The Experimental Arabic Novel – Stefan Meyer

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Citation

 

Meyer, Stefan G., 1949. The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001.

 

Contents

Intro: Experimental Arabic Novel and Comparitive Modernisms

Chapter 1: Modern Ambivalence and the Beginning of Narrative Experimentation

-existentialism and the fragmentation of narrative voice

-the defamiliarization of narrative

-The strategy of ironic distance

Chapter 2: Recovering the Past: The “Arabization” of the Novel

-cultural and historical counternarrative: Abdelrahman Munif

-Magical realism: Selim Barakat

-Folk Narrative and subjective expression

Chapter 3:

Recovering the Presents: the Lebanese Civil War

-fragmented reportage: Ghada Samman

-the patchwork novel: Elias Khoury

-The dynamics of war and sexuality

-The novel of interior situations.

Chapter 4: Redefining the Future: Questions of Artistic Choice.

 

Author

Context

Thesis

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

 

Answers many many questions about the perceived lack of certain stylistic innovations in Arabic fiction, the continued dominance of realism, and the tricky question of postmodernism.

 

Notes

 

Introduction:

-writers in the Arab world were never bohemians, alienation was due to search for harmony in society with weakness and failed institutions.

-where privilege of ironic distance, hindrance to more complex forms of novel.

-experimental arabic novel self-conscious revolt againt Arabic narrative tradition and its ambivalence to modernity.

-Arabic novels have focused more on social conditions experienced within a particular class — whether bourgeois, peasant, or urban — and the relationship among members of a particular class.

Chapter 1:

-Kanafani – all that’s left to you, Jabra’s the ship, Mahfouz’s miramar (heavily influenced by Faulker)

-Najma Agostos really weird and unsettling.

-the strategy of ironic distance: Zayni Barakat, the pessoptimist, also Arab history and folk tradition as vehicle for irony.

Chapter 2:

 

-Abdulrahman Munif: cultural and historical counternarrative. Looking for innovative narrative style not imitative of the West. (Nihayet) challenging both Saudi and western colonial view of history.

-Selim Barakat and Magical Realism: the closest of any Arab author to Latin American magical realism. Uses words in weird counter-semantic ways, reminiscent of the maqama where the major purpose was the compositional process to play with the meaning of words.

-Despite being Kurd, he is perhaps the master prose stylist in Arabic today. Producing distintly Arabic work.

Al-jundub al-hadidi – formal linguistic experimentation

Fuqaha’ al-zalam – pure form of magical realism. Highly political but subordinates that to creating a new type of cultural panorama.

Folk narrative and subjective expression – Syria has been the most resistant to experimentation, realism lingers: Hannah Mina, Faris Zarzur, and Hani Rahib.

-the literary legacy of socialist realism has created its own momentum.

-Syrian historical novels of the 90s: Nabil Sulayman, Fawwaz Hahhad, Khayri al-Dhahabi, and Nihad Sirris. Way to talk obliquely about social problems.

Chapter 3:

radical fragmentation of form in attempt to express complete dislocation caused by Lebanese Civil war.

-Elias Khoury and Ghadda Samman

-Hoda Barakat – stone of laughter challenge male ethic of violence and expose ambiguities and contraditions on the other. Feminine and masculine features in one character. Atomizes the masculine war culture.

-Rashid al-Da’if exposed space between drowsiness and sleep (1986)  -dream and physical reality mixed. Hallucinatory, fragmentation and interiorization lays bare psychological aspects of war.

Chapter 4:

-Ibrahim Nasrallah – prairies of fever (1985) – uses symbolist poetry techniques for narrative. Lyricism of al-jundub al-hadidi with interiorized quality of gates of the city.

-Rashid al-da’if – tiqniyat al-bus (1989) – entire novel of short guy based on minute recording of reality.

-Edward Kharrat (1990) women of Alexandria – experiment with lyrical form reminiscent of proust thirties and fourties, women of every type in the city. Exhuberant sense of unite underlying life.

Hasan Daoud – ayyam zaidah – dialect between internal and external.

Dhat – mimicking postmodernity – with rise of consumerist society – criticizing dependence on foreign goods and not being productive which leads to traditionalism. Stille enthralled to subserviene.

Conclusion:

-Edward Said wrote shitty intro to Khoury novel, calling it postmodern, which is lazy labeling unaware of local trends.

-like in Latin America, postmodern rise had to do with demobilization of the left.

Modernism in Arabic literature began from a radicalized political viewpoint and a conservative approach to experimentation with language. Modernism in the West, on the other hand, presented radical experimentation with language, and a conservative political agenda.

-Modernism in Arab world is awareness of not living in a modern era.

-Faysal Darraj – postmodernism just another attempt to import a grand recit, and to import cultural imperialism.

-experimentalism in Arabic cannot be labeled postmodernism but has to be seen in its own context.

Conscience of a Nation – Richard Jacquemond

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Citation

 

Contents

 

Author

 

Richard Jacquemond is associate professor of modern Arabic language and literature at the University of Provence and a researcher at IREMAM (Aix-en-Provence). A specialist in modern Egyptian literature, he has also translated numerous novels and short story collections as well as works by political thinkers into French.

 

Context

 

this unique study explores the dual loyalties of contemporary Egyptian authors from the 1952 Revolution to the present day. Egypt’s writers have long had an elevated idea of their social mission, considering themselves ‘the conscience of the nation.’ At the same time, modern Egyptian writers work under the liberal conception of the writer borrowed from the European model. As a result, each Egyptian writer treads the tightrope between authority and freedom, social commitment and artistic license, loyalty to the state and to personal expression, in an ongoing quest for an elusive literary ideal.

