Academic literature on the topic 'Contemporary Arabic novel'

Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi’s book offers a fresh contribution not only tostudies in Arabic literature but also to postcolonial critique, cultural criticism,comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies. Its interest lies inthe fact that it introduces a relatively less explored territory in postcolonialthought and cultural criticism: namely, Arabic literature. Theattention of many western and non-western scholars in the field has long been directed toward Anglophone literature from South Asia, Japan,Africa, and Canada, and then to Francophone literature from North Africaand the Antilles.In the context of the Arab world, the author also situates the importanceof his study in how The Thousand and One Nights, a work whosefate and reception he sees as emblematic of the fate of fiction writing inthe Arab world, was received. Just like the novel genre in general, thiswork only received scholarly interest rather recently, after centuries ofneglect and disdain by conservatist Arab scholars and elite culture.Central to postcolonial critique, whose sources and precedents can betraced to the practices and discourses of those writers associated with variousintellectual traditions (e.g., poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,feminism, cultural studies) and which has affinities with the literary movementknown as postmodernism, is the experience of colonization as amoment of cultural self-consciousness and self-dividedness. This momentgenerates contradictory and ambivalent identity patterns and subject positionsresulting from the encounter with the Other (culture), and emphasizesthe constructedness of identity. Al-Musawi transposes these key postcolonialmotifs and insights to the realm of Arabic literature in order to revealimportant dimensions of the contemporary Arabic novel.Scholarly research on Arabic literature (both within and outside theArab world) often privileged poetry as an object of study, given its historicallyprominent place in elite culture and the Arab world’s literary canon.The subject choice of the book is of particular interest, because it targetsthe Arabic novel as an emerging literary genre, and, by the same token,because of its use of postcolonial analytical concepts to account for thisrelatively new literary genre’s place in contemporary Arab culture andsociety ...

This paper deals with the problem of alienation in Saud Alsanousi’s (Saud al-San‘ūsī, 1981) novel The Bamboo Stalk (Sāq al-bāmbū, 2012), which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (often referred to as the Arabic Booker) in 2013. With first-person narration, the novel tells a story about a half-Filipino, half-Kuwaiti teen who is struggling with his hybrid iden- tity. Set partly in the postcolonial Philippines, partly in oil-rich Kuwait, this novel depicts the main character’s quest for a place where he belongs. The Bamboo Stalk is a heartbreaking story about alienation, non-belonging, non-acceptance, identity, and „otherness”. Alsanousi portrays life in the multicultural society of Kuwait while shedding light on conservatism, dis- crimination, racism, and lack of human rights. Due to the high influx of foreign workers, huge socio-economic differences between people, and rigid social norms, Kuwait is the place where people often feel alienated, frustrated, and unable to fit in. The theme of alienated modern man has been common in contemporary Arabic fiction, and central to a vast number of literary studies. It is also one of the themes of the Kuwaiti literature, which is still very young. The Kuwaiti novel has not received the attention it deserves from Arabic literature scholars yet. We believe that The Bamboo Stalk is worth the attention because it contributes to the development of Kuwaiti novels both thematically and formally while exploring problems of different social groups in contemporary Kuwait.

AbstractThis article brings area studies approaches to Arabic novels into dialogue with world literature through a critical engagement with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize launches Arabic novels out of national fields and into a world marketplace whose reading practices have been shaped by the Anglophone postcolonial novel, canonized by the IPAF's mentor: the Booker Prize Foundation. Against this institutional backdrop, the article develops a scale-based method to revisit the intersection of postcolonial tropes and national epistemologies in two winning IPAF novels: Bahaʾ Taher'sWahat al-Ghurub(Sunset Oasis, 2007) and Saud Alsanousi'sSaq al-Bambu(The Bamboo Stalk, 2013). By interrogating the literary and political work performed by comparative scale in these novels, the article argues that dominant applications of theoretical methods inherited from postcolonial studies fail to supply trenchant forms of critique for Arabic novels entering world literature. Bridging the methods and perspectives of area studies with those of comparative literature, this article develops new reading practices that are inflected through contemporary institutional settings for literature's circulation, translation, and canonization.

