Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West

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In an unusual approach to cultural studies, John Maier examines a wide variety of modern Western and Eastern texts. He brings together very different forms of cultural production: modern and postmodern fiction and folktales, advertising copy and oral histories, travel literature, and ethnographic studies. Many academic disciplines are also juxtaposed--literature and literary theory, linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, film studies, women's studies, and anthropology--largely because they have themselves been transformed by the cultural questions raised here.

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Contents

Asia under the Sign of Woman The Feminization of the Orient in The Aeneid
35
Silence and Ecstasy Watching the Sufis Dance
63
Two Fathers General
89
Jane Bowles and the SemiOriental Woman
119
Penetrating the Ramparts Morocco in the Fiction of Paul Bowles
143
Elizabeth Ferneas Moroccan Pilgrimage
161
Insider Views Five Moroccan Writers
177
Two Moroccan Storytellers in Paul Bowless Five Eyes Larbi Layachi and Ahmed Yacoubi
211
Tented Visions Woman as Heroas Victim
229
In the Service of Aisha Qandisha
251
Conclusion
267
Notes
289
Bibliography
319
Index
339
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Page 6 - Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

About the author (1996)

John Maier is Professor of English at State University of New York College at Brockport. He is the co-author, with John Gardner, of Gilgamesh, Translated from the version of Sin-leqi-unninni, and co-author, with Samuel Noah Kramer, of Myths of Enki, The Crafty God; and co-editor of The Bible in Its Literary Milieu: Contemporary Essays, and Mappings of the Biblical Terrain: The Bible as Text (both with Vincent L. Tollers).

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