AnonymClassic team members Beatrice Gründler (PI), Matthew Keegan, Johannes Stephan, and Isabel Toral participated in the Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Pamplona/Spain from May 30 to June 2, 2019, which gathered scholars of narrative studies from different disciplinary angles. Our panel under the title “Before Factuality/Fictionality History and Narrativity in Premodern and Early Modern Arabic Literary Tradition” was chaired by Johannes Stephan.

Isabel Toral made a start by discussing critical concepts for understanding classical Arabic text production and underlined the overlap between adab as a classical concept denoting belles-lettres and historiographical writings in order to nuance the question of fictionality/factuality. Matthew Keegan by introducing his work on the Book of Enjoyment and Conviviality by the 10th-century polymath Abu Hayan al-Tawhidi, illustrated how truthfulness and unreality are part of an intratextual negotiation. Beatrice Gründler then depicted the degrees of linguistic and content variation between different manuscripts of Kalīla and Dimna. By doing so she underscored the text's deliberate openness and urged us to interpret the copying activity as an anonymous authoring of the classical book. As the panel's last speaker, Johannes Stephan tackled the question of fictionality in early modern Arabic travelogues and pleaded for re-contextualizing modern fictionality within Arabic textual history.  

Our group formed the only Arabist panel. Furthermore, it was among one of the very few that engaged with non-Western and premodern literary traditions. In comparison to many contemporary narratological and rhetorical approaches our contributions altogether stressed the importance of historicizing fictionality, rethinking it as a literary mode and a pragmatic category beyond European literatures, as well as relating it to the ongoing reformulation of philological activity in the digital age.

by Johannes Stephan