Amr ElSherif | SUNY: Geneseo (original) (raw)
Papers by Amr ElSherif
مجلة کلیة الآداب جامعة الفیوم
In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers formulated a worldview which ... more In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers formulated a worldview which recreated the theological unity of being on the plane of immanence. This intellectual unity was imposed on the deeply divided Victorian society which was described by Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, as-the two nations.‖ Imposing a unified intellectual framework on a sharply divided society without being able to develop it from within is bound to merely cover the division with an ideological smokescreen. This study explores how romantic ideology manifests itself in the dominant form of Romantic realism in the fiction of early Victorian writers. It, then, investigates the dominant form of late Victorian fiction in order to prove that it functions as ideology critique. Romantic fiction in the early Victorian period, on the one hand, attempts to unify the individual and society, man and nature and the different social classes through showing how they are permeated by a unifying spirit. The form of late Victorian tragedy, on the other hand, which shows the opposition between the individual and society, man and nature and the social classes is the result of debunking the faith in unity as merely ideological. When unity is exposed as merely ideological, what remains is the opposition in which the individual is defeated in his struggle against a greater power, creating, thereby, the distinctive form of tragedy. Late Victorian tragedy is, hence, the exposition of oppositions without unification.
مجلة کلیة الآداب جامعة الفیوم
Heidegger turns to Greek tragedy in the course of his investigation of the pre-Socratic concept o... more Heidegger turns to Greek tragedy in the course of his investigation of the pre-Socratic concept of being. His reading offers an understanding of being prior to the platonic and Aristotelian metaphysical determinations of being and beings. Most, importantly, it registers a monumental change from the pre-Socratic to the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts. Heidegger regards the whole history of the West as a result of this change in the understanding of being. This article seeks to situate Sophocles" Oedipus Tyrannos in the history of being in order to witness the change from the pre-Socratic to the later Greek concept of being. It, then, reads Arthur Miller"s reformulation of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century, in an attempt to reveal the result of the metaphysical and technical determinations of being. In All my Sons, a revelation of the limits of the technical determination may be visible. A new concept starts to unconceal itself.
مجلة کلیة الآداب .جامعة بورسعید
Phenomenology offers a presuppositionless methodology for investigating phenomena which does not ... more Phenomenology offers a presuppositionless methodology for investigating phenomena which does not determine their nature from a metaphysical, sociological or psychological standpoint but lets them stand on their own. It, therefore, functions as the eidetic science which determines the essences of phenomena and provides the ground on which theories which agree with their nature can be established. Through tracing José Ortega Y Gasset's and Mikel Dufrenne's static and genetic phenomenological investigations of literature, this article offers a deconstructive reading of their accounts. Although Jacques Derrida has also worked on a phenomenological investigation of literature, he has not been able to reach similar conclusions. The reason is that his investigation of the ideal literary object has led him to examine the metaphysical presupposition of the presumably presuppositionless method and how it controls Husserlian phenomenology. The present study extends Derrida's findings to other phenomenological investigations and shows how their metaphysical presupposition determines the results they reach in advance.
Mağallaẗ kulliyyaẗ Al-ādāb Ǧāmiʿaẗ Būrsaʿīd, Apr 1, 2022
Modernity comes as a revolution against tradition in order to establish knowledge on a rational g... more Modernity comes as a revolution against tradition in order to establish knowledge on a rational ground and set the individual free from its authority. Nevertheless, there is a strong anti-modern return to tradition among many modernist thinkers and writers. Both T. S. Eliot and Theodor W. Adorno formulate the relation between modernity and tradition in dialectical terms. This article argues that Eliot, on the one hand, forms the relation in a positive dialectical way to contain modernity through return to tradition. This imposes its parameters on modern rationality and recreates the same kind of hegemonic society against which modernity revolts. Adorno, on the other hand, analyzes the negative dialectical reversion of modern rationalism against itself and its liberatory potential which subjects all fields, including tradition, to its domination. Rather than imposing one on the other, this study proposes an unreconciled, noncoercive form of coexistence in a pluralistic culture in order to move beyond this impasse. Instead of subjecting one to the other, each may provide a critical perspective on the other.