 

Thesis

 

Conscience of the Nation examines Egyptian literary production over the past fifty years, surveying works by established writers, as well as those of dozens of other authors who are celebrated in Egypt but whose writings are largely unknown to the foreign reader.

 

Methodology

 

Key Terms

 

Criticisms and Questions

 

Notes

Introduction:

 

– this book aims to describe and analyze the major aspects of the Egyptian literary doxa such as the idea of the writer as the conscience of the nation and of literature as the mayor of society.

– this book takes as its object the literary field as defined by Pierre bourdieu which is the milieu of norms institutions and values surrounding the social space of literature.

– it is in Egypt more than anywhere else in Arab world that a strong and long-standing state, a sizable intellectual class, and then abundant production of written materials can be found in the modern period.

– The Triad of State writer and book begins in 19 century continues to Fashion literary production in ideologies of contemporary Egypt.

– Books May occupy a marginal space but the corresponding intellectual field has played an enormous role.

 

  1. The Army of Letters

 

September 1954 Purge of academics at Cairo University including al-Amin, Louis Awad, Muhammad Mandu r

-Hire counsel for arts and letters established 1956 Ministry of culture established 1958.

-Yusuf al-Siba’i  head of Nadderite system of controlling and mobilizing writers.

1967-73  years of uncertainty

1973-81  slim pickings

1981-1991  reconstruction

1969 the beginning of the Egyptian writers Union.

 

2) Censorship and Censors

 

– Marxist leading political movements in the 1940s warband what had formed literary groups and reviews to enable intellectuals to present the literary philosophical and artistic aspects of their ideologies and to express their clandestine struggles in public. “School of the party” especially prisons and internment camps (like sonallah Ibrahim’s experience)

 

-people of the high dam propaganda sonallah wrote with kamal al-qilish and ra’uf mus’ad, reportage

-The closer that authors are to the centers of power the more that they are able to avoid censorship ie Mafhouz and children of the alley

– the Arabic language Academy was founded in 1932 and restricted itself to linguistic questions at the beginning of the 1950s.

– during the Socialist realism. Of the 1960s to hire counsel for the protection of arts and letters refused to recognize free verse and led a rearguard struggle against the use of spoken language in prose fiction.

-Yusuf Idris  committed acts of transgression in his short stories and created a language that was written in a grammatically correct fashion but could be read as though it were vernacular disguised as pure Arabic.

-In the 1960s political restrictions on literary expression gave rise to a whole literature of dissimulation symbol and allegory of which Children of the alley is perhaps the first example.

 

3- the literature market

 

The state is first and foremost publisher under the general Egyptian Book organization established in the 1960s.

 

– the writers of the generation of the 1960s are given to evoking with Nostalgia the magazine al-magalla  edited until 1970 by yahia hakki.

 

– the tradition of self-publishing among the Egyptian avant-gardes well-established throughout the first half of the 20th century fell off considerably under the Nazi regime because of the restrictions imposed on periodical publication and more generally over the control exercised by the state over the whole of book production.

-Everything conspires to make the press the end point of in the essential means toward struggling for symbolic domination in the literary field.

– being a columnist for al-ahram  was the mark of veritable lifetime annuity.

– in the 1960s all the Egyptian daily papers had a weekly literary page or supplements or unpublished writing occupied a large place. each paper had its own policies the result of the paper’s editorial line and the personality of the literary editor.

-Para literature of occasional verse and the work of short story writers and cerealized fiction was an integral part of most Egyptian magazines from the 1920s to the 1960s.

 

4) Conscience of a Nation

 

– the two postulates of realism and commitment constitute the Egyptian literary doxa.

– while the political Corruption of realism rehabilitated critical realism it damage the realist model itself 1967 was a moment unique in the history of modern Arabic literature when an abundance of non-realistic Works were published.

-The tension between commitment and realism freedom and Collective causes.

-Jean Bessiere “the deflation of mimesis”

-The Narrative conventions of mimetic realism of which the Cairo Trilogy is the classic example did not break with the idea that legitimate literature is that which retains an important connection to reality as well as to the Social and Collective spheres.

– reacted to by hyperrealism typified by the smell of it.

– Egyptian version of Latin American magical realism indigenous forms of narrative heritage. Gamal Ghitani, the seven days of man, muhammad Mustagab

-Coptic contributions to Cosmopolitan literature and the extreme left.

– translation of what is literature by Sartre in Cairo in 1961.

– the closer that writers get to the field of power the more these former avant-garde writers tend to take on the authoritative pose of the great realist writers.

 

5) foreign translations

 

– in the 1950s and 1960s the proportion of translations among all published titles was around 12.5% on average. In the time from 1970 to 1985 this fell to 8% period in absolute terms there was a reduction from around 100 translate titles per year to around 50 a year in the Years following.

 

6) literature and identity

 

– an attempt to resurrect indigenous narrative forms like in Children of the alley.

– Yahya Taher Abdullah (1938-81) rebelled, went to USSR, languished in Budapest

-Yusuf Idris 1964 manifesto “nahw masrah misri” Criticize the hybrid development of Egyptian Theater and asked it to become native . Wrote a play called al-farafir, not super indigenous, more brechtian, carried out better by Nagib Surur.

-Return to nativism argued by shukri ayyad.

 

8)

The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 – Samah Selim

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Citation

  • Selim, Samah, and Inc NetLibrary. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. RoutledgeCurzon, New York, 2004.

