Mary N Layoun

If the modern Western novel is linked to the rise of a literate bourgeoisie with particular social values and narrative expectations, to what extent can that history of the novel be anticipated in non-Western contexts? In this bold, insightful work Mary Layoun investigates the ...

Wedded to the Land? is a tightly organized, elegantly written, and analytically nuanced study of the relationship between nationalism, culture, and gender. . . . Layoun's lucid prose and attention to historical detail (along with a rich, interdisciplinary bibliography) make Wedded to the ...

First used in post–World War II historical accounts as a designation for the period that followed the independence of successful anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, the origins of the postcolonial as a category of thought are multiple and diversely located: in anti-colonial movements such as Pan-Africanism and the Négritude movement and thinkers and writers including Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Léopold Sédar Senghor; in the work of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded and directed by Richard Hoggart in 1964 and subsequently directed by Stuart Hall; in the analysis of colonial discourse introduced to the Anglophone world by Edward Said’s Orientalism; in the work of a generation of well-known scholars of the postcolonial (and, often, of literary studies) that include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Aijaz Ahmad, Ranajit Guha, and Robert J. C. Young and drawing from the Central and South American intellectual and political traditions of anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles that began over a century earlier, Mary Louise Pratt, Walter Mignolo, and John Beverly; and in the colonial historiography and history of anti-colonial resistances in South Asia of the Subaltern Studies group. After some three decades as a category of thought in and beyond the academy, a capacious and diversely defined postcolonial has produced a plethora of studies, academic and otherwise, as well as a marketing category, and a now-conventional use as a journalistic descriptor. Broadly, however, the postcolonial as a category of thought can be understood as a situated response to shifting apprehension and efforts at comprehension of the complex inequities of the late 20th and 21st centuries in the wake of European colonialism. And as important as the what of the postcolonial is the when; where; and by-, to-, and with-whom.

ABSTRACT It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher in the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man intuited at least one aspect of what we point to when we speak of a "crisis in the humanities." It was, in that novel, recognized by those who came "late" or "sideways" to the "feast of the world's culture." Dedalus's prescience, reiterated in the century that followed as public education, including higher education, underwent a sea change. But in the century that lies behind us, it was not only the "monkish learning" of "the world's culture" that underwent a sea change. It was also, of course, the societies that surround the world's culture. (In fact, we now understand the culture to be a pluriverse rather than singular. But the lure of the single banquet table on which the feast is arrayed is still with us.) Nearly one hundred years later, in the age we live in, it's not only who is invited to the "the feast" that is the issue. Rather it is the very table itself and the structure that houses that table. And "monkish learning" or historical irrelevance is only one of the charges that haunts the structure that houses the "banquet table" and it contents. We can argue for the value of that "monkish learning"—it's a valid intellectual argument. But we cannot ignore the contexts in which the audience for that learning has moved elsewhere or simply diminished. We have, then, at least two related locations of a shifting landscape of the humanities. One is in educational institutions; the other is in the communities that surround, support, oppose, or ignore those educational institutions and their definitions of the humanities. In response, public and academic intellectuals move nimbly to create new relationships to the humanities in the academy and outside it, to reiterate the multitudinous ways in which art and literature and languages—to take up the fields and disciplines which most concern some of us—enrich and inform public and private lives, intellectual and social thought. Those, too, are important arguments. There is much to be said for being able to articulate clearly and practice forcefully as teachers and scholars those relationships within and to the humanities, within and beyond educational institutions. In these years, perhaps it should be a required professional skill. Yet this "crisis" of intellectual content—Dedalus's mournful characterization of "curious jargons"—was not yet, in the early years of the twentieth century, overshadowed by quite the same structural crisis which now confronts us. In at least the second half of the twentieth century, education in the United States (the present location of at least some of us) saw radical expansion, certainly and famously in the years following WWII. It even more famously and significantly desegregated in the 1950s. It expanded again, bringing with that expansion a proliferation at the feast table. And then it began to contract, almost on the heels of—if not simultaneous with—that proliferation and the openings created in the aftermath of the social and student struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. If we will speak of "crisis" then, in the present, it seems clear that it is not only one of content but also one of structure, and that this latter is multiple, a "crisis" that has been accumulating over time with numerous symptoms. A partial list would surely include an increasingly radical reduction in public funding for land grant institutions; the academic marginalization of the humanities as liberal arts degree requirements were steadily reduced in the last three decades or so, widening and worsening economic conditions in more recent decades which heighten the impetus to view education as a means to secure a higher...

