Opening figures: Acts of mourning in modern Arabic letters

This dissertation addresses the relations among literature and mourning in modern Arabic letters. Yet a relation to irreparable loss does not come to Arabic letters or writings on them from the outside, affecting the reading of something that will have preceded it, and that will have remained in the wake of this reading untouched. For this relation also produces the category of the literary, and allows literature, adab, to appear as an object of study. Tracing the marks of mourning and the refusal to mourn in modern Arabic letters, I focus on selected writings of Mahmud Darwish (b. 1941), Ilyas Khuri (b. 1948), and Shimon Ballas (b. 1930), in poetry and prose, in Arabic and Hebrew. Drawing upon reflections on language offered in the classical Arabic rhetorical and literary critical traditions, I turn to selected writings of Ibn Jinni (d. 1002), 'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and argue that the work of Darwish, Khuri, and Ballas occurs as a mode of withdrawal and disappearance. And literature takes place as the unsettling coming out of place of language. Addressing this coming out of place I trace the formation of Arabic literary studies. I turn to selected literary critical and autobiographical writings of Taha IInsayn (1889-1973) and offer a reading of his On Jahili Poetry (1926) because it is in this work that literature appears as an object, texts appear as the effect of a subject, and language appears as a derivative and secondary mark, which, once subject to the interpretive practice of the scholar, will have been left, safely, behind. Rather than exemplifying effects of a subject, the texts that I read, both literary texts and writings which offer a discourse on them, occur as effects of a relation to irreparable loss. And they give themselves to be read as figures of impossible mourning, as opening figures. As opening figures, the subordination of literature and language to the subject and its voice comes undone, and poetry appears as prose, criticism as autobiography, novel as testimony, and Hebrew as Arabic.