Left Behind: Literature and Left Critique in Neoliberal Egypt traces trajectories of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt from the aftermath of Nasser’s imprisonment of the communists in 1959-64 and the 1967 defeat to Israel, through the present aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. I contend that despite the 1967 defeat and the Left’s political capitulations, disillusionment, and rents that emerged in its fallout, the literary Left has remained a force for engagement. Its approach shifted from literary forms of political commitment (iltizām) – rooted in socialism and national liberation, but also tied to the Nasserist state – to forms of Left literary critique marked by alienation, Marxism, and innovative literary aesthetics. I extend the lineage of Left literary critique from the Sixties Generation’s New Sensibility (Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm), through the rightward swing of infitāḥ (Arwa Ṣāliḥ), and to the consolidation of the postrevolutionary neoliberal order (Nādiya Kāmil and Muḥammad Rabīʿ). I am primarily concerned with gendered aesthetic and epistemological aspects of the literature of iltizām and its legacies in the neoliberal era. Specifically, I refer here to sexual-political symbolism, gendered affect, and modes of reading and critique that were produced during the hegemony of the Nasser era. The authors I examine deform, intensify, reroute and reject these aesthetic aspects of iltizām as central components of their critiques of neoliberalism.

My attention to the symbolism and aesthetics of these literary critiques of neoliberalism is grounded in a concern for sex and gender: gendered affect, sexual-political symbolism, and gendered language and literary forms. This is a divergence from dominant scholarly approaches to iltizām and its legacies, which are articulated largely in terms of literary theory and political critique. While I engage this scholarship and these aspects of iltizām’s literary and intellectual history, my focus on aesthetics and symbolism is important because they are among the most enduring aspects of iltizām in the literature of the neoliberal era and in modes of reading Arabic literature broadly speaking. The critical literary works discussed in Left Behind are marked by exhausted and grotesque aesthetics (Ibrāhīm, Rabīʿ), analytical rigor and principled despair (Ṣāliḥ), and reanimated and reframed past political commitments (Kāmil). These aesthetic, methodological, and formal aspects direct our authors’ literary critiques of neoliberalism Egypt. Together they form the contours of the Left literary critique of neoliberalism in Egypt.

This dissertation takes a comparative approach in examining works of literary fiction that represent the 1975-1990 war in Lebanon, the 2011-present war in Syria, and the 2003-present war in Iraq. Drawing on a corpus of writings by Mahā Ḥassan, Dīma Wannūs, Imān Ḥumaydān, Azhar Jirjīs, and others, some of which have received little or no scholarly attention, the dissertation examines works of Arabic war fiction that draw on an aesthetic of the uncanny in order to disrupt wartime temporal discourses. In Lebanon, these works disrupt the postwar reconstruction process, which relied upon the production of the illusion of a prosperous future at the expense of erasing the memory of the war and the unresolved losses that accompanied it. Uncanny works of Iraqi fiction, meanwhile, stage the return of histories left out of dominant discourses through frightening and often grotesque figures like the ghost and the animated corpse who act as powerful metaphors for the ways in which unresolved histories continue to haunt the present. Contemporary Syrian novels, finally, explore the psychological impact of protracted dictatorship through family sagas that explore long-lasting legacies of trauma. Ultimately, these works explore the temporal discourses that underlie protracted states of violence and, by drawing on an aesthetic of the uncanny, excavate memories that demonstrate that this violence emerged historically and that endeavor to keep alternative visions of the future alive even as violence continues.

The public’s understandings and attitudes toward marijuana use as well as changes in the legality and acceptability of marijuana use across the United States have undergone substantial changes in the past few decades. These shifts have led to changes in individuals’ informational assumptions (e.g., various considerations or evidence) that come to be associated with the issue, and have made marijuana use a complex social issue that is often comprised of various relevant facets warranting consideration. During adolescence, developments in individuals’ capacities for recognizing and incorporating multiple aspects of an issue enhances the potential for complexity and variation in judgments. In the present investigation, patterns of adolescents’ judgments and justifications regarding marijuana use are explored through a Social Domain Theory framework.

The sample consisted of 100 high school junior and seniors, ages 16 through 18. Respondents completed a survey with open-ended questions asking about their judgments of marijuana use, as well as judgments of a prototypical moral issue (stealing) and a prototypical personal issue (using one’s allowance money to purchase music). Survey items asked respondents to evaluate and justify each of the three acts generally, as well as under various contingencies. Comparisons of judgment patterns were expected to demonstrate greater homogeneity in evaluations and justifications of the prototypical issues as compared with the marijuana use issue. Informational assumptions about marijuana use were also assessed through questions about the harm (or lack thereof) involved use, and hypothetical conditions regarding the absence or presence of harm.