Climate change has been attracting increasing attention as one of the most significant consequences of the anthropogenic global warming and fictional narratives have increasingly been involved in engaging human imagination on the topic of climate change. Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is the umbrella term that designates fiction with climate change as its main theme. Climate fiction has been primarily published in English so far and narratives specifically problematising anthropogenic climate change are still quite rare in the Arabic literary landscape. In this regard, the novel 2022 by the Lebanese author Ghassān Shibārū constitutes an interesting case, given that it is authored in Arabic but displays several of the characteristics typical of the cli-fi genre. This paper aims at providing an analysis of Shibārū’s novel 2022 as representative of Arabic climate fiction. The main features of the climate fiction genre and its relationship to the scholarship of ecocriticism are first outlined. An overview of the environment as a theme in Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies then follows. The paper subsequently presents the concept of ecological literacy, which constitutes the theoretical framework for the analysis of the characters in the novel. After a synopsis of the plot, the characters are analysed and discussed and the novel itself is examined as instance of climate fiction as intended by the Anglophone definition of the genre. The authors argue that the purpose of the novel is didactic, since, rather than narrating a fictional story, the novels exploits a fictional story in order to spread awareness of global warming and climate change. Keywords: Contemporary Arabic literature • Climate change • Climate fiction • Ecocriticism • Ecological literacy

This paper analyses the narrative representations of religious agents in the contemporary Arabic novel. Contextualizing the domain of the religious in its fragile ideological age, or within the dominant secular matrix, the paper locates the established religious topoi in the contemporary novel as an effective cultural narrative. Within the framework of literary criticism and theoretical models, the paper offers the interpretation of the genesis of fixation, otherness and stereotypes in the images of religious characters. Central analysis is devoted to the novels of Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz, which are considered the best representatives of literary narratives in the period between the 1930s and 1990s. The paper discusses the monolithic representation of the religious, deconstructs secular stereotypes, and analyses the phenomenon of parallax and its social and cultural consequences within the aforementioned novelistic narratives.

Cette thèse analyse la littérature arabe de l’exil et de la migration produite au tournant de la « crise des réfugiés » de 2015, à travers un corpus de six romans dont les auteurs diffèrent par leurs sexe, âge, origine, notoriété et statut migratoire. L’étude vise à décrire l’émergence d’une nouvelle esthétique migrante construite autour de l’expérience polyvalente et multiforme du refuge, en identifiant les différents éléments de continuité et de discontinuité qui relient la fiction contemporaine au canon littéraire du passé. Focalisée sur des romans qui puisent dans la littérature de harraga (Taytānīkāt afrīqiyya d'Abū Bakr Ḥāmid Kahhāl et Anāšīd al-milḥ d'al-'Arabī Ramaḍānī), la première partie met en évidence les liens entre les textes qui relatent l'expérience de la migration clandestine et ceux qui se concentrent sur l'exode des demandeurs d'asile, en faisant ressortir le même type de discours critique à l'égard de la forteresse Europe et des hiérarchies établies par le système humanitaire. Concentrée sur les concepts de vulnérabilité, traumatisme et résilience, la deuxième partie est consacrée aux réalités du transit et de l'immobilité. Elle analyse les espaces d'exception incarnés par les camps de réfugiés palestiniens (Muḫmal de Ḥuzāma Ḥabāyib) et par la Syrie prérévolutionnaire, caractérisée par une double réalité d'accueil et répression (Ḥurrās al-hawāʼ de Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan). La troisième partie se concentre sur l'expérience de l'asile en Europe (Barīd al-layl de Hudā Barakāt et 'Āzif al-ġuyūm de 'Alī Badr), nous permettant d'explorer des représentations anti-hégémoniques des notions d'hospitalité, d'identité, d'appartenance et de citoyenneté
This thesis analyses the Arabic literature of exile and migration produced at the turn of the 2015 "refugee crisis", through a corpus of six novels whose authors differ in gender, age, origin, notoriety and migratory status. The study aims to describe the emergence of a new migrant aesthetic built around the polyvalent and multifaceted experience of "refuge", identifying the different elements of continuity and discontinuity that link contemporary fiction to the canon of the past. Focusing on two novels that draw on the tradition of harraga literature (Abū Bakr Ḥāmid Kahhāl's Taytānīkāt afrīqiyya and al-Arabī Ramaḍānī's Anāshīd al-milḥ), the first part of this work sheds light on the links between texts that recount the experience of clandestine migration and those that focus on the exodus of asylum seekers, bringing out from them the same kind of critical discourse towards Fortress Europe and the hierarchies established by the humanitarian system. Linking the concepts of vulnerability, trauma and resilience, the second part is devoted to the realities of transit and immobility, and analyses the spaces of exception embodied by Palestinian refugee camps (Ḥuzāma Ḥabāyib's Muḫmal) and pre-revolutionary Syria, characterised by a dual reality of regional shelter and repression (Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan's Ḥurrās al-hawāʼ). The third part sheds light on the experience of asylum in Europe (Hudā Barakāt's Barīd al-layl and Alī Badr's Āzif al-ġuyūm), allowing the reader to explore the anti-hegemonic representations of notions such as hospitality, identity, belonging and citizenship

