This dissertation focuses on the figure of Jewish exile since the rise of Zionism. My research proposes a unique configuration of German, Turkish, Israeli, and Palestinian contexts, one that sheds new light on the challenge of representing minority subjectivity during moments of collective displacement. I argue that displacement is not only an experience, but also a structure of representation. My study begins by examining the representation of Jewish belonging at the turn of the century, when the German-Ottoman imperial alliance provided a potential framework for the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. The aesthetic possibilities that ultimately crystallize in Israeli and Palestinian literature, I assert, are inseparable from the imaginary of Jewish displacement in fin de si�cle Germany and Turkey.

Germany, Turkey, and Israel each occupy a space of intense critical focus in Comparative Literature. Beginning with Edward Said, scholars have called the discipline’s attention to a cohort of German-speaking Jewish academics who fled to Istanbul during the Nazi years. From this canonical moment in the emergence of Comparative Literature, Erich Auerbach’s composition of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, and his work on Weltliteratur (or “world literature”), have emerged as prominent models for the discipline’s self-conception. The achievements of German-Jewish intellectuals in Turkey would later reinforce notions of “exilic” critique as a practice of heroic opposition to nationalist chauvinism.

These assessments could be enriched, however, by situating the very possibility of Auerbach in Istanbul within the political programs and cultural imaginaries that immediately preceded, and in fact enabled, the German-Jewish scholars’ remarkable refuge in Istanbul. My project begins the story of German-Jewish literature and aesthetics a generation earlier. I propose a comparative framework that juxtaposes the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl’s five visits to fin de si�cle Constantinople with the German-Jewish scholars, such as Erich Auerbach, who found refuge from the Nazis in Turkey a generation later. I assert that the very production of Mimesis is a vital part of the story of the representation of European Jewish exile – perhaps inseparable from the story of Zionism in the early 20th century. Through close readings of Herzl’s wide- ranging corpus of literature, I conclude that this exilic position – one who identifies with and yet (must) live beyond the settled location of the native – was an irreducible feature of Herzl’s Zionism. Mimesis, as the re-presentation (making present, again, elsewhere) of European reality and subjectivity, becomes an essential analytical tool for understanding the relationship between Jewish belonging and exile.

My dissertation then turns to literary works written in the aftermath of the 1948 partition of Palestine and creation of Israel. I discuss the portrayal of Palestinian exile by two of the most canonical Hebrew authors from the period, the poet Nathan Alterman and the novelist S. Yizhar. My readings explore changes in the representation of exile at the moment when its simultaneous creation and negation comes to define two national communities. The dissertation’s final chapter presents an original, comparative analysis of poetry written by Dahlia Ravikovich and Mahmoud Darwish. Through recourse to what I term the visionary prophetic modes of Hebrew and Arabic literature, these authors re-open the literary significations of exile to pre-modern traditions of Jewish and Islamic exegesis, liturgy, and history. I assert that their poetics – attuned to the semiotic displacements between vision and text – unravel the political discourses of national belonging generated by the failed partition of Israel and Palestine. These alternative modalities of representation re-envision the nature of belonging in a post-colonial world. I contend that the study of Israeli and Palestinian literature cannot be extricated from broader inquiries into the representation of migration and flight across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

This dissertation demonstrates how the work of three contemporary Mizrahi authors (Haviva Pedaya, Albert Swissa, and Dvir Tzur) challenges the postsecular framing of Mizrahi Jewish practice as masortiyut (“traditionism”), which refers to the flexible form of Jewish observance associated with Arab-Jews in Israel/Palestine. Postsecular critics have mobilized this position to challenge the terms of Jewish national sovereignty. This study claims that, while these writers refuse “masortiyut” as a coherent subject position, they extend certain of its challenges by reconsidering the interaction of the secular and the theological with regard to the nationalist narrative of return entailed in Shivat Tzion (“the return to Zion”). By means of an allusive engagement with mystical texts, these authors reconceive of exile as a reparative condition rather than as a defective state. They replace a notion of static “return” with a “Wandering East” which potentially reorients the Jewish presence in the Middle East away from a relationship of strict identity with the geopolitical territory of Israel.

