ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences–undergraduate and graduate–in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḍah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman "decline" and post-European "awakening" and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; and second, a relative dearth of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations. Indeed, throughout late nineteenth- and especially early twentieth-century Arabic literary history and criticism, the scholar of the nahḍah encounters Arab self-murder. That the term nahḍah also translates as "awakening" compounds its translational instability. Certainly "awakening" skirts the direct comparison to European history that "renaissance" – a periodization freighted with European historical assumptions and cultural politics – implies.