Contents

  • Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt
  • 1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue
  • 2 Novels and nations
  • 3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral
  • 4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel
  • 5 The Land
  • 6 The exiled son
  • 7 The storyteller

Author

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature.[1] She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.

Selim is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (2004). She won the 2009 Banipal Prize for her translation of Yahya Taher Abdullah‘s The Collar and the Bracelet.

 

Context

Thesis

 

The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed a bifurcated narrative and social geography, are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre.

Methodology

 

Periodizing the role of the village as an object of ideological projection during different periods of 20th century Egyptian history: Nahda standarization, early nationalism, the hayday of socialist realism, and the new sensibility.

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

 

very good book, but focuses on individual authors along with a stulted idea of the structure of feeling, without talking barely at all about the literary community, and the way these ideological projections were collectively formed.

 

 

In 1925, Mahmud Taymur called for the writing of narrative dialogue exclusively in the vernacular, ‘the natural language of the speaker’, but two years later, he renounced this position in favor of a return to a unified ‘literary Arabic’ throughout the text.40 Taymur was eager to gain admittance to the Arabic Language Academy, which did not accept authors who wrote in the colloquial.41 Writers continued to debate this issue throughout the 1920s, but it was eventually the ‘third’ or vernacularized standard Arabic described by Sabry Hafez above that emerged as the dominant language of narrative and particularly, narrative dialogue. Some writers however continued to use colloquial for dialogue – Tawfiq al-Hakim and the great writers of the mid-century social realist school, like Yusuf Idris and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, for example – but these were, for the most part, in the minority, and the significance of their inscription of narrative diglossia will be discussed in later chapters.

Language is a central strategy through which the post-1952 village novel attempts to render the realities of peasant life, whether by directly inscribing ungrammatical vernacular peasant voices or by deploying a variety of rural narrative languages – such as the languages of Sufi tradition or of folk ballad – within the text. Again, this is a political as well as a formal strategy that underlines the necessary relationship between language and representation. The radical re-presentation of the village required an equally radical language that would break with the old forms and literally recreate the village and the peasant in ways that more truly reflected a contemporary historical dynamic. In 1952, The Land accomplished just that. The novel shattered the romantic idiom of the nahdawi novelists, producing a dizzying and unprecedented universe of insurgent peasant voices and drawing the portrait of a revolution in the making. By 1969, however, Sharqawi’s village could no longer adequately represent the complicated experience of a new historical reality, one in which the very meaning of words like nation, tradition, truth and liberation were being scrutinized and interrogated by a new generation of writers and by society at large.”

“The committed realists rejected the autobiographical mode of the Egyptian novel. In their fiction, the dominance of the narrative subject is muted, dismantled or altogether discarded. Some favored a straightforward third-person narration that completely erased all reference to the authorial voice, while foregrounding the voices and languages of the subaltern. Naguib Mahfouz and Fathi Ghanem used multiple narration as a means of de-centering narrative authority. Where a first-person narrator exists in the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s, his voice is framed, interrogated and finally marginalized by the voices of other characters. Ghanem’s 1957 novel The Mountain is a good example of this strategy. The narrator is literally forced to give way to other narrators who proceed to tell their own story in terms which push him into the painful revelation of his own liminality. Echoing al-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice, the model of the narrator in The Mountain is a government inspector who travels to a remote southern village to investigate a criminal complaint against its impoverished inhabitants. In this model, the disciplinary protocols of bureaucratic investigation (tahqiq) act as a metaphor for the conventional process of narration itself. The narrator’s questions and his attempts to reconstruct events lead nowhere. He is only able to solve the mystery when he gives up the reins of his own narrative authority and allows the villagers’ stories to capture his imagination and his empathy. In the end, fragile and disillusioned, but nonetheless drawing a new strength from the encounter, he returns to Cairo with an empty dossier and resigns from his post. The Land employs a similar strategy in relation to its first-person narrator, who simply disappears halfway through the text. The novel begins and ends in the conventional autobiographical mode, making explicit reference to its canonical predecessors (Zaynab, Ibrahim the Writer and The Days), while framing a story and a cast of characters that spill over the conventional narrative boundaries marked by the genre. As in The Mountain, the narrator finally re-enters the text, chastened and transformed by the revelation of his own marginality in a world he had thought to master. Committed realism formally re-introduced narrative dialogia into the Arabic novel as part of a deliberate political strategy. In the 1920s, the New School writers had attempted to stabilize linguistic usage in both narration and dialogue through syntactic and lexical simplification and standardization. The narrative phrase was stripped of the ornate rhetorical devices associated with neo-classical prose and the romantic lexicon, and brought closer to the syntax of everyday speech. The more problematic inscription of dialogue was rendered through an abbreviated and standardized colloquial or, more commonly, through the use of the compromise third language, later perfected and canonized by Naguib Mahfouz in his pre-trilogy novels. With the advent of the new realist aesthetic in the 1950s, narrative language again emerged as a flashpoint in contemporary literary debate. Sharqawi had quarreled with Taha Husayn in 1953 over his extended use of the colloquial for dialogue in The Land. Husayn had accused Sharqawi and his contemporaries of neglecting the Arabic language and of making a mockery of its literary canon.27 Sharqawi, Yusuf Idris and Nu‘man ‘Ashur among others insisted on writing dialogue in the vernacular, claiming it as an artistic imperative and an essential tool for the realistic representation of character. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the new fiction was precisely its skillful and largely unprecedented elaboration of extended dialogue as a central narrative axis. One only need compare Zaynab to The Land or al-Mazini’s Ibrahim the Writer to Idris’ The Fair-Skinned Girl or Ghanem’s Those Days to note the huge difference in the emphasis placed by the two generations on the importance of narrative dialogue. Moreover, this difference did not simply mark a process of technical development in the Egyptian novel over the course of thirty-odd years. Rather, it underlines the essentially political relationship between narrative form and social ideology. The insistence of committed realist writers on the necessity of faithfully reproducing a variety of social speech in their fiction was a political as well as a technical strategy. It was no longer adequate to directly narrate the character of a peasant or an urban lumpen, or to represent his or her voice as a muted extension of the narrator’s own voice. The new fiction deliberately set out to liberate the voice of the subaltern from the tyranny of the bourgeois text, in both its romantic and conventional realist versions. In this fiction, narrative language is consciously deployed as a central dynamic in the variegated and contested social terrain called ‘reality’. The contrapuntal subaltern languages created by Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim reappear in the writing of the committed realists, both in dialogue and in the narrative languages of popular orality. In their fiction, the highbrow classical language of the romantic subject and the correct modern fusha of the Mahfouzian phrase rub shoulders and correspond with a whole range of ungrammatical and non-canonical voices and generic languages. In formal terms, then, an example of great mid-century committed realism like The Land belongs to a modern literary genealogy inaugurated by Muwaylihi’s Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham and Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway rather than the novelistic canon of the first half of the century, beginning with Zaynab.”

