Modernist Encounters across Borders: May Ziadeh and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Literary modernism is a movement that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with its roots typically acknowledged to be western. However, in recent decades, the question of modernity outside the geographical boundary of Europe has been circulating in the rising field of global modernism. Building upon this theoretical ground, this thesis argues for respatializing the modernist movement through expanding its parameters beyond Eurocentric notions. As the title indicates, it trespasses borders to allow comparing May Ziadeh(1886-1941), an early example of an Arab modernist activist and writer, on equal footing with Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an iconic western figure of modernity. To do so, this study juxtaposes Ziadeh’s Kalimāt au Ishārāt (Words and Signs,1922) with Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), marking an original and non-hierarchal comparison of the two writers and their respective publications. Performed and written in the same period and in a male dominated world, a cross-cultural comparative reading of the two texts uncovers the recurrence of common motifs while avoiding the dissolve of their unique and local contexts. Chapter two introduces “shadow” as a new keyword in the field of global modernism and investigates the shadowing of Ziadeh and Woolf in modernist studies. It then addresses how they responded to the multiple shadows in the Egyptian and British contexts respectively. Chapter three contributes to adding an Arab modern lens to another keyword, “tradition”, and suggests the possibility of its multi-conceptions and functions beyond the European archive. What shadows hindered the emergence of Ziadeh and Woolf? And how did they manage to come out from these shadows? In times of modernism, what was the nature of their relationship with traditions in the Arabic and Western scenes respectively? What traditions did they leave behind and what did they hold onto? To what extent did they have a sense of belonging to their respective pasts, and to what extent did they feel alienated?