Levi Thompson

Transnational analysis has become an essential part of approaches to modernist literature in the academy, but scholars of Arabic literature have yet to embrace its possibilities. This article presents the benefits transnational literary inquiry holds for analysing Arabic literature as a significant instance of postcolonial literature, taking as a case study the Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī's references to the Persian ʿUmar Khayyām. Through my consideration of contemporary readings of Khayyām from Iran, I reorient Arabist understandings of this poet's function in Bayātī's work. Moving beyond arguments centred within a nationalist paradigm of understanding, I employ a transnational mode of analysis to provide an alternative reading of Khayyām's presence in Bayātī's poetry and the dramatic work A Trial in Nishapur. The article seriously considers the modern Iranian reception of Khayyām, which presents him as a rationalist and skeptic rather than a Sufi mystic. I therefore offer a new way of understanding Bayātī's use of Khayyām as a poetic mask that attends to Bayātī's significant engagements with Iranian culture and Persian literature. Finally, I draw on this case study to argue that we must begin accounting for the transnational connections that have defined modern Near Eastern literatures like Arabic and Persian.

Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s novel Al-Qāhira al-jadīda (Cairo Modern) takes on the crisis of modernity by exposing the various conflicts inherent to the processes of democratization in 1930s Egypt. This article argues that Al-Qāhira al-jadīda, written in 1945 but set a decade earlier, makes a literary intervention against the corrupt and corrupting British colonial superimposition of modernity in Egypt. The novel presents the difficulties four Egyptian university students face in defining themselves as modern subjects in a sham democracy controlled by colonial outsiders and entrenched local elites. By narrating his characters’ struggles, Maḥfūẓ re-evaluates the outcomes of the Arab nahḍa in Egypt and highlights the shortcomings of modes of binary thinking that took hold among Arab intellectuals during the early 20th century. Through a combination of historical and literary critical analysis, I show how Maḥfūẓ parodies various contemporary political trends—such as socialism, Islamism, and capitalism—in order to critique them.

In Arabic literature, the autobiographical works of Muḥammad Shukrī (1935-2003),  al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī  (For
Bread Alone), Zaman al-Akhṭāʾ (Time of Mistakes), and Wujūh (Faces), fit into a liminal, mythological space
first populated by the pre-Islamic ṣuʿlūk (rogue or vagabond) poets, such as Taʾabbaṭa Sharr, ʿUrwah ibn
al-Ward, and al-Shanfarā. By reading Shukrī’s autobiographical trilogy as a modern version of al-Shanfarā’s
wholly liminal Lāmīyat al-ʿArab  (The “L” Poem of the Arabs), the borders between traditional society and
that of its ostracized validation, the  ṣuʿlūk,  can be elucidated. This study is further called for due to the
problematic history of Shukrī’s most popular work, al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī, first published in an English translation
by Paul Bowles in 1974. Due to its frank descriptions of alcohol and drug use, sexual exploration, and
abject poverty in pre- and independence-era Morocco, this first work of his three-volume autobiography was
banned in Morocco until 2000 and remains so at the American University of Cairo ever since a 1998 row over
its place on an Arabic literature syllabus there.
Shukrī’s autobiography provides further opportunity to explore the notion of social borders in 20th century Morocco. In al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī, the author’s—the main character’s—quest for literacy and deliverance from an impoverished life drives the narrative. In this pursuit, the narrator encounters numerous obstacles
facing poor, homeless youths in 1950s northern Moroccan cities. His situation is further complicated by the
fact that Shukrī himself learned to speak his native tongue—Rīffian Berber, Spanish, Moroccan dialectical
Arabic, and even some French prior to learning the modern standard Arabic in which he ended up writing.
Shukrī’s two sequels offer an inversion of the narrator’s initial quest for aggregation with society through
acquiring literacy instead retreating into a life of seclusion, a rejection of social norms, and, at times, complete exile.

This dissertation critically investigates the transnational movements that shaped the making of modernist poetry in Iraq and Iran. Following a brief introduction to the project’s historical and critical framework, the first chapter provides the dissertation’s theoretical foundation. It thus engages conversations about literary commitment, the transnational dimension of literary development, and world literature to situate these two poetries as integral to the broader modernist movement. Chapter Two examines the poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj, the founder of Persian modernist poetry, and the foundational position of premodern Arabic prosody for Persian poetic form. It highlights how Nīmā’s innovations on Arabic prosody presage the birth of the Iraqi free verse movement. Chapter Three moves on to discuss the work of Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, addressing how his pioneering project of poetic modernism changed in light of his political alignments. It demonstrates how his experience of the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh in Iran forced him to reconsider his Communist affiliations and discerns the effects his changing political outlook had on how he presented his poetry for posterity. Aḥmad Shāmlū and Furūgh Farrukhzād, two poets who took up Nīmā’s modernist vision in Iran, are the subjects of Chapter Four, which tackles their continued development of Arabic prosody in Persian and ultimate break with the formal constraints Nīmā had continued to adhere to. It also considers Shāmlū’s and Farrukhzād’s contrasting poetics of death in terms of their transnational poetic engagements. The final chapter turns to examine the Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī’s poetics of revolution—which combines existentialism, Sufism, and political commitment—to show how al-Bayātī’s use of the poetic masks of ʿUmar al-Khayyām and the martyred Sufi Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj works in transnational dialog with the Persian poetic and mystical traditions. By taking the Arabic modernist tradition as its focal point and putting Arabic poetry in conversation with modernist poetry in Persian, this study sheds light on how modernism functions as a planetary movement and calls for a reconsideration of current models for transnational literary analysis, reorienting modernist studies away from vertical approaches to lateral ones that consider minor modernist traditions on their own terms.