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.)

Selim, Samah. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. Routledge, 2004.

Notes

 

  • Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt

Fallah originally seen in 19th century as romanticized emblem of the nation

Foil to the problematization of the modern subject

Fallah pre-nahda featured in shadow-plays, al-Shirbini’s work, linguisticlly hybrid popular narratives (1001), also Fallah character in the Maqama of al-Muwaylihi’s Hadithh Isa Ibn Hisham, maqama prone to dialogism

relationship between language and representation played out in the village, diglossia heightened ideological effect of colloquial speech.

folk narrativity is constructed in dialectical opposition to the language of the modern subject

The novel as a history of a dialogue and a conflict between classes, discourses, and ideologies

  • 1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue

Abdallah al-Nadim and Ya’qub Sannu’ (d. 1912), both Urabists, while touting nationalist cause, foregrounded a class-specific representation of the coarse, earthly peasant.

Nadim wrote in a combination of registersm broad range of contrapuntal voices, linguistic play as parodic tool. (wrote a series of didactic essays and dialogues)

Nahda experimentation with old genres like maqama and new genres like journalistic essays and novels went hand in hand with conscious effort to reform literary Arabic.

Early 20th century school called the madrasa al-haditha committed to linguistic compromise, some like yusuf idris and sharqawi continued to write in the colliquial

writing of narrative proper in dialogue were luwis awad’s “mudhakkarat talib bi’thah and bayram al-tunisi’s al-sayyid was miratuh fi bariz

Sannu and Nadim’s parodic colliquial voice continued in the character of the fallah.

Chatterjee nation attempts to create united identity  through sanitization of dissonant cultures and voices, disciplinary project

 

  • 2 Novels and nations

-artistic novel emerges when national bourgeois intelligentsia begins self-consciously to articulate role as exclusive political and cultural vanguard.

New School journal was (al-fajr), and big advocate was Mahmud Taymur, Isa Ubayd.

Attempt to create pharonic fallah authenticity (salama musa and ibrahim al-Masri)

-peasant simultaneously seen as noble authentic source of Egyptian nation, but also flea-ridden and ignorant.

Egyptian novel constantly in tension between alienated modern subject and the collectivity of the rural hinterland.

  • 3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral

Zaynab (1913) foundational vilage text then Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s the maiden of Dinshaway (1906) (account of british massacre) and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s county prosecutor (1937) are counter-texts which illuminate and strip the neurotic national romance presented.

Zaynab the peasant’s voices are erased where as in country prosecutor they challange canonical language and authority.

Zaynab offers original inscription of autonomous narrative subject AND offers complete pastoral image of countryside. (Rousseau natural man)

-minimal dialogue attempts to mimic syntax of colliquial speech but erases all traces of ungrammattical vernacular usage.

Hakim’s peasants in country prosecutor speak in parodic colliquial register (court interrogation), used comically, but also a folk critique of hegemonic disourse.

 

  • 4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel

Both committed realism and neo-realism are essentially political interventions into reality, ow what Stephen Heath has called “the space of discourse” within which cultural ideologies repeat themselves, i.e. difference lies not in mechanics of representation as it does its politics. It is through shared space, and not through particular political pedagogy, that modern fiction mounts its challenge to hegemony.

 

list of social realist novels

 

struggle against oppression

The Land – Abd al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi (1952)

Al-rihlah – Fikri Al-Khuli (1987)

Al-Awbash – Khayri Shalabi (1978)

 

individual struggle for self-knowledge

 

Seven days of man (1969)

east of the palms (1985) – Baha Tahir

 

through prism of sexuality

 

the band and the bracelet (1975) – Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah

Al haram – Yusuf Idris (1959)

 

1958 Ministry of Culture founds Center for popular folk art, no less than 22 village novels between 1952 and 1970.

Corporatist structure of Nasserism depended on reificiation of Egyptian countryside.

 

Mid-century revolutionary period writers and critics

critics:

Mahmud Amin al-Alim, Ali al-Ra’i (committed realism)

Luwis Awad (free verse and colliquial)

 

theatre:

Alfred Faraj, Nu’man ‘Ashur, Sa’d al-Din Wahbah

 

Fiction:

Yusuf Idris

Fathi Ghanim

Sharqawi

 

Larger literary iconoclasm

Iraqi poets Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

al-Adab in Lebanon.