Against the Flow: Impassive Modernism in Arabic and Hebrew Literatures elaborates two interventions in contemporary studies of Middle Eastern Literatures, Global Modernisms, and Comparative Literature: First, the dissertation elaborates a comparative framework to read twentieth century Arabic and Hebrew literatures side by side and in conversation, as two literary cultures sharing, beyond a contemporary reality of enmity and separation, a narrative of transition to modernity. The works analyzed in the dissertation, hailing from Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, and Tunisia, emerge against the Hebrew and Arabic cultural and national renaissance movements, and the establishment of modern independent states in the Middle East. The dissertation stages encounters between Arabic and Hebrew literary works, exploring the parallel literary forms they develop in response to shared temporal narratives of a modernity outlined elsewhere and already, and in negotiation with Orientalist legacies.

Secondly, the dissertation develops a generic-formal framework to address the proliferation of static and decadent texts emerging in a cultural landscape of national revival and its aftermaths, which I name impassive modernism. Viewed against modernism’s emphatic features, impassive modernism is characterized by affective and formal investment in stasis, immobility, or immutability: suspension in space or time and a desire for nonproductivity. The impassive literary forms unearthed in the dissertation propose a host of metaphors for an alternative politics grounded in passivity rather than activism, and in weakness rather than force.

Chapter One, “There Is No Event Whose Mark Has Not Gone before It,” explores the difficulties of the Arabic or the Hebrew text to be read as modern. I demonstrate how Arabic writer Mahmud al-Masʿadi and Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon stage encounters between Orientalist and literary modes of readings in their mock-classicist texts, and envision a timeless, universal literary realm in which literary periodization plays no role. Chapter Two, “Scratching at the Surface: Predicaments of Settlement and the Poetics of Disgust,” concerns the politics of settlement in the novel al-Jabal (The Mountain) by Egyptian Fathi Ghanem and in the story “ʿAtzabim” (Nerves) and the novel Shkhol ve-khishalon (Breakdown and Bereavement) by Hebrew writer Yosef H. Brenner. It identifies an impassive mode of settlement in the works of both authors, embodied in the gesture of scratching, and countering models of productive settlement within a national context. Chapter Three, “State Time: Gendered Genres of the Everyday in Sonallah Ibrahim and Yishayahu Koren,” identifies an anti-evental aesthetic in the work of both authors, which dismantles literary and historical logics of liberation and radical rupture. Chapter Four, “Impassivity: Resistance to Analysis in Post-Oslo Palestine” examines two impassive genres developed in the works of Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and writer Adania Shibli in relation to crisis ordinariness: the boring joke and the frustrating snapshot.

"Qur'anic Invocations: Narrative Temporalities in Twentieth Century Maghrebi Literature" investigates the dialogic relationship between literary and theological discourse in modern Arabophone and Francophone literature of the Maghreb. The novels of al-Tahir Wattar, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraibi and Mahmud al-Mas'adi critically explore the complex colonial histories and conflicted articulations of national identity, language and literature in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. While the 130-year French imperial presence in the region left an indelible cultural and linguistic imprint on the Maghreb, nationalist attempts at homogenizing these countries under a shared Arab and Islamic heritage were equally divisive. This dissertation examines the intersecting discourses of nationalism, modernity and postcolonialism in fiction of the late colonial and post-independence period between 1945 and 1985. I posit that these novels engage with Islamic Thought in order to complicate, nuance or challenge the temporality of these grand historical narratives. In the process, however, they trouble the boundary between 'religious' and 'secular' discourses. In large part, this confluence reflects the very notion of 'Adab' that underwrites both religious and literary discourse in the Arab literary tradition. A concept that historically denoted the moral dimensions of individual and social conduct in the Islamic sciences, 'Adab' also signifies the intellectual pursuit of knowledge and, more currently, the corpus of belle lettres. For while they employ Qur'anic symbology, imagery and motifs, these texts also intervene into debates on the apostolic tradition of hadith, Islamic exegesis, history and jurisprudence. Further, they reimagine the novel in dialogue with and opposition to Arabic and French literary as well as historical discourses. These elements are reflected in the heteroglossic and polyphonic structure of these texts, which undermines historical teleologies and myths of origins.

