Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights

Kohler, Sophy

Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights

Master Thesis

2017

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The Thousand and One Nights is often brushed aside as a manifestation of a long-ago past, its stories recast in orientalist tropes and scoured for clues to the secrets of foreign cultures. Yet, increasingly, scholars are engaging with the text in more complex ways, realising that to read it in this manner is to chain it to a context with which it was never entirely familiar. Born out of centuries of dissemination and cross-pollination, the Nights is better understood as a dynamic thing, a work produced in its movement through time and place. It therefore asks that we find a mode of reading suited to its restlessness, one that accounts for what, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski identifies as "the transtemporal liveliness of texts". Such a reading draws us towards a discussion of the text not simply as something that we can hold but as a phenomenon, as more thing than object. By looking at the text-as-thing alongside the things in the text, we can see the many ways in which the Nights can be considered what Marina Warner describes as a world of stories "lodged in goods" that are alive and sentient. Making use of Warner's insightful study of the text, Stranger Magic, together with Felski's literary reworking of Actor–Network Theory, this thesis explores the thing-culture of the Nights, looking at how the saturation of the text's historical and fictional worlds with objects, both worldly and otherworldly, reveals more than simply the artefacts of bygone eras. By recognising the agency of things, the thesis proposes, it is possible that we come closer to a method of reading that treats the text with neither reverence nor suspicion and, in doing so, reveal the ways in which the Nights is able to contribute to understandings of our own thing-culture and current literary praxes.

Keywords

English in Literature and Modernity

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