 

Lots of specific stuff on New Realism you should go back and have pg. 139-151

critical terrorism (Ghali Shukri) of ossified left literary establishment (Egypt: portrait of a President)

 

Neo-realist village novel (yusuf al-qa’id, khayri shalabi, abd al-fatah al-jamal) challenge middle class image of fallah.

 

  • 5 The Land

expells bourgeois subject from the text and challenges the language of authority

  • 6 The exiled son

Seven Days of Man (Abd al-Hakim Qasim) and East of the Palms (Baha Tahir) double alientation from organic collectivity and technological modernity

  • 7 The storyteller

band and the bracelet – Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah – omniscient prophetic narrator simultaneously panoramic and intimate vantage point.

 

Conclusion

 

Village novel has repeated a powerful opposition between epistemologically and geographically defined modes of narration – linear pragmatic disciplinary vs. circular, affinitive, subaltern.

literature, Journalism and the avant-garde intersections in Egypt – Elizabeth Kendall

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– – This book explores the role of journalism and Egypt in affecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-19th century until the late 20th century.

– What specifically, this book examines the role of the independent journal in fostering literary developments concentrating on the 1960s in the pivotal role of the avant-garde journal gallery 68.

– A single rider my belong to several literary generations, nor can one speak of a specific 60s Aesthetic

-Avant-garde indicates that a work or writer is advancing away from the dominant norms and tastes.

Chapter 1: literary journalism in Egypt, its emergence and development

-A necessary prerequisite for the emergence of literary journalism and Egypt was Muhammad Ali‘s educational program which came to fruition under ismail’s reign

-ismail supported ezbekiyya theatre in 1868, cairo opera 1869

-The real birth of a Gyptian journalism with both political and literary impact came through the efforts of Yaqub sanu and Abdallah al-nadim who identified with ordinary EGyptian‘s in a way in which the Syrians couldnt. Before the Urabi revolt conditions were right for their papers to Floreis – it ships national consciousness had reached a fever pitch with the eminent threat of European domination

-Egyptian theater was big in the 1870s.

–al-tunisi was banished in 1919 but zajal was A regular feature in the popular press of the 1920s and 30s with several journals having their own poet performing a function similar to today’s editorial columnist

-The two principal general cultural journals in Egypt at the end of the 19th century were alhilal and almuqtatif

– The former was more literary and the second was more scientific.

-hadith isa bin hisham modern maqama

-The golden age of literary journalism was from the mid-1920s to the second world war.

– As a quest for national and political identity matured encouraged by advances such as the 1919 revolution of the 1923 constitution, you knew more subjective fictional writing emerged in the 1920s, designed to reflect intellectuals perceptions of national debt identity.

– 1930-40s islamoc arab focus takes over western (israel gershoni) attributes this cultural shift to setbacks in the parliamentary Egyptian just order which resulted in the loss of political hegemony by the secular pro-Western elite. (Could this be thought of as the failure o bourgeois hegemony as well)

-al hilal had literary heavyhitters in 1923-9 with salama musa as editor: taha hussein, ahmed amin, mahmud abbas al-aqqad, abdal qader al-mazini, muhammed huseein haykal

-diary of a country prosecutor was actually written in 11 different parts as it was serialized which helps to explain its structure.

– 2K journals of the period of the 1920s which played an avant-garde role is a literary scene was the dawn 1925 to 7 for the short story and Apollo 1932 to 4 for poetry.

– Al-fajr significance lay in it introduction of European ideas about creative literature and its role in society shifting the focus from the works political relevance to his artistic form while retaining its social and didactic role

-Apollo had extended encouragement and patronage to promising young poets and greatly stimulated the Romantic movement which had a significant impact on the course of modern Arabic literature.

– Al-majalla al-jadida became home to a kind of surrealist writing and literature formed an integral part of the groups bold Marxist program which led to its closure by military decree in 1944.

– By the 1940s literary journalism had gained a momentum of its own it was no longer reliant on nationalist zeal to act as it’s essential impetus.

Chapter 2: literary journalism and Egypt increasing polarization

 

-Account of literary journalism in the 1950s and 60s.

– In general literary journalism suffered during the second world war as it has during the first with paper shortages and many journal shrinking.

– The Egyptian writer was a literary journal in the late 1940s which introduced modern European writers and experimentalism it was close in 1948. Louis wad called it probably the finest cultural organ Egypt has ever known. Baja also said it was very important for the 60s generation.

-it also published adunis bayati and malaika

-The 1940s witnessed a flurry of activity and organization among the far left with the birth of several radical cultural groups many of which publish their own journals. Marxist ideology greatly influenced the development of modern education literature.

– jamaat al-fan wa al-hurriya 1939 – ramsis yunan, kamil al-tilmisani, fuad kamil

-al-tatawir published some of the earliest examples of surrealist tendencies in Arabic literature as well as translating forward thinkers and poets like Sigman Freud Paul Ella wired and I thought our Rambo.

-follow up journal al-majalla al-jadida in 1941 call that self a journal for social struggle and renewal which included articles on Marxist thought by awad and Al-sharuni and was close by military degree when a picture of Lenin appeared on the cover

-lots of other good stuff in here about left-wing journalism in the 1940s.

