Sea in the Desert, Desert in the Sea: An Inflected Spatial Image East and West

This presentation focuses on the often-overlapping desert/sea imagery in the literature of both East and West. This image is assimilative of the dual geographical locations, existing mostly side by side, that influence the daily perception of the common Arab dweller - the sea and desert existing in such expansive proximity as seldom occurs in other parts of the world. As such, the image resonates with modernist romantic nuances that make it all the more fitting for the mindset of the modern Arab poet. It is an image that often overlaps; the desert often assuming the features of the sea and vice versa largely because "semiologically", in Arab culture, "the desert is the Arab equivalent of the sea." Drawing on classical Arab poets like Tarafa and Amr Ibn Kalthûm who often equate desert and sea imagery in remarkable ways, in comparison to the English Romantic classics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Melville who contrastively deflect the image; the sea often assuming the image of the desert, this presentation explores the duality of an image that is not as one-sided as the casual reader might expect.

Professor Osama Abdel Fattah Madany

Osama Madany is professor of English and American literature, and Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Translation, Pharos University in Alexandria, Egypt. He is a member of the Egyptian referee board for the promotion of professors and associate professors, and a member of the Faculty of Arts National Sector at the Egyptian Supreme Council of Universities, responsible for leading teams to revise and approve more than twenty internal regulations for undergraduate and graduate programs at national and private universities nationwide. He is currently a member of the International Comparative Literature Association Nominating Committee. He was team leader in establishing the Faculty of Media Studies at Menoufia University (2011), and the Departments of Hebrew, Persian, and Archaelogy at the same university (2017 – 2020). He is a board member of twelve national and international academic journals, and external reviewer at the National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation (NAQAAE). He has been a recipient of three Fulbright teaching and research grants, and is co-founder of the Humanities Circle at the Fulbright Commission in Egypt. He has published extensively on Scottish, Irish, and Arab-American poetry and fiction with special emphasis on border crossing theory, and the shifting of cultural space in contemporary Egyptian fiction writers. He has translated three books for the National Translation Centre in Egypt, and his latest publication is: Readings in Contemporary Egyptian Narrative: From Theory to Practice (Cairo: Egyptian General Book Authority, 2021).