The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability is literary criticism as damage control. Attentive to the cautions and insights of a developed tradition of postcolonial criticism that has long fixated on questions of ethical representation of geopolitical others, Stanton argues for a renewed focus on the transformative potential of the reader's affective encounter with the literary text. For Stanton, postcolonial criticism's preoccupation with the ethics of translation has, in fact, rendered it unable to answer important ethical questions about the experience of reading. She therefore calls attention to those moments, shared by all readers regardless of mother tongue, in which affect is the “sole reaction” (p. 117) to the text. The result is a style of criticism that is able to approach difficult ethical and political questions about what it means to encounter Arabic literature in translation.

By focusing on aesthetic experience, Stanton seeks to refute the “reductive and essentializing logics that have long governed Arabic literature's reception among Anglophone publics” (p. 20). Like several other Anglophone scholars in recent decades, including Roger Allen and Alexander Key, Stanton sets aside well-explored questions of how literature represents reality (mimesis) by turning to premodern literary theory as a resource for ways of thinking through the literary as an experience of overwhelming affective encounter. In this body of theory, spanning Spinoza to Saint Jerome to Jurjani, she finds a multicultural and rich body of theory of affective experience ready and waiting to be used in the study of literature in translation. “A vigorous academic conversation,” she writes, “around the role of affects and the body in practices and ethics of literary translation has yet to emerge” (p. 12). She asks us to turn to this oasis and recognize that thinking of translation “as a mechanism of intercultural or informational exchange” (p. 13) is hardly adequate for us, not just as critics or scholars, but as readers.

In many ways, Stanton's approach to the aesthetic builds upon Spivak's affirmative sabotage of the concept in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). Spivak, like Schiller whom she seeks to sabotage, is working precisely from the premise that the overwhelming effects of aesthetic experience can (and should) transform how the subject constructs themself as an object of knowledge in the world—a premise that Stanton evidently shares. Like Spivak, Stanton treats the literary as the domain of the singular and unverifiable without dismissing the geopolitical specificity of the work's reception and circulation. Her readings of how various modes of rhetorical technique operate across several works of Arabic literature masterfully illuminate how the experience of Arabic literature can work to retrain the Anglophone reader's imagination, leading to new ways of understanding the self within the world.

What Stanton does not take up, however, is the difficult question of how exactly aesthetic experience works upon the reader. Drawing on the work of Brian Massumi and Pierre Bourdieu, Stanton claims that the ethical potential of reading lies in the corporeal knowledge that occurs prior to the reader's decoding of that experience into conscious response. In her fourth chapter, which considers the experience of reading Iraqi fiction written during the years of the American invasion, Stanton writes that “for Iraqi pain to come to matter affectively for the American readers of [Sinan] Antoon's novel [The Corpse Washer] would not entail their necessarily responding to it consciously in any particular way” (p. 116). Yet even if Stanton is right, she does not consider the conditions in which particular experiences of texts become possible. This is the problem of aesthetic education; it cannot be merely a question of attending to the text's rhetorical richness or literary craft, as Stanton's argument for close reading supplemented by affect theory implies. The cost of Stanton's bypassing the question of education is that the worldliness of the Arabic text in English translation—its embeddedness in relations between all kinds of readers, writers, teachers, and others—is kept in view only up until the moment of “close reading,” at which point the texts suddenly appear on stage as autonomous instruments that produce certain effects upon the reader's body. Writing on Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer, she offers this account: “The monster has been let loose into the literary system because the writer could not write otherwise; representations of pain concatenate to produce an unbearable reading experience that is borne nonetheless upon a reader's body” (p. 138).

But we might ask: “unbearable” for whom, in what context, and when? That the reading of The Corpse Washer might become unbearable is possible, but it cannot be the result of the text's affective mechanisms alone, acting upon the body of the reader. It will have been the result of a whole complex of past and present events that have worked on the reader to arrange their desires such that they are, in the moment of reading, passible to the “unbearable” experience the text wishes to induce. One can train the imagination with an eye to this goal, but it cannot reliably be achieved through any planned course of action. It is as if the uneven and troubling journey of reading in space and time disappears from Stanton's analysis at precisely the moment where reading itself is most valorized.

Nevertheless, this is a book that opens up immensely important new directions, not just in Arabic literary studies, but in literary studies in all languages. By insisting upon the somatic effects of language, the book might renew scholars’ interest not just in the effects of language but in the process through which readers become passible to the text, such that there comes into being an opportunity for them to construct themself anew as an object of knowledge. Drawing upon psychoanalysis, critical pedagogy, and human geography, The Worlding of Arabic Literature pushes literary studies to explore the ways in which the encounter with world literature is fruitful beyond the production of professional intellectual attitudes. To borrow the phrasing of Avgi Saketopoulou in Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2022), the encounter with world literature might be most fruitful in those contexts in which its reading demands a “shattering of self” and new “translations of identity” to emerge. Perhaps it is this shattering of self, and not linguistic or cultural breadth of reference, that constitutes the “worldliness” of world literature. Rather than simply theorize how a certain work operates at the level of rhetoric, content, and form, literary studies in the wake of this book might also take up the conditions and practices, both within and outside the classroom, that might allow for such experiences in the encounter with world literature.