-many of the marxist writers poets and artists from the democratic movement for national liberation which had cooperated with the free officers movement in the July 1952 revolution began to fall out with the new regime. Factionalism am on the far left intensified with the Soviet union is condemnation of the officers movement as an American plot

-their journal was al-ghad many writers published the first story here like idris ghanem and sharqawi 1953, 1959

-The latter half of the 1950s witnessed a search and cultural activity there was a dramatic increase in the number of students in higher education but also increased state intervention.

– Literature was institutionalized in the 1960s with the political and cultural fields in extra bleach and twined the political disillusionment and unrest that dominated the 1960s was inevitably reflected in a cultural domain. Left wing leaders were arrested after 1959Because of the rivalry with qasim in iraq.

  • Nationalization of literature was a double edged sword with many financial benefits but very much censorship and control which culminated in the increasing stagnation of cultural activity in the 1970s.
  • Leftist intellectuals under mass arrest in 1966: ghitano, abnudi, ghali shukri, sabry hafez
  • In the middle of the 60s there was a brief cultural surge but after a decade of state control young experimental writers felt excluded and frustrated.
  • An avant-garde responded to this with the new sensibility.
  • While nasser
  • respected intellectuals he did not trust their political tendencies and while he let them work with in the institutions he left real power in the hands of others and maintained a sort of control.
  • The cultural seen deteriorated after 1967 as the reverse outcome of the state monopoly on culture made it self felt, most of the journals sponsored by the Ministry of culture we’re close down in 1971 to 1973
  • The remainder of the book focuses on gallery 68.There was not a disagreement about the portrayal of working class realities, it was the static socialist realist approach to this portayal. Page 167

Shifting Ground: Spatial Representations in the Literature of the Sixties Generation in Egypt -Yasmine Ramadan

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This dissertation examines the representation of space in the fiction of seven members of the sixties generation in Egypt. Focusing upon the novels of Jamal al-Ghitani, Muhammad al-Bisati, ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Baha’ Tahir Yahya Tahir ‘Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, and Sun’allah Ibrahim, I contend that the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space is a means to trace the social, political, and economic changes of the post-colonial period in Egypt. This exploration is framed by the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre and seeks to show that the “spatial shift” that has occurred in the humanities and social sciences can enrich the understanding of the contribution of this literary generation. Emerging at a time of instability and uncertainty, the writers of jil al-sittinat (the sixties generation) moved away from the realist techniques of their predecessors, displaying new innovations in their work, in an ongoing struggle to convey their changing experience of reality. This shift away from realism can be registered in the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space and speaks to the writers’ growing disillusionment with the post-colonial project in Egypt, in the years following the 1952 Revolution. Chapter One traces the emergence of the writers of the sixties generation onto the literary scene in Egypt, presenting both the aesthetic innovations with which they were associated, and the socio-economic and political context of which they were seen to be both a part and an expression. This chapter also pays attention to the “anxiety over categorization” that the appearance of this generation seems to have caused, an issue that has been overlooked by critics in the field, and which reveals a great deal about how power and authority is negotiated within the literary field in Egypt. Chapter Two moves to the focus upon literary texts, exploring the representation of the urban space of Cairo in the novels of Ibrahim, al-Ghitani, and Aslan. The three novels reveal a move away from the realist depictions of the popular quarters of Cairo, or of the alley as a cross-section of society; the novelists represent “new” spaces within the capital, or “old” spaces in new ways, showing the way in which the relationship between the individual and the state is based upon surveillance and control, providing virulent critiques of the regimes of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and Anwar al-Sadat. Chapter Three turns to an examination of the Egyptian countryside as it appears in the novels of Qasim and ‘Abdallah, arguing that the move away from socialist realism resulted in the re-imagination of the village as mystical or mythic space. This chapter places these novels within the context of the agricultural reforms intended to improve the lives of the rural population, and that dominated political discussions in the decade of the fifties and sixties. Both novelists present villages that are separate from the rest of the country, calling into question the possibility of revolutionary change. The fourth and final chapter ends with the move beyond the borders of the Egyptian nation; the novels of Tahir and al-Bisati signal a shift to Europe and the Arab Gulf which appear as the spaces of political and economic dislocation. These novels are read in light of the transformations that resulted in migration, and that call into question both national and regional forms of belonging. This dissertation expands the understanding of the literary contribution of the sixties generation by bringing together the discussion of stylistic innovation and thematic preoccupation, while also insisting upon an approach that reads the production of the generation against the socio-economic and political changes that took place in the decades after their emergence on the literary scene.

Language and Symbolic Power – Pierre Bourdieu

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Citation

Language and Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Contents

  • General Introduction
  • Part I. The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges
    • Introduction
    • 1. The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
    • 2. Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits
    • Appendix: Did You Say ‘Popular’?
  • Part II. The Social Institution of Symbolic Power
    • Introduction
    • 3. Authorized Language: The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse
    • 4. Rites of Institution
    • 5. Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness
    • 6. Censorship and the Imposition of Form
  • Part III. Symbolic Power and the Political Field
    • 7. On Symbolic Power
    • 8. Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field
    • 9. Delegation and Political Fetishism
    • 10. Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region
    • 11. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’

Author

 

Bourdieu’s work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics.

Context

Thesis

linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a “linguistic market” and a “linguistic habitus.” When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.

Methodology

Key Terms

 

field – A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent’s habitus and agent’s capital (social, economic and cultural).[40] Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: Most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.

 

Habitus–  can be defined as a system of dispositions(lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action).  a central aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: Habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the ‘muscle memory’ cultivated in many areas of physical education.

 

Doxa – Doxa refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent’s actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable.

 

Language – Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one’s relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions are manifestations of the participants’ respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a “right” to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and to what degree.