It was a thought-provoking invitation on the fifty-year anniversary (1963–2013) of Comparative Literature Studies – “To invite comparatists whose doctoral study took place within the relevant decade to contribute a brief personal essay, comparing their own formation in comparative studies with what was being published in Comparative Literature Studies during that decade.” An invitation I was honored to receive and which I set about to do with interest and, in fact, curiosity. My “own formation in comparative studies” in relation to leading essays in a distinguished academic journal?

... But rather than celebrate oppositional read-ings of these new interpretative communities, Castonguay remains skeptical about ... pure, simple, and apocalyptic, and thus to inspire further thinking and debate about global security as it is imagined in the media, popular culture ...

First used in post–World War II historical accounts as a designation for the period that followed the independence of successful anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa, the origins of the postcolonial as a category of thought are multiple and diversely located: in anti-colonial movements such as Pan-Africanism and the Négritude movement and thinkers and writers including Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Léopold Sédar Senghor; in the work of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded and directed by Richard Hoggart in 1964 and subsequently directed by Stuart Hall; in the analysis of colonial discourse introduced to the Anglophone world by Edward Said’s Orientalism; in the work of a generation of well-known scholars of the postcolonial (and, often, of literary studies) that include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Aijaz Ahmad, Ranajit Guha, and Robert J. C. Young and drawing from the Cen...

“‘To Relearn the Sense of the World’: A Call to Arms” rereads the work of Masao Miyoshi and the legacy of that work in attending to his imperative to “relearn the sense of the world” (or worlds) in which we reside and cohabit with others. The role in that relearning of higher education and of the humanities, as well as of social and of poetic practices, locally and internationally, is traced as suggested by and beyond Miyoshi’s writings.

ABSTRACT It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher in the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man intuited at least one aspect of what we point to when we speak of a "crisis in the humanities." It was, in that novel, recognized by those who came "late" or "sideways" to the "feast of the world's culture." Dedalus's prescience, reiterated in the century that followed as public education, including higher education, underwent a sea change. But in the century that lies behind us, it was not only the "monkish learning" of "the world's culture" that underwent a sea change. It was also, of course, the societies that surround the world's culture. (In fact, we now understand the culture to be a pluriverse rather than singular. But the lure of the single banquet table on which the feast is arrayed is still with us.) Nearly one hundred years later, in the age we live in, it's not only who is invited to the "the feast" that is the issue. Rather it is the very table itself and the structure that houses that table. And "monkish learning" or historical irrelevance is only one of the charges that haunts the structure that houses the "banquet table" and it contents. We can argue for the value of that "monkish learning"—it's a valid intellectual argument. But we cannot ignore the contexts in which the audience for that learning has moved elsewhere or simply diminished. We have, then, at least two related locations of a shifting landscape of the humanities. One is in educational institutions; the other is in the communities that surround, support, oppose, or ignore those educational institutions and their definitions of the humanities. In response, public and academic intellectuals move nimbly to create new relationships to the humanities in the academy and outside it, to reiterate the multitudinous ways in which art and literature and languages—to take up the fields and disciplines which most concern some of us—enrich and inform public and private lives, intellectual and social thought. Those, too, are important arguments. There is much to be said for being able to articulate clearly and practice forcefully as teachers and scholars those relationships within and to the humanities, within and beyond educational institutions. In these years, perhaps it should be a required professional skill. Yet this "crisis" of intellectual content—Dedalus's mournful characterization of "curious jargons"—was not yet, in the early years of the twentieth century, overshadowed by quite the same structural crisis which now confronts us. In at least the second half of the twentieth century, education in the United States (the present location of at least some of us) saw radical expansion, certainly and famously in the years following WWII. It even more famously and significantly desegregated in the 1950s. It expanded again, bringing with that expansion a proliferation at the feast table. And then it began to contract, almost on the heels of—if not simultaneous with—that proliferation and the openings created in the aftermath of the social and student struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. If we will speak of "crisis" then, in the present, it seems clear that it is not only one of content but also one of structure, and that this latter is multiple, a "crisis" that has been accumulating over time with numerous symptoms. A partial list would surely include an increasingly radical reduction in public funding for land grant institutions; the academic marginalization of the humanities as liberal arts degree requirements were steadily reduced in the last three decades or so, widening and worsening economic conditions in more recent decades which heighten the impetus to view education as a means to secure a higher...

Desire is often and almost proverbially formulated as in opposition to some more properly biological need, and that desire as for something absent or missing or lacking. Further, desire is proposed as itself a representation of that absence or lack through the attempt to imagine its ...

THREE Fresh Lima Beans and Stories from Occupied Cyprus Mary N. Layoun I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment, Don't befooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have ...