May Hawas
(University of Alexandria / EUME Fellow 2015/2016)

Chair: Markus Messling
(Centre Marc Bloch)

Abstract
This article draws on the Alexandrian reception of the Francophone scholars teaching at Alexandria University in the 1940s to highlight the intricate relation between comparative literature as a discipline and as a practice whether within the university or outside of it. Drawing on the pedagogical similarities between French and Arab notions of literature as pedagogy and patrimony, the article outlines the ways that revisiting the trajectory of comparative literature outside the West enhances the objectives of world literature as it is understood today. Questions the paper seeks to explore include: What is the function of literature in different communities? Why, despite Alexandria’s much-glorified ‘cosmopolitanism’, did there not arise institutionalized grounds for comparativity for the many languages of city?

May Hawas teaches English literature at the University of Alexandria, Egypt and is Associate Editor of the Journal of World Literature. She received her PhD in Comparative and World Literature from Leuven University. Hawas has various publications to her name including the Diaries of Waguih Ghali: An Egyptian in the Swinging Sixties (The American University in Cairo Press) and a number of short stories (Mizna: Journal of Arab American Art, Yellow Medicine and African Writing). She has extensive editorial experience and has worked in various NGOs for women’s issues and youth employment. Hawas has presented her work around Europe, the Middle East and the US, and has received awards and grants in the US, Belgium and Egypt. Her current research interests include the circulation of texts between the Middle East, Asia and Europe; methods of comparative and world literature; cosmopolitanism; literary history and canonization; and nation, nationalisms and the novel.