Nouri Gana

Nouri Gana
Assistant Professor
gana@humnet.ucla.edu
(310) 206-9965
Humanities 356

Nouri Gana was born and educated in Tunisia and later studied and taught in Canada and the United States. He earned a BA from Université de Manouba, Tunisia (1997), and both an MA (1999) and a Ph.D. (2004) from Université de Montréal, Québec. He previously taught at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Michigan, Dearborn, before arriving at UCLA in 2007 to hold a joint appointment in the Departments of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He received several awards, including a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship & a Rackham Faculty Research Grant from the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

He is currently completing a book manuscript on the affective politics of Arab contemporaneity tentatively titled, Arab Melancholia: Toward an Affective Theory of Cultural Empowerment, and editing a collection of critical essays on the intellectual history and contemporary significance of the Arab novel in English, The Rise of the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture. He teaches and researches in the intersecting fields of modern and contemporary multilingual Arab literatures and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East; Arab popular music and film; comparative ethnic, Muslim and Arab diasporas studies, namely in Euro-Americas; and postcolonial and modernist comparative cultural studies. He is open to doctoral projects in any of the above and other related fields, but welcomes in particular those that seek to elaborate new approaches to the relations between the poetics and the politics of literatures and cultures.

Selected Publications: 

• Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East, forthcoming special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28.1 (2008), co-editor

• “In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent,” forthcoming in Al-Andalus and Its Legacies, special issue of Comparative Literature Studies 45.2 (2008)

• “Reel Violence: Paradise Now and the Collapse of the Spectacle,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28.1 (2008) [on Hany Abu-Assad’s al-jannah al-an], forthcoming

• “Everyday Arabness: The Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Culture,” The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas; eds., Ella Shohat and Evelyn Alsultany (U of Michigan P, 2008), forthcoming
  
  
• “Bourguiba’s Sons: Melancholy Manhood in Modern Tunisian Cinema,” Masculinity in Middle Eastern Literature and Film; ed., Lahoucine Ouzgane (Routledge, 2008), forthcoming

• "Interview with Hisham Matar," Words without Borders: the Online Magazine for International Literature (2007), http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=GanaInterviewMatar 

• “The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 44.1 (2007), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/james_joyce_quarterly/v044/44.1gana.pdf

• “Of Contrapuntology: Said’s Freud,” Theory & Event 7.2 (2004), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2gana.html 

•  “Revolutionaries without a Revolution: The Case of Julia Kristeva,” College Literature 31.4 (2004):188-202, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v031/31.4gana.pdf

•  “Remembering Forbidding Mourning: Repetition, Indifference, Melanxiety, Hamlet,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.2 (2004): 59-78, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3636242/Remembering-forbidding-mourning-repetition-indifference.html

• “Beyond the Pale: Toward an Exemplary Relationship between the Judge and the Literary Critic,” Law and Literature 15.3 (2003): 313-343 [revised version], http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/lal.2003.15.3.313

• “The Poetics of Mourning: The Tropologic of Prosopopoeia in Joyce’s 'The Dead',” American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 60.2 (2003): 159-178, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_imago/v060/60.2gana.pdf

• “Horizons of Desire, Horizons of Mourning: Joyce’s Dubliners,” Études Irlandaises: Revue Française d'Histoire, Civilisation et Littérature de l'Irlande 28.1 (2003): 25-43,
  http://etudes-irlandaises.septentrion.com/FR/EI28-1/GANA.html

•  “The Specter of Relativism: A Critical Review of Norman Holland’s Models of Reader-Response,” Modern Criticism, eds. Christopher Rollason and Rajeshwar Mittapalli (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2002), 25-59.

• “Toward an Exemplary Relationship between the Judge and the Literary Critic,” Modern Criticism, eds. Christopher Rollason and Rajeshwar Mittapalli (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2002), 209-243.

• “Donne Undone: The Journey of Psychic Re-Integration in Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32.1 (2001): 153-170.
  • “Forbidden Otherness: Jane’s Plain Regress,” The Atlantic Literary Review 2:1 (2001): 1-23. [On Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre]