Reassembling a World Literature: Anton Shammas' Arabesques between Iowa and the Galilee

This article explores how Arabesques (1986) by Anton Shammas, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, uses the Iowa International Writing Program to interrogate and relocate the consecration of world literature. Creative writing programs and the concept and canons of world literature have become central issues in literary studies over the last two decades. I use a perspective from outside Anglophone literature to examine these concerns in a way that comments on world literature and its institutions. I do so by exploring the critique of world literature and creative writing contained in Shammas' work. Arabesques is partly set at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and questions where the world's literature is assembled and consecrated. Although it is commonly assumed that this process happens in big cities, the novel (along with documents written by the Program's founders) shows how the program tries to relocate the world's wealth of literature to this Midwestern location through the movement of people and artifacts. The novel uses Iowa's bid for centrality in the network of world literature to demonstrate how the canon and concept of world literature can also be assembled in the peripheral location of a small Galilee village. Arabesques suggests that the mobility of texts and people can unsettle the global center/periphery and East/West dichotomies, if only for the duration of the novel.