Publisher Description

We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary

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"With impressive learning and critical insight, Allan argues that the arrival of modern Arabic writing into the space of world literature is a sign not so much of its progress as of the emergence of a new discipline that shapes particular reading practices as proper and dismisses others as ignorant. This is a truly remarkable work about the transformation of sensibilities that underlie the modern concept of progressive politics." --Talal Asad, author of Formations of the Secular "Allan compellingly rethinks the category of world literature for its role in promoting distinctions between literate and illiterate, rational and irrational, and cosmopolitan and fanatic in colonial Egypt. These distinctions, he argues insightfully, are important to the ways that literary sensibilities affect the reception of religious and scriptural traditions. In the Shadow of World Literature illuminates how literature's mediation of the world experienced by readers prompts different responses that shape new forms of secular criticism in postcolonial societies." --Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University " In the Shadow of World Literature is beautifully written, well argued, and accessible to an audience ranging from the educated public to literary experts. Allan carefully weaves his argument, simultaneously practicing and critiquing world literature in the best comparative sense possible." --Tarek El-Ariss, author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political " In the Shadow of World Literature contributes to a growing body of work in comparative literature that takes up Arabic language and literature, and offers a significant new approach to how Arabic traditions of learning, recitation, and instruction mediate the constitution of the literary object. I know of no other book that examines ways of reading in quite this way." --Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Author Biography

Michael Allan is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii Notes on Transliteration xiii INTRODUCTION 1 Of Words and Worlds 1 Literary Modernity in Colonial Egypt 5 Reading Beyond Representation 7 The Moral Universe of a Secular World 9 A User's Guide 12 1 WORLD The World of World Literature 17 The Constraints of Democratic Criticism 19 International Standards of Excellence? 25 World Literary Space 29 The Saidian Grounds of Worldliness 32 The Force of a Secular World 37 2 TRANSLATION The Rosetta Stone from Object to Text 39 Making Stones Speak 42 Leveling Languages, or The Conditions of Equivalence 45 Entextualization and the Purely Literary 48 The Contours of a Literary Empire 52 3 EDUCATION The Moral Imperative of Modernization 55 Failure's Success: Securing the Imagined Future 58 From Prejudice to Opinion 61 Governing Hermeneutics, Producing Subjects 63 The Colonial Cultivation of Character 66 Immanently Modern and Uncritically Civilized 70 4 LITERATURE How Adab Became Literary 74 A World in Words: Philology as Pedagogy 77 Literary Institutions and the Instantiation of World Literature 80 Footnoting Literature, or The Literary Footnote 83 Orientalism, or Literature for Its Own Sake 87 Disciplines and Frames of Reading 91 5 CRITIQUE Debating Darwin 94 Soundness and the Poetics of the Appropriate 97 The Force of the Illiterate Reader 102 A Passion to Be Cultured: Constructing Intellect and Ignorance 105 Relating Religion: The Discursive Limits of Character 109 The Borders of a Darwinian World 112 6 INTELLECTUALS The Provincialism of a Literary World 115 The Bonds of World Literature 116 Literary Imaginings of Religious Difference 119 Whispers at the Limits of Literary Experience 123 A World Untouched by Literature 127 Provincial Cosmopolitanism 129 CONCLUSION 131 The Dynamics of a Global Public 134 Literary Myopia 135 How to Love the World Properly 138 Notes 141 Bibliography 163 Index 175

Review

"Co-Winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association"
"Allan's incisive In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . . In the Shadow of World Literature's critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book's broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs."---Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic Literature

Prizes

Winner of 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association 2016

Review Quote

"With impressive learning and critical insight, Allan argues that the arrival of modern Arabic writing into the space of world literature is a sign not so much of its progress as of the emergence of a new discipline that shapes particular reading practices as proper and dismisses others as ignorant. This is a truly remarkable work about the transformation of sensibilities that underlie the modern concept of progressive politics." --Talal Asad, author of Formations of the Secular

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