Ala Alryyes | Queens College of the City University of New York (original) (raw)

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Books by Ala Alryyes

Papers by Ala Alryyes

Eighteenth-century Life, Sep 1, 2020

Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge. In a novel like Robinson Crusoe there is a histo... more Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge. In a novel like Robinson Crusoe there is a historical knowledge, a geographical, a social (colonial), a technological, a botanical, an anthropological knowledge." Roland Barthes, "Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France. "The English live with the turmoil of two incompatible passions: a strange appetite for adventure and a strange appetite for legality." Jorge Luis Borges, "The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton" ROBINSON Crusoe is taken a captive at sea before his shipwreck makes him one on land and the difference between how he characterizes and resists his two antagonists, the "Moor" and the "Savage," respectively, says much about how Defoe links adversity to place in Europe's uneven imperial land and maritime spaces, even as he uses the enemy to shape Crusoe's contentious subjectivity, tying interiority and the external world. The ostensibly empty American island has a counterpart, a crowded Old World, and properly understanding Crusoe as the island's engineer requires understanding Defoe as the architect of a totality, a fictional universe in which an account of an Englishman's life becomes in Rousseau's words "a whole library." 1 Disregarding his father's warnings against leaving "my Father's House and my Native Country" and seeking to rise above the "middle Station of Life," the young Crusoe follows his inclination to go to sea, despite the ill-omened storms he encounters on his first trip. 2 After he first profitably sails to the "Coast of Guinea" in Africa with the "honest" captain, his ship is captured by "a Turkish Rover" and taken to the Moroccan port of Sallee, where he is "kept by the Captain of the Rover as his proper Prize, and made his Slave" (17, 18, 19). For two years

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2008

This article argues that what I call court-martial narratives, published British pamphlets purp... more This article argues that what I call court-martial narratives, published British pamphlets purporting to be eye-witness accounts of military trials, provide insights into both the ubiquity of war in the eighteenth century and its distance from the everyday life of the reading public in London. ...

Choice Reviews Online, 2002

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2020

Although it may appear that geography is distinguished by an objective, neutral subject, a geneal... more Although it may appear that geography is distinguished by an objective, neutral subject, a genealogy of geographical knowledge reveals that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European polemics over the demarcations and legal representations of space were imbued with polemos itself, war and conflict. In this article, I examine the polemical nature of Robinson Crusoe’s spatial experience and constructions, maritime and insular. Most readers know Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for the shipwreck and the island. This sells short the novel’s formal spatial design, which contrasts its hero’s early mobility with his subsequent settlement(s), while concurrently encoding ideas about law, enmity, and sovereignty into geographic constructions. In Defoe’s space, theory and practice of empire are intermeshed. As I shall argue, Defoe’s representations of his hero’s achievements—both Crusoe’s astute seafaring and his later claims to sovereignty and possession of “his” island—build on extraliterary system...

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2015

garth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and its sequel (1744). This ... more garth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and its sequel (1744). This eclectic grouping offers insights, but it challenges coherence and nothing is concluded. Darren Wagner explores how visualizations of the womb paralleled developments from early folkloric beliefs to the ‘‘unembellished, technical, and objective’’ scientific perspective. He notes that medical illustrations, though at times still subjected to the allegories of medieval depiction, may have helped to facilitate obstetrical science. Other essays in the collection touch on Scriblerians only briefly. This Cambridge Scholars effort would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand—condensing wordiness, insisting on clarity and precision, and limiting its sprawl between the historical, theoretical, and applied study of book illustration (in serving many masters, authors satisfy none). Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century, however, compensates anyone interested in literary illustrati...

The Journal of North African Studies, 2014

Eighteenth-Century Studies