Abedelwahab Meddeb
Presentation
Writer and poet Abdelwahab Meddeb was born in Tunis but has lived in Paris for 30 years where he currently teaches comparative literature at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He is the producer of a show called « Cultures of Islam, » which is broadcast on the radio station France-Culture. He also directs the international journal Dédale, which he founded in 1995.
Abdelwahab Meddeb is one of the leading authorities in France on the culture of Islam. He is particularly interested in relations established since the Middle Ages between Islam and Europe, between eastern and western cultures. This field of study has led him to analyze North/South relations from a cultural point of view, and especially through the prism of the different literatures. This approach, based on a genealogical and archeological method, dares to cross many disciplines: It concerns putting poetics and aesthetics to the test across different fields, which would have to behave according to the intermediary of cross-generic, cross-cultural, and cross-historical advances.
Abdelwahab Meddeb has expounded this perspective through the publication of over 20 books (essays, fiction, poetry), over a hundred articles, the translation of books from Arabic to French, the organizing of colloquiums, exhibitions, as well as collaborations on films and television shows.
Lectures
1. Between East and West, Islam Beyond the Turmoil
It is possible to show how the nature and quality of the texts produced in Islamic lands and in Europe cross over and combine. This can perhaps be illustrated by the strange echoes which are heard when passing from a reading of la Vita Nova to that of Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (The Interpreter of Desires), even if we know that Dante and Ibn ‘Arabi had no knowledge at all of each other. This example from the 13th century can serve as the archeology of our approach, which will be illustrated by many other literary, philosophical, theological, mystical, and artistic examples.
2. Proust and The Thousand and One Nights
Proust recalled at the end of In Search of Lost Time that The Thousand and One Nights was one of two books he took as a model. Dominique Jullien (professor of French at the University of California at Santa Barbara) has, admirably, been teaching those connections. But beyond this presence of Arab tales and eastern themes and figures, we notice that the presence of The Thousand and One Nights in In Search of Lost Time reveals to us in return unsuspected adjacencies and interconnections between the theory of the epiphanies in sufism and the poetics of the marvelous which colors the literary space of orality. Thus it is a French-language text from the twentieth century which sheds light on the structure of the connecting vessels between the scholarly and the popular in Islamic and Arab culture.
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