Results indicated that respondents judged marijuana use across the social domains of reasoning, suggesting that this is an ambiguous social issue; multiple considerations including the prudence of use, individuals’ prerogatives about use, laws prohibiting use, as well as consequences to others if use was prohibited (e.g., medical uses for marijuana) were considered as respondents judged marijuana use. This was in contrast to their judgments of stealing and purchasing music (considered to be prototypical or unambiguous social issues), which were more consistently evaluated within the moral and personal domains, respectively. Moreover, informational assumptions regarding the harm involved in marijuana use suggested an association between respondents’ perceptions of the harm involved in use and their evaluations of the acceptability of marijuana use. Results demonstrated the role of informational assumptions in judgment formation and suggested the complexity in adolescent reasoning about an ambiguous social issue like marijuana use.

This dissertation critically investigates the transnational movements that shaped the making of modernist poetry in Iraq and Iran. Following a brief introduction to the project’s historical and critical framework, the first chapter provides the dissertation’s theoretical foundation. It thus engages conversations about literary commitment, the transnational dimension of literary development, and world literature to situate these two poetries as integral to the broader modernist movement. Chapter Two examines the poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj, the founder of Persian modernist poetry, and the foundational position of premodern Arabic prosody for Persian poetic form. It highlights how Nīmā’s innovations on Arabic prosody presage the birth of the Iraqi free verse movement. Chapter Three moves on to discuss the work of Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, addressing how his pioneering project of poetic modernism changed in light of his political alignments. It demonstrates how his experience of the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh in Iran forced him to reconsider his Communist affiliations and discerns the effects his changing political outlook had on how he presented his poetry for posterity. Aḥmad Shāmlū and Furūgh Farrukhzād, two poets who took up Nīmā’s modernist vision in Iran, are the subjects of Chapter Four, which tackles their continued development of Arabic prosody in Persian and ultimate break with the formal constraints Nīmā had continued to adhere to. It also considers Shāmlū’s and Farrukhzād’s contrasting poetics of death in terms of their transnational poetic engagements. The final chapter turns to examine the Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī’s poetics of revolution—which combines existentialism, Sufism, and political commitment—to show how al-Bayātī’s use of the poetic masks of ʿUmar al-Khayyām and the martyred Sufi Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj works in transnational dialog with the Persian poetic and mystical traditions. By taking the Arabic modernist tradition as its focal point and putting Arabic poetry in conversation with modernist poetry in Persian, this study sheds light on how modernism functions as a planetary movement and calls for a reconsideration of current models for transnational literary analysis, reorienting modernist studies away from vertical approaches to lateral ones that consider minor modernist traditions on their own terms.

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There is an increasing demand for nonvolatile memory (NVM) due to the rapid growth of IoT devices that need to operate with a tight power budget. These devices often have low activity rates and most of the time are in standby mode, resulting in a high leakage energy consumption. To reduce the leakage energy, the supply power can be turned off, but beforedoing so, data need to be stored in an NVM. Also, many IoT devices are battery-operated or powered wirelessly and can see fluctuations in their supply power. Therefore their critical data need to be stored before a power-loss event. However, the conventional NVMs such as EEPROM and FLASH are not logic CMOS compatible in terms of technology node and operating voltages. They also require extra fabrication steps, which increases the cost for IoT devices that use small memories. Additionally, most NVMs are not embedded with logic. Embedding memory with the logic improves the memory access time and energy. It also increases data security by eliminating interface ports that are vulnerable to sidechannel attacks and malicious activities. Furthermore, embedding nonvolatile memories (eNVM) with logic enables novel architectures, such as in-SRAM nonvolatile weight storage for compute-in-memory (nvCIM). In the past, researchers have proposed various eNVMs, such as RRAM, PCM, and STT-RAM [1]. However, these solutions require significant changes to the manufacturing process making it challenging to integrate them into modern SoCs. Therefore, there is a need for an eNVM that can be fabricated in a standard logic CMOS process. This dissertation presents the first on-chip demonstration of an embedded Nonvolatile SRAM (eNVSRAM) in the standard CMOS logic process. We propose an 8T eNVSRAM architecture and present experimental results of a chip that was taped-out in GlobalFoundries 22FDX technology. In addition to eNVSRAM, I present a few other projects that I have worked on during my PhD studies. These include a nonvolatile circuit tuning technique used to modify the frequency of a ring oscillator, a supply-fluctuation resilient SRAM, and a low-power ASIC chip for detecting heart-rate and missing beats.

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