My first chapter, "Revolutionary Eschatology: Islam and the End of Time in Wattar's al-Zilzal" [The Earthquake, 1974], analyzes Wattar's mobilization of eschatological imagery to question the ideological underpinnings of Algerian nationalist discourse. I explore al-Zilzal's critical engagement with the rhetoric of Arabism and Islamism in post-revolutionary state politics. In my second chapter, "Heterodoxies of History: Algerian National Identity in Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia" [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985], I investigate the interweaving of the French colonial occupation and settlement of Algeria with the Arabo-Islamic conquest of the region in the seventh century. I posit that the novel's polyphonic structure and resistance to a single authoritative voice challenges religious, ethnic and linguistic narratives of origins, as well as the politics of transmission and interpretation in Islam. The third chapter, "The Thin Line of Imperialism: Parsing the Qur'an in Chraibi's Le passé simple" [The Simple Past, 1954], examines the controversial representation of French imperialism and Islamic patriarchy as mutually imbricated ideologies. I argue that Chraibi offers an alternative mode of historical and literary temporality in the motifs of the passé simple and la ligne mince. My final chapter, "The Poetic Landscape of Islamic Thought: Creation and Existence in al-Mas'adi's Mawlid al-Nisyan" [The Genesis of Forgetfulness, 1945], explores the novel's fusion of Sufism, Existentialism, Islamic Thought and Arabic literary discourse. Al-Mas'adi's ethical literary project, I suggest, reads artistic representation as a mode of creation.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon suggests "Decolonization is truly the creation of new men" (2). In this project, I am interested in the representation of the emerging "new man" in the novels of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Paule Marshall, as well as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Sadeq Chubak, and Simin Daneshvar. My study aims to use these mid-twentieth century novels as "contrapunctal" to Fanon's hope for the decolonizing world. In each main chapter, I show how these novels challenge and critique Fanon's concept of the "new man" while expanding upon and complicating the idea.

Clandestine migration from North Africa across the Mediterranean has been explored widely as a topic in the fields of social science in the past decade, but representations of undocumented migration in literature have not been subject to significant attention and analysis. Moreover, in comparison to French, Italian, or Spanish literature, Arabic clandestine migrant literature has barely been subject to recognition or discussion. Even though this dissertation includes some Anglophone literature, by and large, its main attention to Arabic literature addresses the dearth in scholarship on contemporary Arabic literary representations of clandestine migration from Egypt and Morocco, as well as trans-migration from sub-Saharan Africa. My analysis of literature charting journeys from the Mediterranean's southern shores and rendering clandestine existence in the global North attempts to contribute to not only the discourse on migration literature but on conceptualizations of the Mediterranean as both a dividing border and unifying contact zone, especially vital to the contemporary recurrence of the study of seas and particularly the Mediterranean. My discussion encompasses Arabic literature by Moroccan author Rachid Nini and Egyptian author Khaled Al-Khameesy, as well as Anglophone literature by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami and Nigerian-American author Sefi Atta.

Themes of invisibility, nostalgia, transience, paralysis, mobility and immobility in secret Mediterranean border crossings are analyzed alongside themes traditionally capturing a mythic Mediterranean space, like cosmopolitanism, cultural interaction, and adventure. I explore and demarcate the dual imaginaries of the Mediterranean space and attempt to retrieve migrant narrative along these meeting points and dividing lines. Because the dissertation attempts to address an imbalance in the research literature by focusing literary analysis on Arabic and Anglophone African narratives and poetry that chart migration from the homeland, across the Mediterranean frontier, to the European shore, it focuses on journey narratives, which often show migrant characters representing an interdependent relationship of uneven development that connects the northern and southern shore. Thus, this dissertation reflects the authors' investment in how distinct nations map the journey across the Mediterranean, casting the literature as both national and diasporic, emergent from and part of the African Mediterranean rather than about it.