Cultural identity and literary criticism, by: Jaber Asfour

I imagine that the path of creative cultural diversity is the promising way out of the two sides of the millstone: globalization and its oppositional fundamentalism, and moving forward on a promising path for humanity, which it has become inevitable for third-world intellectuals, specifically, to reintroduce fundamental questions about cultural identity, cultural invasion, Orientalism, Occidentalism, the concept of national culture, and the universality of literature, which our writers have become obsessed with after Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in 1988. And it is certain that the old answers are no longer useful in answering such questions, especially after the world changed radically. I imagine that this general trend aligns with the changing times we live in and imposes its conditions, challenges, and threats upon us at the same time. The articles in this book are not far from this trend, as they all stem from a desire for accountability aimed at re-examining dominant concepts, newly introduced ones, and those in between; they were reactions that must be subjected to scrutiny. I named it "Cultural Identity and Literary Criticism" because everything in it is written from the perspective of the literary critic, which, within the scope of literary criticism in its limited sense, expands to become cultural criticism in the broader sense beyond the direct technical meaning of literary critique. Jaber Asfour Number of pages: 472