Apocalyptic Aftershocks in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s Al-zilzāl

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
National Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Narrative Time

Chapter 3 explores the use of Qurʾanic imagery and intertextuality in al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār’s (1936–2010) apocalyptic 1974 novel al-Zilzāl [the Earthquake]. The novel follows the misanthropic Shaykh ʿAbd al-Majīd Bū al-Arwāḥ as his capitalist aspirations are thwarted by Algerian socialist reforms and increasingly prescient images of the earthquake of the Day of Resurrection. Its satirical portrayal of Bū al-Arwāḥ calls attention to the complicity of the religious elite with French colonialism. By reworking the symbols and mythology of Islamic eschatology, al-Zilzāl challenges hegemonic discourses of Arabism and Islamism in Algerian nationalist discourse. The chapter reads the novel against the grain of Waṭṭār’s own false binary of Arabic (national) and Francophone (non-national) literature. It does so by examining the work’s generic hybridity, conscious manipulation of narrative time and space, as well as its incorporation of the Qurʾan alongside various registers of the Arabic language.

Dream Time, Modality, and Counterfactual Imagination in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Misztal
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Narrative Time

This paper elucidates the structure and scope of Pynchon’s temporal imagination by studying the complex relations between narrative time and modality in his 1997 novel Mason & Dixon using the conceptual framework of contemporary narratology. It argues that Pynchon’s use of the subjunctive mode allows him not only to articulate the political and ideological concerns in his vision of America on the eve of its founding but also to address the problems of historicity, causality and irreversibility of time. By employing the subjunctive as a general narrative strategy, Mason & Dixon challenges the various temporal regimes and discourses of modernity, and projects imaginative re-figurations of time and space. In carrying this out, the novel moves beyond what Pynchon calls “the network of ordinary latitude and longitude” (Against the Day 250) and replaces a totalizing singularity with plurality of times and timescapes

scholarly journals An immersive Arabic language course in Cairo moves online

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Heba Salem
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Community Based ◽  
American University ◽  
University Environment ◽  
The Us ◽  
Community Based Learning ◽  
Online Format ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
The University

This chapter describes the my experience as the instructor for a course rooted in community based learning theory that was forced to move online in spring, 2020, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The course, titled ‘CASA Without Borders’, allows Arabic language students in the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) program at The American University in Cairo (AUC) to leave the university environment and serve the community, while also benefiting from the experience both linguistically and culturally. This course was disrupted by the students’ mandatory return to the US from Cairo as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, and continued remotely in an online format. This chapter describes the CASA program and explains both the purpose of the CASA Without Borders course and its significance to CASA students and to the program. It also describes and reflects upon my experience of continuing the course remotely during the ongoing pandemic.

The Debt Chronotope

differences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Frederik Tygstrup
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Financial Capitalism

When literature engages in portraying the contemporary rule of finance and its impact on our lives, it also entails a transformation of the forms through which literature represents our lives. Over the last decades, as debt has become an ever more important motive in contemporary literature, we have thus also seen the contours of a new debt chronotope: a particular organization of narrative time and space that can gauge and expound on the working of debt-driven financial capitalism. This essay’s argument hinges partly on an analysis of the spatiotemporal logic of contemporary financial capitalism and partly on the historical transformation of representations of debt from nineteenth-century realism to European literature of the present.

Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
David Fieni
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Semitic Languages ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Novelistic Form

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

Chronotopes as a Component of Ideological Narrative in Political Advertisements

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Hasan Turgut
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Campaign ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Political Advertisements ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Justice And Development Party ◽  
Ideological Stance

The JDP (Justice and Development Party-AK Party) enters the local elections to be held on March 31, 2019, with the slogan of “Gönül Belediyeciliği”. In this process, the political campaign process is carried out in accordance with the conservative ideological stance of the party around various slogans such as “Memleket İşi Gönül İşi,” “Gönülden Yaparsan Gönüller Kazanırsın,” and “Gönlü Güzel İnsanların Ülkesidir Burası.” M. Bakhtin describes how the narrative is structured in time and space in the novel with the concept of chronotope. In a narrative, chronotope is the place where the plot is touched and solved as a combination of time and space. This study aims to explore the role of chronotopes in the formation of ideological narrative structures. Within this framework, chronotopic elements in “Gönül Belediyeciliği” commercials will be analyzed.

The idea of sobornost and its artistic realization in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” by M.A. Sholokhov

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Наталья Стюфляева ◽  
Natal'ya Styuflyaeva
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
National Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Spiritual Tradition ◽  
Literature History

The monograph studies one of the magnum opuses of the XXth century within the context of the national spiritual tradition. It states the problem of sobornost as an author's ideal in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. This idea defines the analysis of the agon, narrative structure, distinction of style, motive organization, Don landscape symbols. Referring to a complex religio-cultural, literary and philosophical context of “And Quiet Flows the Don” contributes to holistic understanding of the novel, writer’s historical concept, his attitude and aesthetics. The book is written for students-philologists, university professors, as well as all who are interested in the problems of national literature, history and culture.

scholarly journals Breaking the Circle

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-113
Author(s):  
Bozhou Men
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Sociohistorical Context

Abstract First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.

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