Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics articles from January 1 2002

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics archives from January 1 2002

The language of the self: autobiographies and testimonies.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... Autobiography is a protean genre: it covers so many forms and styles. When narrating one's life, the narrator has to choose what he or she considers to be relevant and decisive. Aside from the differences on what is fundamental in a life, the...

Arab-American autobiography and the reinvention of identity: two Egyptian negotiations.
January 1, 2002... This article examines two Anglophone autobiographies by Egyptian immigrants in the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's...

Ahmed de Bourgogne the impossible autobiography of a Clandestine.
January 1, 2002... The article deals with the problematic reconstruction of the tragic autobiography of a clandestine. The book, Ahmed de Bourgogne is born of the collaboration between the clandestine ex-convict Ahmed Beneddif and the renowned French writer and...

Interrogating identity: Abdelkebir Khatibi and the postcolonial prerogative.
January 1, 2002... This article discusses the problematic of identity in Maghrebian literature in French. Through a close analysis of Abdelkebir Khatibi's autobiography, La Memoire tatouee (1971), the author shows how Francophone literature of the Maghreb...

Makdisi's war memoir: fragments of self and place.
January 1, 2002... This article aims at analyzing the fissures of female discontinuity in Beirut Fragments (1990) through examining three aspects: the position of the female 'I' in relation to the narrative, which includes the form of the narrative, and thus, the...

Sophia Poole: writing the self, scribing Egyptian women.
January 1, 2002... Sophia Poole (1804-91) was the sister of the Arabist Edward William Lane, She visited Egypt and wrote a book, in three volumes, about Egyptian women which was meant to be a companion book to Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians...

Yeats and Maud Gonne: (auto)biographical and artistic intersection.
January 1, 2002... Unlike many other heroines, Maud Gonne lives a separate life with her distinct personality in Yeats's works. Yeats's poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between the two a...

T. S. Eliot's poetics of self: reopening Four Quartets.
January 1, 2002... This article discusses how T. S. Eliot's long poem, Four Quartets, employs the thematics of time, self, and history in an autobiographical work of literature. The article approaches autobiography primarily as an intellectual concern, rather...

Autobiographical fantasia.
January 1, 2002... The article argues that fiction and fantasy are an artistic necessity in autobiography, and analyzes the presence of the fantastic and its function in Maxine Hong-Kingston's A Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). In this...

Moving away from accuracy.
January 1, 2002... Leila Aboulela presents herself and is left feeling ambivalent about the complications of such a discourse. Using extracts from her published writings and relating them to personal incidents, the writer describes some of the difficulties of her...

African autobiography: the contribution of women.
January 1, 2002... The history of literary criticism of autobiography shows that definitions of the genre are based on analyses of the literary characteristics of autobiographical writing by men and Western women. This study seeks to present other examples of...

From Lettres parisiennes.
January 1, 2002... Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbar (Translated by Noha Abou Sedera) In their book, Lettres parisiennes: Autopsie de l'exil, Anglophone Canadian writer Nancy Huston and Francophone Algerian writer Leila Sebbar exchange letters while living in...

Writing and being: a reading of Somaya Ramadan's Leaves of Narcissus.
January 1, 2002... This study of Somaya Ramadan's Leaves of Narcissus (2001) argues that the details in the text acquire their significance from an existential stance first and foremost. The protagonist, Kemi, is engaged in a relentless battle against the...

The many names of illumination in my life: an interview with Bahgory.
January 1, 2002... In this interview, Bahgory--a well-known Egyptian artist--discusses his painting, sculpture, caricature, and literary works. He recalls scenes from different stages of his life, using them as entries into his views and attitudes. He delineates...

The political autobiography of 'Abd al-'Azim Anis.(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... 'Abd al-'Azim Anis exemplifies the trajectory of an Egyptian intellectual who combined social concerns with a scientific and mathematical career as well as engaging in a critical appraisal of literature. He worked towards an Arab vision of...

Variegating the self: transformation of textual strategies in autobiography.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The article points out the literary mechanisms resorted to in writing autobiography which turn the process of reformulation into something more complex than an account of life. After an introduction to critical theory related to autobiography,...

Me: fragments from a history of infatuation.
January 1, 2002... This is a testimony in poetic prose by an Iraqi novelist. She recalls how the "I" in her secondary school in the 1960s was under siege as the focus was on the hero, not the individual. She dared to love and admit her love, and did not pay...

Kafka: when the self talks to the self about the self.(Franz Kafka)(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... This article deals with the complicated relationship between Kafka and his father, portrayed in the famous letter to Hermann Kafka. The study starts with a theoretical briefing of the relationship between the autobiography and the literary...

Autobiography in a feminine key.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... This study throws light on the following questions: Does the autobiography written by women have a specificity of its own? And if it does, is there a difference between the autobiographies written in the same language by women of different...

Fragments of a memoir.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The article is composed of two fragments. The first is a sketch of the author's upbringing in the center of Cairo in Shari' Mohammad Ali, the street forming the backbone of the old commercial as well as the entertainment area of the city of...

Representing the self: autobiography and identity in ancient Egypt.(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2002... (Translated by Lamis Al Nakkash) Ancient Egyptian autobiography is born from the epitaph. Its space is tied to death and thereby to memory. The correlation between autobiography and the funerary space gives this literary genre a unique...

From the memory slate: encounter with Laila Doss.(Brief Article)(Interview)
January 1, 2002... This interview (with an introductory essay) focuses on the importance of the study of oral accounts and history as a source for examining social and political changes. Oral life histories and accounts, as expressed by social actors, need to be...