Join us to hear Barnard College's Dr. Matthew Keegan discuss his new book: Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-?ar?r? in an Age of Commentary. Before World Literature offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maq?m?t of al-?ar?r?, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster stories written in an elaborate and highly allusive form of prose. This book shows how the emergence of world literature as a literary critical paradigm led to a wholesale reformulation of literary tastes that sidelined elaborately referential texts like the Maq?m?t. Restoring the Maq?m?t to its place as the pinnacle of Arabic style and as an essential text of Islamic education for centuries, Before World Literature offers a model of how to read texts like the Maq?m?t on their own terms