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Alexander Key
Alexander Key is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature, working on comparative poetics.
Alexander Key is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature, working on comparative poetics.
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“Neither Arabic nor Persian literature has an originative poetics per se.”
NewBlog Post
Ma'na is not the same as “meaning” at all; it is its own story.
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Raw Transcript: Selim Kuru on Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and literary theory
NewResources
At this point in history, a focus on literature as an object of study is informed by administrative and pedagogical necessities.
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Reflections from Trans;form
Blog Post
How do we speak and write in a way that is concise and accessible to a wider audience and that can make an impact on social movements and on life in society?
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Syllabus: Comparative Literature 305
NewResources
Here, the syllabus of Comparative Literature 305: Prospects for a Comparative Poetics.
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Identities of a Single Root: The Triad of the Khuntha, Mukhannath, and Khanith
Journal Article41.1 (2018)
I aim to explore in what follows the terms khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith, and their associated identities, along with their linguistic characteristics and literary uses.*
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Trans;form Response: Saqer Almarri’s “Identities of a Single Root: The Triad of the Khuntha, Mukhannath, and Khanith”
Blog Post
Mixed forms are crucial not only to the understanding of khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith communities, but also to the very scaffolding of Almarri’s paper.
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Khwaja Sira Activism: The Politics of Gender Ambiguity in Pakistan
Journal Article3.1-2 (2016)
This essay examines an instance of media activism by members of a Karachi-based organization run by and for nonnormatively gendered people who are known as khwaja siras.
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Interference
Book Chapter
The Untranslatable refers to how concepts assimilate actually existing ways of speaking and being and how ways of speaking and being interfere with concepts.
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Celebrating Mediation: The Poet as Translator
Book Chapter
Amichai’s poetry articulates an implicit theory of translation as the intertextual practice of a historical agent, an implicit theory that is poised to provide a new perspective on the critical discourse of contemporary translation studies.
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Language between God and the Poets: Ma‘na in the Eleventh Century
Book Chapter
Wittgenstein’s theory of language provides a good methodology for making sense of maʿna in Classical Arabic.
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“Introduction” to Shazaya wa Ramad, Nazik al-Malaʾika (1947)
Essay
Driven by his artistic sensibility, the poet might tear up a given rule, not to do harm to language, but to urge it forward. The poet or man of letters, then, is the one in whose hands language develops.
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Raw Transcript: Elizabeth Bernhardt on the Future of Language Learning
NewResources
I want to talk about the future not of language teaching, but of language learning.
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Further reading: "Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone"
NewResources
How might we move beyond the Europhone term "vernacular" to frame non-Europhone literatures and literary histories?
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