'An Arabian in My Room': Shakespeare and the Canon

Holderness, Graham

doi:10.3167/cs.2014.260204

Critical Survey

2014

DOI: 10.3167/cs.2014.260204

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'An Arabian in My Room': Shakespeare and the Canon

Graham Holderness¹

Abstract: The literary canon is commonly thought of as ancient, accepted and agreed, and consistent between high and popular cultures. This article demonstrates the falsity of these assumptions, and argues that the canon is always provisional, contingent, iterable and overdetermined by multiple consequences of cultural struggle. Using definitions of canonicity from Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode and Pierre Bourdieu, the article shows how the canon is produced, consumed and reproduced. Picking up on Harold Bloom's use of a … Show more

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Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

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Shakespeare in the Arab Jordanian Consciousness: Shylock in the Poetry of ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal)

Alhawamdeh¹,

Almazaidah²

2018

Arab Studies Quarterly

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Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has been reimagined, adapted, and appropriated by Arab playwrights and poets. The Arab Jordanian poet ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal; 1897–1949) appropriates Shakespeare's anti-archetype of the figure of the Jew, Shylock, to criticize two local issues in the early twentieth-century context in Jordan and Palestine. First, the phenomenon of money-lending by Jordanian merchants, which led to the confiscation of the poor peasants' lands in the early twentieth century. Second, the condemnation of Zionism and its association with Western colonialism. Shakespeare's Shylock, on one hand, is recreated as a Jordanian Shylock, who is a usurer, and, on the other, as a Zionist Shylock. This remoulding of Shakespeare's Shylock as an Arab and Zionist reveals the post-Shakespeare Arab audience's new perception of The Merchant of Venice as a play about the political and behavioral affiliations of Shylock rather than about his Jewish ethnicity.

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Shakespeare in the Arab Jordanian Consciousness: Shylock in the Poetry of ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal)

Alhawamdeh¹,

Almazaidah²

2018

Arab Studies Quarterly

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Trans*textuality in William Shakespeare’s Othello: Italian, West African, and English Encounters

Arndt

2018

Anglia

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William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) displays a critical agenda towards the emerging colonialist discourse of his time and may have encountered, or even been influenced by, African oral literature. This thesis will be probed in this article by comparing Othello with the folktale “The Handsome Stranger” and the Trickster character, well known all across Western Africa, touching lightly on Leo Africanus’s The History and Description of Africa (1550) in the process. In doing so, Othello’s most acknowledged source text, “Un Capitano Moro” by Giovanni Battista Giraldi (1565), will be involved, thus complementing earlier comparative readings of “Un Capitano Moro” and Othello. This postcolonial comparative reading will finally embrace Ahmed Yerima’s adaptation of Othello, entitled Otaelo (2002). In doing so, the article will discuss striking parallels among all four texts, as well as differences and diversions. The latter are, however, not read as counter arguments to the possibility of an encounter; rather, discursive diversions are contextualised historically and trans*textually. Before delving into this analysis, the article will explore both historical probabilities and methodological challenges of reading African oral literature as possible sources of Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as theorise trans*textuality (as related to and yet distinct from Kristeva’s intertextuality and Genette’s transtextuality).This article has developed from two papers, one held in 2015 at a symposium dedicated to Michael Steppat in Bayreuth, who, ever since, accompanied this project with most helpful critical input; I owe him my sincerest gratitude. A second workshop on this topic was held in 2016 in Berlin in the presence of Shankar Raman, Christopher Joseph Odhiambo, and a student research group from Bayreuth with Taghrid Elhanafy, Weeraya Donsomsakulkij, Samira Paraschiv, and Mingqing Yuan. Taghrid Elhanafy dedicates her MA and PhD thesis to comparing Romeo and Juliet with several Arabic and Farsi versions of Layla and Majnun (Cf. Elhanafy 2018). Moreover, this article owes sincere gratitude to a most challenging and expert editing by Shirin Assa, PhD candidate at Bayreuth University, as well as Omid Soltani. Moreover, I wish to thank Dilan Zoe Smida and especially Samira Paraschiv for supporting me while doing research and working on notes and bibliography.

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National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

Innes

2016

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Abstract This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British national poet, and his place within the canon of world literature. The article defines this context first before moving onto the figure of Shakespeare, by referring to various high status texts such as the Kalevala, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. The position accorded Shakespeare at the apex is therefore contingent upon a series of prior operations on other texts, and their writers. Shakespeare is not conceived as attaining pre-eminence because of his own innate literary qualities. Rather, a process of elimination occurs by which the common ascription of the position of national poet to a writer of epic is shown to be a cultural impossibility for the British. Instead, via Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic, the rise of Shakespeare is seen as almost a second choice because of the inappropriateness of Spenser and Milton for the position.

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'An Arabian in My Room': Shakespeare and the Canon

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Shakespeare in the Arab Jordanian Consciousness: Shylock in the Poetry of ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal)

Shakespeare in the Arab Jordanian Consciousness: Shylock in the Poetry of ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal)

Trans*textuality in William Shakespeare’s Othello: Italian, West African, and English Encounters

National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

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