Description: In this seminar, we will explore "headwaters" in literature and film, the sources that drive narratives set alongside, in, or at the mouth of rivers. Rivers lie at the origin of human civilizations: the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile river valleys provided enough resources for humans to settle, grow crops, and begin reflecting on the meaning of life. Rivers have therefore long been a central feature in creative works. Taking accounts of river journeys as our focal point, we will analyze how authors and filmmakers have used rivers-both metaphorically and literally-to make a point. In so doing, we will also reflect on what it means to travel into the unknown, to seek out the unexplored headwaters of a river. Along the way, we will discuss the works of Joseph Joseph Conrad, Tayyib Saleh, Ibn Fadlan, Francis Ford Coppola, Ciro Guerra, Werner Herzog, Toni Morrison, James Dickey, and Rudaki, among others. This course is developed with students interested in film, literature, and other creative works in mind. Students planning to major in a foreign language, English, creative writing, history, or political science will find the course themes relevant to their future work, and may even be inspired to expand their frame of reference to a part of the world they were previously unfamiliar with. Students interested in other subjects are also most welcome! Students in the course will complete a multi-stage final project (a digital diary of their own journey through the course, to be condensed and molded into a final presentation and project) over the weeks of the seminar. After we begin with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, students will address in writing on a blog how the narratives we give to our own lives and those of others reflect our cultural, geographic, religious, etc. backgrounds. As we progress through the course, students will return to their reflections, both online and in class, to chart how their thinking about narrative (both others' and their own life stories) has developed through engagement with the course material.

In this course, we will explore how the Arab and Islamic world has been portrayed in travel narratives, Orientalist texts, film, and other scholarly and creative work – including poetry – from the premodern period until today, in both East and West. Students will engage with historical, anthropological, and visual materials to consider how Islam has been narrated in colonial European imaginings about the Islamic world and in texts written by Muslims and non-Muslims in the Middle East.

Together, we will attempt to answer questions such as: what is Islam? What makes someone a Muslim? What did/do Muslims think about the West? Is there an American Islam? Can Islam be punk rock, and vice versa? We will read broadly, from translated Arabic and Persian sources written by the likes of al-Shanfara, Abu Nuwas, Omar Khayyam, Nizam al-Mulk, and Usama Ibn Munqidh to those of westerners like Richard Burton, Edward Lane, and Martin Luther, to contemporary material from Shahab Ahmed, Malcolm X, and Michael Muhammad Knight, and a comic book.

The twentieth century witnessed a revolution in literary production in the Arab world, from
Morocco to Iraq. The novel form rose in popularity following a growth in literacy as nation-states came into their own. Beyond changes in the forms and themes of modern Arabic literature, writing also gave authors a venue to express their positions on a crucial series of revolutionary moments: the Egyptian revolutions of 1919 and 1952; opposition to the British-backed Iraqi monarchy in the 1940s and 1950s; the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962); and the more recent events of the Arab Spring, among many others.

This course introduces students of all levels to the Arabic novel in English translation. We will look to both the significant changes that occurred within Arabic literature during the twentieth century as well as to how literature responds to or even acts on historical events. Students will learn how to engage with literature in translation while becoming familiar with the trends and topics that shaped modern Arabic literary production. Student performance will be evaluated by way of attendance, active participation in class, weekly discussion board posts (online), oral presentations, a midterm, a multi-stage final project, and a final exam.

Course Description: This course examines the categories of gender, sexuality, and culture in the modern Middle East. Through weekly readings in history, sociology, literature, and other disciplines, in-class discussion, film viewings, and written and oral assignments, students will learn about how gender has been constructed across the Near and Middle East and North Africa, in the Arab world and Iran. Over the course of the semester, students will learn how to critically approach gender in the modern Middle East by writing weekly discussion board posts (online) about the weekly readings, completing a midterm exam, giving an in-class presentation about a book or film not included in the required readings, developing a final project, and writing a final exam. The final project may be submitted in a variety of forms, including but not limited to: a 10-minute film that addresses themes from the course, an interactive website, a short play, a lengthy piece of creative writing, or a more traditional 3,000 – 4,000-word research paper. Students must submit a final project proposal following the midterm, and rubrics for evaluating different project types will be distributed the week after submission of the proposal. Students may change their proposal after receiving the rubric, but only in consultation with the professor and no later than two weeks after the initial proposal. Students will engage with their colleagues and the broader digital public through their discussion board posts and on Twitter.

This course provides an interdisciplinary overview of the cultures of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Southwest Asia and North Africa from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the present. Readings include historical, religious, literary, and cultural texts from both the premodern and modern eras. Course taught in English.

Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry is the first book to systematically study the parallel development of modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian. It presents a fresh line of comparative inquiry into minor literatures within the field of world literary studies. Focusing on Arabic-Persian literary exchanges allows readers to better understand the development of modernist poetry in both traditions and in turn challenge Europe's position at the center of literary modernism. The argument contributes to current scholarly efforts to globalize modernist studies by reading Arabic and Persian poetry comparatively within the context of the Cold War to establish the Middle East as a significant participant in wider modernist developments. To illuminate profound connections between Arabic and Persian modernist poetry in both form and content, the book takes up works from key poets including the Iraqis Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and the Iranians Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, and Forough Farrokhzad.