University of Toronto Quarterly
The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of ... more The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of objective knowledge to science and relegate the human realm to historicist relativity, which leads to the crisis of modernity. The late modern return to immediate experience as a condition that is antecedent to dualism comes as a response to the crisis and attempts to cure the diremption of experience. T.S. Eliot’s and Theodor Adorno’s accounts of immediate experience and the possibility of developing a vision of the whole out of it are compared to determine which response is more consistent and handles the crisis adequately. This may offer a possible way out of the crisis and indicate the role that art can play in restoring experience. Art may either work to recreate the lost totality of experience as Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral does or show alienated objectivity as a product of experience as another possible route to restoring experience.
Cairo Studies in English, 2019
Interventions, 2014
The cultural identity of any nation is not a simple self-identical concept. It is more like a liv... more The cultural identity of any nation is not a simple self-identical concept. It is more like a lived experience that can be known by experiencing the cultural milieu and being acquainted with the nation's cultural products. As an intellectual endeavour, the attempt to understand cultural identity, nevertheless, necessarily involves conceptualization. Due to their abstract nature, concepts both reveal and conceal cultural identity. Hassan Hanafy and Gaber Asfour offer two different and even opposed accounts of Egyptian cultural and national identity. Hanafy offers an Islamic-oriented vision and Asfour a liberal one. By abstracting a simple concept from a multi-dimensional entity, both Hanafy and Asfour cover the other dimensions of the entity they seek to conceptualize. Fetishizing a particular concept leads to neglect of the other components that supplement it but which are denied in its harmonious constitution. As a result of this fetishism, both fall into self-contradiction, revealing the rich diffuseness and the self-contradictoriness of the entity that extends beyond these concepts. Dialogue between the two intellectual positions is interrupted by these fetishisms. No third concept synthesizing the liberal and the Islamic components will be offered, for such a concept will necessarily cover other dimensions of the Egyptian national and cultural identity, which can be understood as the entity giving rise to, yet not subsumed by, these concepts.
مجلة کلیة الآداب جامعة الفیوم
In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers formulated a worldview which ... more In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers formulated a worldview which recreated the theological unity of being on the plane of immanence. This intellectual unity was imposed on the deeply divided Victorian society which was described by Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, as-the two nations.‖ Imposing a unified intellectual framework on a sharply divided society without being able to develop it from within is bound to merely cover the division with an ideological smokescreen. This study explores how romantic ideology manifests itself in the dominant form of Romantic realism in the fiction of early Victorian writers. It, then, investigates the dominant form of late Victorian fiction in order to prove that it functions as ideology critique. Romantic fiction in the early Victorian period, on the one hand, attempts to unify the individual and society, man and nature and the different social classes through showing how they are permeated by a unifying spirit. The form of late Victorian tragedy, on the other hand, which shows the opposition between the individual and society, man and nature and the social classes is the result of debunking the faith in unity as merely ideological. When unity is exposed as merely ideological, what remains is the opposition in which the individual is defeated in his struggle against a greater power, creating, thereby, the distinctive form of tragedy. Late Victorian tragedy is, hence, the exposition of oppositions without unification.
مجلة کلیة الآداب جامعة الفیوم
Heidegger turns to Greek tragedy in the course of his investigation of the pre-Socratic concept o... more Heidegger turns to Greek tragedy in the course of his investigation of the pre-Socratic concept of being. His reading offers an understanding of being prior to the platonic and Aristotelian metaphysical determinations of being and beings. Most, importantly, it registers a monumental change from the pre-Socratic to the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts. Heidegger regards the whole history of the West as a result of this change in the understanding of being. This article seeks to situate Sophocles" Oedipus Tyrannos in the history of being in order to witness the change from the pre-Socratic to the later Greek concept of being. It, then, reads Arthur Miller"s reformulation of Greek tragedy in the twentieth century, in an attempt to reveal the result of the metaphysical and technical determinations of being. In All my Sons, a revelation of the limits of the technical determination may be visible. A new concept starts to unconceal itself.
