Cultural Processes in Muslim and Arab Countries

ISRAEL GERSHONI AND EHUD R TOLEDANO, GUEST EDITORS

CULTURAL PROCESSES IN MUSLIM AND ARAB SOCIETIES: Special Issues, **Poetics Today** 14:2, 14:3, 15:2 (1993)

(*Poetics Today* is published by Duke University Press, 6697 College Station, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA. Telephone: +919-684-2173. It is edited at Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University, Israel.) Vols. 9-14 (1987-1993) have been edited by Itamar Even-Zohar.

These three Special Issues of **Poetics Today** comprise an attempt to introduce current methodologies and insights to the study of Islamic cultures, Ottoman societies, and the modern Middle East, recently put forth in cultural studies and intellectual history. The collected papers are thereby informed by works on cultural theory and semiotics by Pierre Bourdieu and Itamar Even-Zohar, on symbolic meaning in social anthropology by Clifford Geertz, on the "new" intellectual history "after the linguistic turn" by Quentin Skinner, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, on the sociology of culture, and on the interaction between high/learned and low/oral cultures. The papers in this collection have also benefited from the insights of literary criticism, cultural-reception and reader-response theories, and elements of the postmodernist paradigm.

These three special issues explore the processes of formulation and reformulation of cultural products by various social strata. Such products are presented here in their specific historical, social, and political contexts. The articles deal with the formulation of canonic and noncanonic culture, official and nonofficial culture, elite and popular culture, cultural contact and interaction, the dynamics of dissemination and transmission, the modes of reception and consumption, and the changing relationship among producers, transmitters, and consumers of culture. These themes are contextualized in medieval and modern Muslim societies, politics and cultures.

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Vol.1 Special Issue Poetics Today 14:2 (1993) MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIODS (available)

Table of Contents:

Israel Gershoni and Introduction Ehud R Toledano, Tel Aviv

J.S. Meisami The Past in Service of the Present: Oxford Two Views of History in Medieval Persia

Rina Drory Literary Contacts and Where to Find Them: Tel Aviv On Arabic Literary Models in Medieval Jewish Literature

David J. Wasserstein Coins as Agents of Cultural Definition in Tel Aviv Islam

Carl F. Petry, Scholastic Stasis in Medieval Islam Northwestern Reconsidered: Mamluk Patronage in Cairo

Boaz Shoshan, On Popular Literature in Medieval Cairo Ben-Gurion, Negev

Avner Gil'adi, "The child was small...not so the grief on Haifa and Durham him": Sources, Structure and Contents of al-Sakhawi's Consolation Treatise for Bereaved Parents

Gabriel Piterberg, Speech-Acts and Written Texts: A Reading St. Cross College of a Seventeenth-Century Historiographic Oxford Episode

Rhoads Murphey, Continuity and Discontinuity in Ottoman Birmingham Administrative Theory and Practice During the Late Seventeenth Century

Vol.2: Special Issue Poetics Today 14:3 (1993) MODERN PERIOD I (in press)

Table of Contents

Juan R.I. Cole, "I am all the Prophets": The Poetics of Michigan Pluralism in Baha'i Texts

Ehud R Toledano, Late-Ottoman Concepts of Slavery Tel Aviv (1830s-1880s)

Fatma Muge Gocek Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education and Michigan Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century and Ottoman Society

Donald Malcolm Reid The Egyptian Geographical Society: From Georgia State Foreign Layman's Society to Indigenous Professional Association

Thomas Philipp, The Autobiography in Modern Arab Literature Friedrich-Alexander and Culture

Vol.3 Special Issue Poetics Today 15:2 (1993) MODERN PERIOD II (in press)

Table of Contents

Zachary Lockman, Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Harvard Nationalism and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899-1914

Joel Beinin, Writing Class: Workers and Modern Egyptian Stanford Colloquial Poetry (Zajal)

Beth Baron Readers and the Women's Press in Egypt CUNY

Israel Gershoni, The Reader: "Another Production." The Tel Aviv Reception of Haykal's Biography of Muhammad and the Shift of Egyptian Intellectuals to Islamic Subjects in the 1930s

Amatzia Baram, A Case of an Imported Identity: The Modern- Haifa izing Secular Ruling Elites of Iraq and the Conception of the Mesopotamian-Inspired Territorial Nationalism 1922-1992

Mahmud Ghanayim, Mahmud 'Amin Al- Alim: Between Politics and Tel Aviv Literary Criticism