Extensio animae-the artful ways of remembering "Al-Andalus"

Abstract EN

The Muslim civilization of al-Andalus in Iberia has been a leitmotif of what Arabic speaking civilization could achieve for writers struggling with modernism throughout the twentieth century, in anticipation that the fetters imposed with the gatekeepers of conservatism would be removed in their own locales.

Al-Andalus has traditionally been represented as a paradise lost of interfaith and cosmopolitan utopianism, when writers could write freely.

The Andalusian chronotrope, as to how Al-Andalus is reconstructed by modern writers, refers to the relationship of the text to the period and context of its writing.

Different views of Al-Andalus are compared to the aspirations of the novelists in their own cultural and social contexts.

These points represent the "present" view of both Al-Andalus as "past'' and Al-Andalus as "future,'' the kind of society modern Arabs aspire to create.

Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere...in a time and place of one's own, in an originality that must compound with inheritance, with the anxiety of influence.