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

from Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton (Doxa and Common life)

-language is as much and instrument of power and action than of communication

-Problems with Marxists conception of ideology

-“enlightened false consciousness” too simple, people more shrewd and cynical than suggested

– what keeps system going is less rhetoric and discourse than the system’s own logic (does not need to pass through consciousness to be validated)

-ideology as false consciousness remains Cartesian the social world works in terms of practices, mechanisms, etc.

-By using the term ‘Doxa’ we accept many things without knowing them, and that is what is called ideology

-It operates through language, through the body, through attitudes below level of consciousness

-emancipation is therefore a work of mental gymnastics as much as consciousness-raising

-Althusser, whatever the limits of his thought, was trying to shift the concept of ideology to a much less conscious, more practical, institutional place

-“very often the persons who are able to speak about the social world know nothing about the social world and those who do know cannot speak”

-you mystify people when you say “look, rap is great” the question is: does this music really change the structure of the culture?

-you are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture.

-Doxic submission does not mean happiness, it means bodily submission, which includes a lot of internalized tension.

 

  1. i. conceptual problems with structuralism – focus on internal mechanisms, attempt to distill structure from social world

ii- ignores pragmatics

iii – the application of structural linguistics to other kinds of behavior (anthropology)

  1. i – encourage sociolinguists to supplement structural, pragmatic studies with consideration of socio-historical context

language- instrument of action and power we use language to do things (speech act theory) create reality, constrain, intimidate, set boundaries.

a – constrained by institutions which defines the relatively stable social relations between agents in a conversation.

b- field/market – structured spaces of positions, site of struggle for power and prestige.

-ascribes a particular value to a language, ascribed by dominant group to our goods always and determines access that others can have to language of institution comparison to value of legit. language.

-assigns capital and (resources and honor and prestige ascribed to resources)

  1.    a) economic – material wealth
  2.    b) cultural  knowledge and skills
  3.     c) symbolic- accumulated prestige
  4. Habitus i. set of dispositions ingrained in the body, habits, behaviors, comportment.
  5. linguistic habitus: hypercorrection, censorship, silencing we/they are committing symbolic violence against ourselves

The Postcolonial Unconscious – Neil Lazarus

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Eurocentrism emerges on

this conceptualisation as an untranscendable horizon governing thought –

its forms, contents, modalities, and presuppositions so deeply and insidi-

ously layered and patterned that they cannot be circumvented, only

deconstructed

 

Subaltern practice cannot signify

‘as itself’ across the divide that separates social elites from those who are

not elite. It is, indeed, precisely the irreducible gap between popular

practice and its (misrecognising) construal in elite discourse that the term

‘subalternity’ designates on Spivak’s usage of it. The subaltern is the object

of discourse, never the subject. Whatever is represented as ‘subaltern’ has

always-already been made over: not only translated, but traduced; not

only appropriated, but expropriated

 

It is noteworthy that Ghosh does not provide us unmediated access, in

The Hungry Tide, to Fokir’s own thoughts. This obviously allows us to

dwell a little longer on the idea that there is an incommensurability –

radical alterity – between elite and subaltern cultures, value systems and

ways of seeing. Subaltern consciousness is figured consistently as inscrut-

able; irrecoverable by and inaccessible to any of the novel’s elite characters,

it is also left unrecovered and unaccessed by the novel itself.

But I wonder whether the narrative, formal, and affective dimensions

of The Hungry Tide do not cut against and in the end undermine this idea

of incommensurability, and of the theoretical anti-humanism that under-

lies it. Ghosh’s self-conscious use here, as elsewhere in his work, of

sentimentality and sensationalism (the novel’s very title is significant in

this respect), of romance and narrative suspense, all point us in a quite

different direction, towards the idea not of ‘fundamental alienness’ but

of deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the social

division of labour.59

Class Conflict in Egypt – Mahmoud Hussein

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Citation:

Relevance:

Marxist reading of 20th century Egyptian history

Notes:

-big landowners preferred uprooted irregular labor to tenant farmers, but also them to mechanized labor

-interests of landowners clashed with growing productive forces of capitalism

-colonial power relied on local business elite which has no solid domestic foundation.

-newer commercial bourgeoisie was more local in origin. investment originally had to come from the countryside until WWII.

-relations of production which let ruling class exploit masses were transitional between fueudalism in decay and capitalism, which paralyzed country. direct reflection of Egyptian dependence on global market.

-petty-bourgeois elite were in favor of capitalism and hostile to those in the way.

-the petty bourgeois is the connecting link between all these dissociated social levels. monopolize intellectual activity ideological background based on individualism, elitism, and idealism.

-interwar system based on two rival institutions: the palace and the wafd, who could be played against one another.

-key posts in civil service reserved for palace, why Wafd was only ever an appendage of power structure.

-value system of puppet kind regime disintegrated after the war.

1945-47 workers and students alliance to push British out of canal.

-King used Palestine war as a way to recapture popular patriotic movement.

-Free officers original plan to streamline army made them realize they needed to change state structure.

-Cairo fires were dispossessed masses setting fire to symbols of class privelege and haunts of imperialism (groppi, rivoli shepheards, etc.)

-1950-1952 wildcat strikes and independent movements, while the communists were still theorizing.

-Free officers and MB both trying to seize power, free officers had positions in state apparatus, MB had mass support.

-Communist movement lived a life of its own remote from mass support

-Free officers only understood superstructural crises, wanted to promote capitalism

initial stage of regime (1952-1954) the council of the revolution was led to suppression of all parties without its own class foundations, relative autonomy of state power to suppress mass movements.

