Matthew Keegan and Johannes Stephan participated in a workshop on Conceptions and Configurations of the Arabic Literary Canon in Paris

Matthew Keegan and Johannes Stephan participated in the international workshop Conceptions and Configurations of the Arabic Literary Canon which took place between June 17 and 19, this year in the Columbia University Global Center of Paris.

A central aspect discussed at the workshop is the overlap of the concepts of canon, literary history, anthological literature and tradition. The question of canonicity is crucial to our project, as Kalīla and Dimna happened to be included and excluded from processes of canonization throughout its long history within the Arabic tradition. A complex process culminating in first critical editions in the early 19th century led to its acquiring the status of a classic within Arabic literature. Moreover, all versions of Kalīla and Dimna carry with it an internal textual history, as they all thematize in their introductory chapters the travelling of texts between different languages and localities, and hence may be seen as an early contribution to an Arabic literary canon.
Recap by Johannes Stephan

AnonymClassic panel at the ISSN annual conference in Pamplona (Spain)

AnonymClassic team members Beatrice Gründler (PI), Matthew Keegan, Johannes Stephan, and Isabel Toral participated in the Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Pamplona/Spain from May 30 to June 2, 2019, which gathered scholars of narrative studies from different disciplinary angles. Our panel under the title “Before Factuality/Fictionality History and Narrativity in Premodern and Early Modern Arabic Literary Tradition” was chaired by Johannes Stephan.

Our group formed the only Arabist panel. Furthermore, it was among one of the very few that engaged with non-Western and premodern literary traditions. In comparison to many contemporary narratological and rhetorical approaches, our contributions altogether stressed the importance of historicizing fictionality, rethinking it as a literary mode and a pragmatic category beyond European literatures, as well as relating it to the ongoing reformulation of philological activity in the digital age.

Recap by Johannes Stephan

Cinderella, Sindbad & Sinuhe: Arab-German Storytelling Traditions

More than 250,000 people have visited the special exhibition “Cinderella, Sindbad & Sinuhe: Arabic-German Storytelling Traditions at the Neues Museum”. Various lectures were held over the course of the exhibition, accompanied by a trilingual publication (German/English/Arabic).

PI Beatrice Gruendler has contributed to the exhibition catalogue with her essay on Kalīla wa-Dima: A Unique Work of World Literature, and presented one of the museum’s talks during the course of the exhibition on June 18, 2019. 

Storytelling is as old as mankind. The exhibition catalogue complements the Berlin exhibition on Cinderella, Sindbad & Sinuheexploring the rich cultural heritage of storytelling traditions and fairy tales in Germany and the Arab Word. The publication focusses on a critical and inspiring discussion of leading Arabic, German and international experts on the question how knowledge and human imagination is being transmitted over time and space. Contributions shed a fresh light on antique model texts that since have become part of the corpus of world literature such as the Egyptian Papyrus Westcar with its five stories about miracles performed by priests and magicians, the Story of Sinuhe (also known as Sanehat), the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dima textual tradition, exploring how these ancient Vorlagen have inspired contemporary literatures, films and other more recent media in their ways of telling a story.

The Neues Museum (New Museum) at Berlin dedicated an exhibition to the rich cultural heritage of narrative traditions from ancient Egypt, the Arab world and Germany. The breadth of the trilingual exhibition (German/English/Arabic) stretches from ancient Egyptian papyruses to the tales of the Brothers Grimm, from the Arabian Nights to contemporary pop-up books and comics. Some 100 objects from the collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and various lenders shed fascinating light on a 4,000-year-old cultural history.

Stories Transcending Time and Space: Cinderella, Sindbad & Sinuhe explores the diverse processes of cultural exchange between the Arab world and Germany. The exhibition examines earlier literary traditions that continue to inspire artists and authors internationally, including the ancient Egyptian story of Sinuhe. The manner in which stories were adapted and interpreted reveals how ideas are passed on across time and space, a process also illustrated by the story of Sindbad. Similarities in the narrative traditions are also pointed out by the exhibition, with varying versions of Cinderella being found in Germany as well as on the Arabian Peninsula.

Historical Commonalities instead of Distinctions: In a time when social debates are increasingly marked by differentiation, it is all the more important that we apply ourselves to exploring the diverse, historically evolved commonalities among different cultures and to making them accessible to an international public.

Cinderella, Sindbad & Sinuhe is a collaboration between the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung (Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). The exhibition received funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the Arab German Young Academy (AGYA). Support has also been provided by the Council of Arab Ambassadors in Berlin, the Mission of the Arab League in Berlin, and MDT-tex.

Compiled of Neues Museum and Kadmos Verlag website texts by A. Kloocke.

AnonymClassic Research Colloquium – summer 2019

During the weekly Kalīla and Dimna research colloquium, Beatrice Gründler and her team discuss current research results. AnonymClassic team members and guests present ongoing work for critical analysis to their peers. Meetings take place each Thursday from 12-15 pm, in the Holzlaube building, room -1.1062, Dahlem campus.

Indologist Florinda De Simini reads with us the Mahābhārata tales of Kalīla and Dimna – Part 2

In daily close reading sessions from April 3-6, 2019, our team picks up where we had left off in October 2018: Our expert advisor was Florinda de Simini, Indologist from L’Orientale (Naples University), who in December 2018 started with her project on “The Shivadharma and the Making of Regional Religious Traditions in Premodern South Asia”, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), returns to Berlin to dive back into the Mahābhārata predecessors of the Kalīla and Dimna tales. Special guest is Kenji Takahashi from the University of Kyoto.

 

This close reading workshop is to be continued!

Matthew L. Keegan earned a grant of the Dahlem Humanities Center Junior Host Program

In the framework of the Junior Host Programme , Matthew will invite Jeannie Miller and Kevin Blankinship, leading scholars of medieval Arabic literature with shared interests in texts about animals. Together, the three scholars will be hosting a series of seminars on Arabic texts. These seminars will culminate in a workshop entitled “Animals, Adab, and Fictivity.” This workshop explores the various ways in which medieval authors and readers put animals to work in adab, as the site of theological debate, as a vehicle for allegory, and as a way of thinking about poetics.

Theodore Beers joins our team!

Theodore is a Persian and Arabic philologist who wrote his dissertation at the University of Chicago on the development of Persian literary anthologies in the late Timurid and early Safavid-Mughal periods. As part of the AnonymClassic team, Theodore will focus on the transmission, translation, and continual reworking of material connected to Kalīla wa-Dimna, with particular regard to the interplay between the Arabic and Persian traditions.

Johannes Stephan joins our team!

Johannes is a literary historian of the Arabic tradition with a PhD from the University of Bern. He has joined the AnonymClassic team in February 2019. He explores the indirect transmission of Kalila wa-Dimna in Arabic from the 9th century onward and the significance of linguistic variations within the corpus.

 

Find out more about Johannes here.