Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation

Introduction: Toward a Poetics of Investigation -- 1. The Detective as Conscript: Tawfiq al-Hakim and Driss Chraïbi on the Margins of the Law -- 2. Murder on the 'Izbah: Spectral Legality and Egyptian Sensation Fiction in Yusuf Idris and Yusuf al-Qa'id -- 3. Bureau of Missing Persons: Metaphysical Detection and the Subject in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Naguib Mahfouz -- 4. Effacing the Author, or the Detective as Medium : Fathi Ghanim and Elias Khoury -- 5. Epic Fails: Sonallah Ibrahim's Modern Myths of Seeking -- Epilogue: Monstrous Omniscience

"In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a "poetics of investigation," the book shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power tend to be premised. At the same time, they return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded to the transformations of modernity through fiction. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel's place in the constellation of Arab modernism, crafting an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves." --Provided by publisher.