Questo studio esamina le strategie, i personaggi e i temi dell’umorismo in alcuni romanzi comici egiziani pubblicati a partire dagli anni Ottanta. Proverbiale qualità degli egiziani, la comicità è una valvola di sfogo nella vita quotidiana e una forma espressiva in diverse produzioni culturali. Finora questo fenomeno è stato parzialmente analizzato dalla critica letteraria, che si è concentrata sulla letteratura pre-moderna, aneddoti letterari-folklorici, teatro popolare e stampa satirica. In ambito moderno, la prosa satirica (adab sākhir) è relegata ai margini del canone, mentre la comicità viene riconosciuta, tutt’al più, come tratto stilistico in singoli autori. Alla luce della rivalutazione dei pionieri della prosa satirica moderna e di recenti pubblicazioni dallo stile comico, questa ricerca indaga i rapporti tra comicità, satira e letteratura nel romanzo egiziano contemporaneo. In particolare, individua un sottogenere di romanzi che combinano lo stile comico con qualità estetiche riconducibili alle coeve tendenze letterarie. Gli autori così identificati vanno ad affiancare i maestri della satira e dell’ironia riconosciuti dalla critica: da un lato, i pionieri a cavallo tra Ottocento e Novecento; dall’altro, alcuni scrittori attivi a partire dagli anni Settanta. A questo scopo, vengono esaminate le strategie comiche in quattro romanzi di Muḥammad Mustajāb (1938-2005), Khayrī Shalabī (1938-2011) e Ḥamdī Abū Julayyil (1968). Questi autori, che contribuiscono al rinnovamento delle forme narrative, hanno recentemente incrementato il loro riconoscimento critico, ma sono ancora poco studiati. Le opere selezionate, che sviluppano l’umorismo a livello tematico, stilistico e meta-narrativo, sono accumunate dall’attenzione per personaggi eccentrici in comunità marginali e offrono una rappresentazione critica della società contemporanea. Avvalendosi dell’apporto teorico degli humour studies e della narratologia, l’analisi testuale di questi romanzi indaga le strategie narrative, la costruzione dei personaggi comici, l’intertestualità e il linguaggio. Inoltre, esamina le affinità tematiche e stilistiche, nonché le funzioni della comicità all’interno di questo filone narrativo. L’attenzione è posta sulla rielaborazione di modelli compositivi tradizionali (turāth) e dell’umorismo popolare all’interno dei romanzi. Il primo capitolo passa in rassegna le principali teorie del comico applicate all’analisi letteraria e alcuni recenti studi sull’umorismo nella letteratura araba. Il secondo capitolo motiva la selezione del corpus, nel contesto del romanzo e della satira egiziana, e illustra le modalità di analisi. I capitoli dal terzo al sesto sono dedicati ciascuno allo studio di un romanzo: Min al-tārīkh al-sirrī li-Nuʿmān ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ (1982) di Mustajāb, Riḥlāt al-ṭurshajī al-ḥalwajī (1981/83) e Ṣāliḥ Hēṣa (2000) di Shalabī, e al-Fāʿil (2008) di Abū Julayyil. L’ultimo capitolo confronta le strategie comiche e le peculiarità stilistico-tematiche. Da questa analisi emergono alcune strategie comuni, come la struttura aneddotica, l’attualizzazione di personaggi comici proverbiali e l’accostamento di registri, compreso il dialetto egiziano e il linguaggio gergale. A livello stilistico, ricorrono l’immagine del doppio, ripetizioni e descrizioni fisiche grottesche. A livello tematico, gli autori si concentrano sulla relazione fra città e campagna, l’ingiustizia sociale e la rilettura ironica della storiografia ufficiale. La molteplicità di forme e personaggi in questo filone comico si inserisce nel rinnovamento del romanzo egiziano, rappresentando in modo giocoso o tragicomico il rapporto fra singolo e collettività.
Our study looks at characters, themes, and strategies in some Egyptian humorous novels published since the 1980s. Known for their proverbial sense of humour, Egyptians resort to comedy as a safety valve in everyday life and as a creative tool in many cultural productions. So far, the study of literary humour has focused on pre-modern literature, literary and folkloric anecdotes, popular drama, and satirical press. Modern satirical writing (adab sākhir) is placed at the margins of the canon, whereas humour is analysed as one of the stylistic features of some novelists. Having considered the re-evaluation of the pioneers of early-modern satire and the recent publication of humorous writings, our study examines the interplay of humour, satire, and literature in contemporary Egyptian novels with a comparative approach. In particular, it identifies a sub-genre which combines sense of humour and aesthetic qualities, which are intertwined with the contemporary literary trends. The novelists of our corpus, thus, join other masters of humour and irony already recognized by criticism: the pioneers of the late 1800s-early 1900s on the one hand, and some writers of the Generation of the Sixties on the other. To identify this sub-genre, we illustrate the humour-generating strategies in four novels by Muḥammad Mustajāb (1938-2005), Khayrī Shalabī (1938-2011), and Ḥamdī Abū Julayyil (1968). These writers have recently increased their critical recognition, but are still understudied. The novels of our corpus employ humour on a thematic, stylistic, and meta-narrative level. They depict eccentric characters in marginal communities and portray contemporary society with satirical criticism. Having adopted humour studies and narratology as a theoretical background, our textual analysis looks at the narrative strategies, the construction of characters, intertextuality, and literary language. In addition, it outlines the thematic and stylistic similarities, as well as the functions of humour in this literary trend. Our analysis focuses on the appropriation of the Arab cultural heritage (turāth) and of popular humour in these comic writings. The first chapter overviews the main humour theories applied to literary criticism and recent scholarship on humour in Arabic literature. The second chapter illustrates the selection criteria for our corpus, within the context of modern Egyptian fiction and satire, and our analytical framework. Each of the chapters 3-6 is devoted to a case study: Min al-tārīkh al-sirrī li-Nuʿmān ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ (1982) by Mustajāb, Riḥlāt al-ṭurshajī al-ḥalwajī (1981/83) and Ṣāliḥ Hēṣa (2000) by Shalabī, and al-Fāʿil (2008) by Abū Julayyil. Finally, chapter 7 compares the humour-generating strategies and the thematic and stylistic peculiarities of these novels. We have identified some common strategies, such as the anecdotic structure, the use of stock characters in a contemporary context, and the juxtaposition of different registers, including Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and jargon. Recurrent stylistic features are the image of the double, repetitions, and grotesque physical descriptions. On a thematic level, these novels focus on the rural-urban relation, social injustice, and a re-reading of official historiography. With its variety of forms and characters, this humorous sub-genre fits into the innovation of contemporary Egyptian fiction, by portraying the relation between the self and the community in a playful or tragicomic way.

