About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherAmerican University in Cairo Press

ISBN-101649032366

ISBN-139781649032362

eBay Product ID (ePID)28057266706

Product Key Features

Book TitleAlif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 42 : Literature Confronting Mortality

Number of Pages576 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2023

TopicDeath & Dying, Middle Eastern, Anthropology / Cultural & Social

GenreLiterary Criticism, Social Science

AuthorWalid El Hamamsy

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Weight0 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6.5 in

Additional Product Features

Table Of ContentEnglish and French Section Caroline Rooney: Shakespeare's Hermetic Lampedusa: From Colonial Fantasies to the Afterlife in The Tempest Andrea Maria Negri: Representations of Death in al-Maqamat al-Hindiyya Shaimaa El-Ateek: Thanatogenos : Photographing Death and Writing Mourning in Barthes's Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary Elliott Colla: Elegy and Mobilization: Poetry, Mourning, and the Student Uprising of January 1972 Marwa Ramadan: On the Threshold of Death: Liminality and Transformation in Margaret Edson's Wit Tania Al Saadi: La mort dans la litterature irakienne de l'exil : L'exemple d'Inaam Kachachi Shaimaa Gohar: Taming the Terror of Death in George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo Hala Amin: Frankenstein's Monster, Past and Present: Writing Against Death in Frankenstein in Baghdad Arabic Section Saeed Elmasry: Cultural Approaches to Mortality: A Critical Overview of the Anthropology of Death Mohamed Birairi: Confronting Annihilation: Readings in Pre-Islamic Poetry Karam AbuSehly: Literature as Archive of Mortality: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Trauerspie l May Telmissany: Death and the Annihilation of History in Egyptian Surrealism Hajjaj Abu Jabr: Death of God Theology: The Holocaust of Paul Celan and Mahmoud Darwish Shahla Ujayli: 'Abd al-Salam al-'Ujayli's Stories of Illness between Culture and the Medical Institution Walid El Khachab: Mystic Annihilation in Sufi Art: Death as a Form of Life Dani Nassif: Traumatic Past and Fantasy: Testimonies of the Undead in Rabi' Jabir's Biritus Yasmine Motawy: "Normal Grief": Death in Children's Picturebooks

SynopsisA wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity This issue of Alif explores the ways in which humans have come to confront their mortality across time and space. Contributions question the nature of loss, grief, and the possibility of an afterlife. Is death only an interlude? Perhaps simply the end? How have people used literature and the arts to conceptualize its relentless presence in our existence? The articles in this issue decenter, critique, and problematize predominant notions of the meaning of mortality for human creativity. They provide a wide scope of responses to mortality, anthropologically, philosophically, and psychologically. They shed light on different cultural receptions of loss, annihilation, and mortality, ranging from India to Yemen, Palestine to Iraq, the Island of Lampedusa to the war-ravished city of Beirut, among many other locales. Death is dealt with in an intimate fashion through the exploration and reinterpretation of modern and classical elegiac poetry, children's picturebooks, fictional accounts of war, grief, and displacement, and dramatic treatments of dying and the afterlife. Contributors: Hajjaj Abu Jabr , Egyptian Academy of Arts, Cairo, Egypt Karam AbuSehly , Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt Hala Amin , Beni-Suef University, Beni Suef, Egypt Shaimaa El-Ateek , Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Mohamed Birairi , Beni-Suef University, Beni-Suef, Egypt, and American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt Elliott Colla , Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Saeed Elmasry , Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt Shaimaa Gohar , Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt Walid El Khachab , York University, Toronto, Canada Yasmine Motawy , American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt Dani Nassif , University of Münster, Münster, Germany Andrea Maria Negri , Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany Marwa Ramadan , Zagazig University, Zagazig, Egypt Caroline Rooney , University of Kent, Kent, United Kingdom Tania Al Saadi , Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden May Telmissany , University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Shahla Ujayli , American University of Madaba, Madaba, Jordan