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

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dc.contributor.advisorSamuelson, Margareten_ZA
dc.contributor.authorKohler, Sophyen_ZA
dc.date.accessioned2017-09-23T06:24:34Z
dc.date.available2017-09-23T06:24:34Z
dc.date.issued2017en_ZA
dc.description.abstractThe 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.en_ZA
dc.identifier.apacitationKohler, S. (2017). <i>Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights</i>. (Thesis). University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/11427/25341en_ZA
dc.identifier.chicagocitationKohler, Sophy. <i>"Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights."</i> Thesis., University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/25341en_ZA
dc.identifier.citationKohler, S. 2017. Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights. University of Cape Town.en_ZA
dc.identifier.ris TY - Thesis / Dissertation AU - Kohler, Sophy AB - 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. DA - 2017 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2017 T1 - Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights TI - Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11427/25341 ER - en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11427/25341
dc.identifier.vancouvercitationKohler S. Stories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nights. [Thesis]. University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature, 2017 [cited yyyy month dd]. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/25341en_ZA
dc.language.isoengen_ZA
dc.publisher.departmentDepartment of English Language and Literatureen_ZA
dc.publisher.facultyFaculty of Humanitiesen_ZA
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cape Town
dc.subject.otherEnglish in Literature and Modernityen_ZA
dc.titleStories "lodged in goods": Reading the thing-culture of the Thousand and One Nightsen_ZA
dc.typeMaster Thesis
dc.type.qualificationlevelMasters
dc.type.qualificationnameMAen_ZA
uct.type.filetypeText
uct.type.filetypeImage
uct.type.publicationResearchen_ZA
uct.type.resourceThesisen_ZA
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