L’écrivain égyptien Yūsuf Zaydān s’inscrit dans la tradition - constituée à l’âge de la Nahḍa – de l’intellectuel “éducateur des consciences”. Depuis cette époque, face à un récit national contrôlé par le pouvoir politique ou religieux, la littérature arabe a souvent revisité l’histoire et l’actualité dans le but de rétablir - grâce à la liberté offerte par le discours fictionnel - la vérité occultée par le récit officiel. Dans ce processus de réécriture, Zaydān s’intéresse particulièrement à la relation entre religion, politique et violence. L’objectif de cette étude est d’explorer l’oeuvre littéraire de cet auteur, dans le but d’en dégager l’originalité. Celle-ci apparaît, d’une part, dans la capacité de Zaydān à mettre en valeur son double profil d’universitaire et de romancier, à travers une production très variée allant du roman à l’essai; d’autre part, dans les stratégies spécifiques qu’il emploie afin de s’adresser à son destinataire privilégié: le lecteur égyptien. Auteur controversé autant pour son oeuvre que pour sa personnalité, Zaydān n’en demeure pas moins un phénomène littéraire : illustration à la fois de l’éclatement du champ littéraire et d’une démocratisation exacerbée de la culture en Egypte, son cas permet de mieux comprendre la littérature arabe ultra contemporaine et ce qu’elle exprime sur les sociétés en recomposition - politique, économique et culturelle - desquelles elle émane
The Egyptian writer Yūsuf Zaydān is part of the tradition – dating from the age of the Nahḍa – of intellectuals as "educators of consciousness". Since then, faced with a national narrative controlled by political or religious power, Arab literature has often revisited history and current affairs with the aim of restoring – through the freedom offered by fictional discourse – the truth overshadowed by official history. Through this rewriting process, Zaydān is particularly interested in discussing the relationship between religion, politics and violence. The objective of this thesis is to explore Zaydān’s literary work in order to identify its originality. This originality is manifested, first, through Zaydān's dual profile as both academic and novelist, engaged in varied production that ranges from novels to essays; second, in the specific strategies he employs in order to address his privileged audience: the Egyptian reader. A controversial author in both his work and his personality, Zaydān is above all a literary phenomenon. An example of the blossoming literary field and the exacerbated cultural democratisation in Egypt, his case allows us to better understand ultra-modern Arab literature and what it expresses about the (politically, economically, culturally) recomposed and changing society that have produced it