مجلة کلیة الآداب .جامعة بورسعید
Phenomenology offers a presuppositionless methodology for investigating phenomena which does not ... more Phenomenology offers a presuppositionless methodology for investigating phenomena which does not determine their nature from a metaphysical, sociological or psychological standpoint but lets them stand on their own. It, therefore, functions as the eidetic science which determines the essences of phenomena and provides the ground on which theories which agree with their nature can be established. Through tracing José Ortega Y Gasset's and Mikel Dufrenne's static and genetic phenomenological investigations of literature, this article offers a deconstructive reading of their accounts. Although Jacques Derrida has also worked on a phenomenological investigation of literature, he has not been able to reach similar conclusions. The reason is that his investigation of the ideal literary object has led him to examine the metaphysical presupposition of the presumably presuppositionless method and how it controls Husserlian phenomenology. The present study extends Derrida's findings to other phenomenological investigations and shows how their metaphysical presupposition determines the results they reach in advance.
Mağallaẗ kulliyyaẗ Al-ādāb Ǧāmiʿaẗ Būrsaʿīd, Apr 1, 2022
Modernity comes as a revolution against tradition in order to establish knowledge on a rational g... more Modernity comes as a revolution against tradition in order to establish knowledge on a rational ground and set the individual free from its authority. Nevertheless, there is a strong anti-modern return to tradition among many modernist thinkers and writers. Both T. S. Eliot and Theodor W. Adorno formulate the relation between modernity and tradition in dialectical terms. This article argues that Eliot, on the one hand, forms the relation in a positive dialectical way to contain modernity through return to tradition. This imposes its parameters on modern rationality and recreates the same kind of hegemonic society against which modernity revolts. Adorno, on the other hand, analyzes the negative dialectical reversion of modern rationalism against itself and its liberatory potential which subjects all fields, including tradition, to its domination. Rather than imposing one on the other, this study proposes an unreconciled, noncoercive form of coexistence in a pluralistic culture in order to move beyond this impasse. Instead of subjecting one to the other, each may provide a critical perspective on the other.
University of Toronto Quarterly
The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of ... more The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of objective knowledge to science and relegate the human realm to historicist relativity, which leads to the crisis of modernity. The late modern return to immediate experience as a condition that is antecedent to dualism comes as a response to the crisis and attempts to cure the diremption of experience. T.S. Eliot’s and Theodor Adorno’s accounts of immediate experience and the possibility of developing a vision of the whole out of it are compared to determine which response is more consistent and handles the crisis adequately. This may offer a possible way out of the crisis and indicate the role that art can play in restoring experience. Art may either work to recreate the lost totality of experience as Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral does or show alienated objectivity as a product of experience as another possible route to restoring experience.
Cairo Studies in English, 2019
Interventions, 2014
The cultural identity of any nation is not a simple self-identical concept. It is more like a liv... more The cultural identity of any nation is not a simple self-identical concept. It is more like a lived experience that can be known by experiencing the cultural milieu and being acquainted with the nation's cultural products. As an intellectual endeavour, the attempt to understand cultural identity, nevertheless, necessarily involves conceptualization. Due to their abstract nature, concepts both reveal and conceal cultural identity. Hassan Hanafy and Gaber Asfour offer two different and even opposed accounts of Egyptian cultural and national identity. Hanafy offers an Islamic-oriented vision and Asfour a liberal one. By abstracting a simple concept from a multi-dimensional entity, both Hanafy and Asfour cover the other dimensions of the entity they seek to conceptualize. Fetishizing a particular concept leads to neglect of the other components that supplement it but which are denied in its harmonious constitution. As a result of this fetishism, both fall into self-contradiction, revealing the rich diffuseness and the self-contradictoriness of the entity that extends beyond these concepts. Dialogue between the two intellectual positions is interrupted by these fetishisms. No third concept synthesizing the liberal and the Islamic components will be offered, for such a concept will necessarily cover other dimensions of the Egyptian national and cultural identity, which can be understood as the entity giving rise to, yet not subsumed by, these concepts.