Capper Fellows: Abdul Basheer and Britt Edelen

Abdul Basith Basheer

The “Global Muslim Journal” Across Three Continents: A Comparative Historical Study of Rida’s Al-Manar, Pickthall’s Islamic Culture, and Muhammad’s The Bilalian News

This paper investigates intellectual linkages between three prominent Muslim journals published throughout the 20^th century. Ultimately, the paper argues that “Muslim scholasticism” during this period was a global process that transcended national borders and had profound effects on the intellectual trajectories of Muslim intellectuals around the world. By looking at important publications in different regional contexts, the paper can explain how the very notion of a Muslim journal in the modern period materialized differently depending on certain conditions, yet the purpose and impact on the community was directly linked if not overtly connected. This work advances the field by comparing journals in regions of the Muslim world not often discussed together in this context, through a global historical lens: the Middle East, South Asia, and the United States. 

Abdul Basith Basheer is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, advised by Dr. Cemil Aydın and Dr. Michael O’Sullivan. He is interested in modern Islamic intellectual history and its global manifestations and interconnectivities, as well as histories of the modern Middle East, Muslim South Asia, and Islam in the West. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Britt Edelen

“The Second Law of Thermopoetics: Modernist Economies of Exhaustion”

Following the discovery and cultural dissemination of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid-nineteenth century, modernist authors in Europe, like their scientific contemporaries, began to take seriously the energetics of language—and, in accordance with the second law, the inexorability of entropy, experienced in its corporeal correlate of exhaustion. In this paper, I argue that while exhaustion became an aesthetic concern for European modernists, it was figured not as a social or individual bane (as it was in the social sciences) but as an artistic telos capable of challenging dominant capitalist discourses of language, the body, and the subject. Examining the works of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett specifically, I show how the modernist novel exists as a microcosm of our universe, operating according to an energetic economy that tends toward entropy/exhaustion. In doing so, this paper attempts to articulate how modernist literature acts to counter modernity and extricate thermodynamics from its bourgeois ideological origins.

Britton Edelen is a doctoral candidate in English literature, focusing primarily on European Modernism in English, French, and German. With a comparatist background and an interest in 20th-century continental philosophy, his research, broadly conceived, attempts to articulate the various logics that subtend the play and dissolution of language that characterize modernist literature. He is currently working on a dissertation, “Language Worked Over: Modernism and the Poetics of Exhaustion,” which explores the legacies of thermodynamics in modernism through the central concept of exhaustion.