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many novelists in the Arab world championed Arab nationalism in their literary reflections on the social and political struggles of their countries, depicting these struggles primarily in terms of spatial binaries that pitted the Arab world against the West, even as they imported Western literary models of progress and modernity into their own work. The intense experience of national awakening that infused their writing often placed these authors at a literary disadvantage, for in their literature, all too often the depth and diversity of Arabic cultures and the complexity of socio-political struggles across the Arab world were undermined by restrictive spatial discourses that tended to focus only on particular versions of Arab history and on a seemingly unifying national predicament. Between the Arab defeat of 1967 and the present day, however, an increasing number of Arab authors have turned to less restrictive forms of spatial discourse in search of a language that might offer alternative narratives of hope beyond the predictable, and seemingly thwarted, trajectories of nationalism. This study traces the ways in which contemporary Arab authors from Egypt and the Sudan have endeavoured to re-think and re-define the Arab identity in ever-changing spaces where elements of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, interact both competitively and harmoniously. I examine the spatial language and the tropes used in three Arabic novels, viewing them through the lens of thawra (revolution) in both its socio-political and artistic manifestations. Linking the manifestations of thawra in each text to different scenes of revolution in the Arab world today, in Chapter Two, I consider how, at a stage when the Sudan of the sixties was both still dealing with colonial withdrawal and struggling to establish itself as a nation-state, the geographical and textual landscapes of Tayeb Salih‟s Season of Migration to the North depict the ongoing dilemma of the Sudanese identity. In Chapter Three, I examine Alaa iii al-Aswany‟s The Yacoubian Building in the context of a socially diseased and politically corrupt Egypt of the nineties: social, political, modern, historical, local, and global elements intertwine in a dizzyingly complex spatial network of associations that sheds light on the complicated reasons behind today‟s Egyptian thawra. In Chapter Four, the final chapter, Gamal al-Ghitani‟s approach to his Egypt in Pyramid Texts drifts far away from Salih‟s anguished Sudan and al-Aswany‟s chaotic Cairo to a realm where thawra manifests itself artistically in a sophisticated spatial language that challenges all forms of spatial hegemony and, consequently, old and new forms of social, political, and cultural oppression in the Arab world.
Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 13:18:25.303

AbstractThe problem of the representation of the mother’s voice and the maternal perspective in literary fiction has been a concern of contemporary scholarship in women’s writing for several decades. This chapter explores the literary representation of the voice and the perspective of a seemingly voiceless migrant mother who is silent in the language of the host country through the novel Happiness Has a Slippery Tail (1998) (Le bonheur a la queue glissante) by the Canadian Quebecois author of Lebanese origin, Abla Farhoud. This chapter demonstrates that in terms of literary representation of the mother’s voice, matrifocal migrant women’s writing relies on the orality of the mother’s voice to articulate the experience of mothering across the language barrier. It argues that the novel tells the story of a marginalised migrant mother in two voices: the aural voice of a marginalised mother who is voiceless in French and in writing (she is illiterate) and that of a French-educated writer daughter who understands the quality of the mother’s voice in Arabic. In this way the voice of the silent mother can be heard by the Western readership, and her perspective inscribed in the Western literary tradition.

The chapter deals with the process of reception of Western authors in Arabic literature as a process of indirect interference—that is, their writings were not accessed directly by agents of Arabic literature but by intermediaries, especially by translators. The case of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe is highly instructive in this respect, as its translation into Arabic in the nineteenth century was one of the factors that helped to shape the norms of the emerging Arabic novel. It was then that such European literary models as the novel and the short story were “imported” into Arabic literature, although one can hardly agree that it was only import that brought about the rise of Arabic fiction. There is surprisingly limited research on the contemporary Arab literary scene as to Western borrowings or interference. “Stream of consciousness” is a salient example—it is clearly present in Arabic literature by the 1960s, but no one has so far followed its trajectory from West to East. In this chapter, I discuss the reception of Virginia Woolf in Arabic literature, which later opened the way for Arab authors to write original fiction in her spirit.