The limits of secular criticism: World literature at the crossroads of empires

The Limits of Secular Criticism: World Literature at the Crossroads of Empires offers a colonial history of literature at the intersections of the French and British empires, nineteenth-century moral education and reforms in Qur'anic instruction. My argument is that literature, known in Arabic as adab, is redefined through processes of modernization, extending from Napoleon's arrival in 1798 to Muhammad 'Ali's reforms and on through the British occupation. Where previously adab implied cultivated knowledge as well as character, conduct and manners, with Egypt's modernization adab comes to imply literature in a different sense, closely linked to the discourse of world literature and the rise of transnational literary genres.;The various chapters analyze literature both as a textual form and as a disciplined reading practice and examine the dynamics of a world literary public. The first half of the dissertation focuses on two distinct historical instances that draw attention to the consolidation of a literary public. The introductory chapter considers how a text comes to be recognized as literature and draws together reflections on Naguib Mahfouz's Nobel Prize and Edward Said's notion of secular criticism. In the next chapter, I address the pedagogical instantiation of literature as a disciplined practice by looking at the relationship between education and self-government in the writings of Alfred Milner and Lord Cromer.;In the second half of the dissertation, I focus on conflicting interpretative worlds staged in Naguib Mahfouz's novel, Qasr al-shawq, and a Lumiere Brothers' film of the pyramids. The third chapter weighs how a literary sensibility comes into conflict with what it casts as its fanatical counterpart, and draws together the Darwin debates at the Syrian Protestant College in 1882 and Mahfouz's Qasr al-shawq. In the next chapter, I draw attention to how Alexandre Promio's fifty-second film of the Great Pyramid transforms the historical relation to the monument, altering its presentation from mythological time to the immediacy of a cinematic event.