Using Edward Said’s notion of the contrapuntal, Dima Ayoub discusses how, in her research on Arabic-to-English translations, digital modes of analysis facilitate a concurrent process of close and distant readings of paratexts (the ancillary materials that surround texts, such as glossaries). In this work, digital analysis brings to the surface surprising power dynamics—in terms of gender, colonialism, and other key topics—lurking quite literally on the margins and edges of literary texts.

Readings:

• Mari Roy ’20 and Will O’Neal ’20, “Two Students Take a Digital Humanities Approach to Arabic Literature,” DLA Website, 28 August 2018
• Dima Ayoub, “The (un)translatability of translational literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love between English and Arabic,” Translation Studies, 13 August 2018

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Dima Ayoub is an Assistant Professor of Arabic at Middlebury College. She received her M.A. in English literature (2006) and PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University (2015). She joined Middlebury College in 2016 after three years of teaching at Georgetown University. Dr. Ayoub specializes in modern Arabic literature with an emphasis on translation, postcolonial, and feminist studies. She is currently at work on a book about histories of translation in modern Arabic literature and questions of linguistic authenticity, gender, and the politics and promise of translation and Arabic language learning.

Behind the Scenes: Glossing the Glossary, Digital Approaches to Paratexts and Power in Arabic Literature—Dima Ayoub