Static Forms by Shir Alon
What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of “cultural awakening” implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present wrongly. Arabic and Hebrew writers found themselves grappling with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of narrating the present—and achieved strikingly similar literary solutions to this challenge.This book develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose. Situating literary production in projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building, Shir Alon traces the proliferation of what she calls “static forms.” These literary forms articulate a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, embodying the lived temporalities of Orientalist fantasies of origin, regimes of productive and reproductive labor, and the routine violence of occupation. Static Forms positions writers such as Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yeshayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism, writing the present as a series of suspensions of modernity’s narrative of progress.
Static Forms is one of the most dynamic, invigorating, erudite books I’ve read about contemporary Middle Eastern literatureAlon teaches us how to read the story of Palestinian “ongoing Nakba,” or violence in Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, with an eye toward the literature of resistance. It is the literary form, she shows, that exposes the “suspended present” of occupation and oppression, and how they cannibalize our past, present, and future. -- Nitzan Lebovic, author of Homo Temporalis: German-Jewish Thinkers on Time
Shir Alon is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780231215954 |
| ISBN 10 | 0231215959 |
| Title | Static Forms |
| Author | Shir Alon |
| Series | Modernist Latitudes |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Columbia University Press |
| Year published | 2025-10-28 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |