Trials of Arab Modernity Literary Affects and the New Political [Hardcover]

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernitywhich treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovationthis study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifaa al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy.

In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

Trials of Arab Modernity offers a refreshing approach to the field of modern Arabic literature both in the scope of its argument and the richness of its interventions. The book not only
discusses the role of the nahda, but it does so against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, new media, affect theory, and Arabic literary history.

In further deftly executed lexical manipulation, El-Ariss discovers for himselfand reveals for his readersin Shidyaq's kashf nothing short of an expos? of modernity as a disgusting work of art.... . . a sharp and witty reading of great warmth and appeal that brings the reader close to its subject without surrendering to hasty generalizations.Focusing on the body as a site of rupture and signification, this book shifts the paradigm for the study of modernity in the Arab context from questions of representation, translation, and cultural exchange to an engagement with a genealogy of symptoms and affects embodied in texts from the nineteenth-century onward.Indeed, this celebration of 'unpredictable directions,'experimentation and further exploration concludes the work, challenging its reader to encounter ephemeral meaning and moments that slip away almost as soon as they appear. Insl£