LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalannotes1. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).2. The idealist assumption that thought is independent of and precedes language,which then serves as a mere vehicle or transparent medium for it, is a highlyproblematic and largely discredited one, but I am following the terms of Antonius’sargument here.3. See Benedict Anderson’s argument in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). The importance of Anderson’stheory of the nation as an imagined community cannot be overstated. But the factthat Anderson, along with numerous other critics and theorists of Westernnationalism, seems unaware of the similar insight that Antonius arrived at severaldecades earlier is indicative of the power of such ‘imagined communities’ tocircumscribe even their own critical discourse.4. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983).5. Hilary Kilpatrick’s detailed study of the novel’s relation to its socio-historicalcontext in The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism (London: Ithaca,1974) most closely approximates my own concerns here. But as the subtitle of herwork suggests, Kilpatrick addresses a broad range of issues of which nationalism, asone, is touched upon only in passing. And whereas Kilpatrick’s sociologicalapproach situates the novel in an essentially mimetic relationship to its context, Isee the novel’s relationship to its context as ideologically more complex.6. Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search forEgyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 209–10.7. Egypt, of course, was by no means unique in this respect. For an insightful andcompelling analysis of the subject and related issues in the comparative contexts ofArab, Greek and Japanese cultures, see Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The ModernNovel and Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). For a discussion ofa similar phenomenon in the Latin American context, see Doris Sommer,‘Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fiction of Latin America’, in Nation andNarration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 71–98. Also see Kemal H.Karpat, ‘Contemporary Turkish Literature’, The Literary Review 4.2 (Winter 1960–1), 287–302, which is especially pertinent here given the profound influence ofKemalist reforms on a generation of Egyptian intellectuals. For a summation of thisinfluence, see Gershoni and Jankowski, 82–3.8. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8. Even Baron’s admirable and thoroughlyresearched attempt to link this turn-of-the-century ‘awakening’ in Egypt to the emergenceof a women’s press ultimately fails to be conclusive in any empirical sense.9. The novel’s earlier emergence in Europe coincided with the rise of a new bourgeoisclass, and of all literary genres the novel is arguably the most expressive of the valueof the individual in Western bourgeois thought. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic andNovel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. CarylEmerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1981), 3–40. See, too, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Storyteller’, inIlluminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,— 158 —www.taq.ir