-second stage (1955-1958) Suez crisis gave huge legitimacy to the regime, soviet support and growing ruling class abmitions of petty-borgeois elite to push aside traditional bourgeoisie.

-third stage (1959-1963) had to choose between crisis of capitalist growth, or taking over with state bourgeosise to orient the economy in keeping with the requirements of capitalist expansion. 61-63 state power destroyed economic power of traditional bourgeoisie, political tutelage and “anti—capitalist” demagoguery.

years of decline (1964-67) autonomy began to narrow as US and USSR closed in, state bourgeoisie had consolidated position and wanted to put brakes on industrialization, wanted to play increasing political role, ending its effective autonomy, and withering its demagogic power.

-seperation in mass opinion between state power and ineffecitve state bourgeoisie until 1967.

“bloodless revolution” “no dictatorship of one class over the others” . Salazar regime type liberation rally, and the Arab Socialist Union corporatist trade-union and parlimentary life. workers and management labeled “salaried” while rural bourgeoisie and peasants labeled “peasantry”

-masses basically knew (1955-1963) that they weren’t represented, as their small initiatives were crushed, but the intellectuals stood by uncomprehending.

-regime put down worker’s strike at Kafr el-Dawwr

-From 1959-1964 most communists jailed until given amnesty, Nasser thinking of using their theoretical and organizational skills as long as they disolved their own orgs. appointed a few dozens to various press services, not only implementing regime’s policies, but for translating them into demagogic language (yusuf in man who lost his shadow), communists joined ranks of regimes intelligenstia, that segment of the state apparatus specializing in demogogery.

Authoritarian Fictions – Susan Rubin Suleiman

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Citation:

Relevance:

lots of great narratological tools to look at how political novels tick

Notes:

A Roman a These is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is built on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation) which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine.

 

Roman a these has an unambiguous, dualistic system of values, a rule of action presented to the reader, and a doctrinal intertext.

 

Sartre’s schtick is basically prose is meant to communicate and poetry meant to use language

“The way towards a man’s recognition of himself” – Lukacs, in a world without gods human individuality has ceased being organic  and so individuality becomes the object of a quest (like bildungsroman), coming to know itself is what makes it Hegelian. The “typical hero” is one who sums up, often without knowing it, the aspiration and contradictions of a social group (class) at a historical moment.

 

Greimas’ Actantial System

 

  • The axis of desire: (1) subject / (2) object. The subject is what is directed toward an object. The relationship established between the subject and the object is called a junction, and can be further classified as a conjunction (for example, the Prince wants the Princess) or a disjunction (for example, a murderer succeeds in getting rid of his victim’s body).
  • The axis of power: (3) helper / (4) opponent. The helper assists in achieving the desired junction between the subject and object; the opponent hinders the same (for example, the sword, the horse, courage, and the wise man help the Prince; the witch, the dragon, the far-off castle, and fear hinder him).
  • The axis of transmission (the axis of knowledge, according to Greimas): (5) sender / (6) receiver. The sender is the element requesting the establishment of the junction between subject and object (for example, the King asks the Prince to rescue the Princess). The receiver is the element for which the quest is being undertaken. To simplify, let us interpret the receiver (or positive receiver) as that which benefits from achieving the junction between subject and object (for example, the King, the kingdom, the Princess, the Prince, etc.). Sender elements are often receiver elements as well.

 

Barthes – what makes a “readable text” from the modern plural texts is its “obsessive fear of failing to communicate meaning” whence its recourse to redundancy, “a kind of semantic babble” in which meaning is “excessively named.” Ecrivain works with multiple meanings, ecrivant works with certainties.

Philippe Hamon – the discourse of realist narrative is characterized by multiples redundancies on the level of characters and their functions, on the level of narrative sequences, of descriptions, of “knowledge” to be transmitted “the pedagogic desire to transmit information…and to avoid any kind of noise.

Russian formalists – fabula -suzhet.

 

Narrative Text

 

level of story

characters (and their qualities)

context (historical etc)

Events (meets up with characters, their doing)

level of discourse

narration (narrative function, communicative function, testimonial function, interpretive function)

Focalization (from whose perspective)

temporal organization

the extreme coherence of the roman a these turns against itself, becomes dysfunctional by an excess of “readability”

 

The roman a these fufills the reader’s desire for unity but it too risks becoming a threat, since the single reading it tries to impose is also a form of terrorism.

 

 

Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces – Chantal Mouffe

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Citation:

Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces .” Art & Research : Chantal Mouffe, Arts & Research, 2007, www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html.

Relevance:

contemporary conversation about the relationship between language and political hegemony, update on Gramsci

Notes:

 

another way thinking about class, conflict, and art

 

-the dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterized by a rationalist and individualist approach which is unable to grasp adequately the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails; conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist, hence the dimension of antagonism that characterizes human societies.

-Indeed, one of the main tenets of this liberalism is the rationalist belief in the availability of a universal consensus based on reason. No wonder that the political constitutes its blind spot. Liberalism has to negate antagonism since, by bringing to the fore the inescapable moment of decision – in the strong sense of having to decide in an undecidable terrain – antagonism reveals the very limit of any rational consensus.

-every society is the product of a series of practices attempting at establishing order in a context of contingency.

-What is at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order – jointly with the ‘common sense’ which accompanies it – is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being.

An agonistic conception of democracy acknowledges the contingent character of the hegemonic politico-economic articulations which determine the specific configuration of a society at a given moment.