Static Forms

Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East

Shir Alon

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English

Columbia University Press
28 October 2025

Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Religious groups: social & cultural aspects

Series: Modernist Latitudes

What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of ""cultural awakening"" implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present wrongly. Arabic and Hebrew writers found themselves grappling with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of narrating the present-and achieved strikingly similar literary solutions to this challenge.

This book develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose. Situating literary production in projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building, Shir Alon traces the proliferation of what she calls ""static forms."" These literary forms articulate a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, embodying the lived temporalities of Orientalist fantasies of origin, regimes of productive and reproductive labor, and the routine violence of occupation. Static Forms positions writers such as Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yishayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism, writing the present as a series of suspensions of modernity's narrative of progress.

By: Shir Alon
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231215947
ISBN 10: 0231215940
Series: Modernist Latitudes
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 28 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1. Reverb: Literature’s Absent Present 2. Scratch: The Present Out of Work 3. Routine: The Present of Reproductive Labor 4. Threshold: The Limit of Correspondence 5. Touch: The Present of Crisis Ordinariness Conclusion: Civil War Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Shir Alon is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Reviews for Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East

Static Forms is one of the most dynamic, invigorating, erudite books I’ve read about contemporary Middle Eastern literature. Alon teaches us how to read the story of Palestinian “ongoing Nakba,” or violence in Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, with an eye toward the literature of resistance. It is the literary form, she shows, that exposes the “suspended present” of occupation and oppression, and how they cannibalize our past, present, and future. -- Nitzan Lebovic, Professor of History and Holocaust Studies, Lehigh University Bold and original, Static Forms creates a whole new way to read and think about modernist Middle East literature. Alon brings together for the first time Hebrew and Arabic prose that attempts to narrate the present, illuminating key historical-political moments in Middle Eastern and global modernities with theoretical sophistication and great sensitivity. -- Shachar Pinsker, professor of Middle East Studies and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan Static Forms offers a provocative new way to link literary style and affect to political conjunction. When the present confronts us as a violent impasse or vacancy, how do writers give it significance? Shir Alon’s shrewdly comparative readings of Hebrew and Arabic novels provide surprising answers. -- Robyn Creswell, Yale University