Tag Archives: Arabic Literature

Political Map of Egyptian Writers and Intellectuals

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political leanings of Egyptian authors according to Mustapha Byumi:

Marxists cut off from communists:

Those part of political groups at one time but broke away keeping their sympathy and political leanings

Non-Marxist progressive thinkers and writers

  • Naguib Mahfouz
  • Louis Awad
  • Fathy Ghanim
  • Baha’ Tahir
  • Gamil ‘Atiya Ibrahim
  • ‘Alla’ al-Deeb
  • Usama Anur ‘Akasha
  • Hussein ‘Abd al-‘Alim

Resources about Egyptian Intellectual History

 

 

 

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)

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.

The Narrative Craft: Realism and Fiction in the Arabic Canon – Samah Selim

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In Arabic literature studies, realism is taken for granted as the natural apogee of modern narrative fiction and a point of departure for “postmodern” narrative production. Realism is enshrined, in both Europe and the Arab world, as the canonical foundation of all literary modernities.

 

When Arab critics use the word “reality” to talk about Arabic fiction, they mean “national reality,” a term that raises the specter of a whole set of specific historical and social issues such as colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle, the rise and hegemony of national bourgeousies as well as the real and imagined social composition of the national community.

 

By examining the critical reception of the series of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arabic texts that constitute what I will call, “illegitimate fictions”, we can better understand the ways in which genre is appropriated and constructed as a hegemonic cultural discourse at a given historical moment

 

The problems of genre and ideology in arabic fiction

 

Popular oral storytelling seen as corrupting and deceptive as opposed to the truth of fiction

 

Narration became the process through which the problem of the individual confronting society in an adversarial relationship was negotiated, managed, resolved.

 

In its efforts to forge its own destiny, this autonomous self is made to contain and resolve the existential contradiction produced by the new social order, thus emerging as a kind of “mirror” of the social body as a whole.

 

Tim brennan – the novel shows the one, yet many and allows people to imagine one community as the nation. (Why nation and not class, who worked to try to create this new belonging)

 

Novels inextricably bound to the linked ideologies of nationalism and romantic individualism as they emerged in Egypt roughly around the time of the First World War and the 1919 revolution

 

in Egypt, the “artistic” novel emerges at the point when a properly nationalist bourgeois intelligentsia begins self-consciously to articulate its role as a powerful and exclusive political and cultural vanguard.

 

Is the anxiety over the marxist novel due to the fact that the novel is a machine for bourgeois subjectivity?

 

Ideology is in effect the culture’s form of writing a novel about itself for itself. And the novel is a form that incorporates that cultural fiction into a particular story. Likewise, fiction becomes, in turn, one of the ways in which the culture teaches itself about itself, and thus novels become agents of inculcating ideology. (Lennard Davis, 1987, 24–25)

 

How would this limit the ability to depict multiple forms and complex class interactions

 

thick description” of locations that Muhammad Khayrat found so tedious in European novels was intended to inscribe the all- important nuances of class hierarchies and the social relationships between ownership, social power and moral character that developed in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

 

Novelistic subjectivity—the minute charting of an individual self’s interior moral and psychological landscape—was the necessary narrative medium through which contempo- rary bourgeois ideology was refracted, negotiated and disseminated

 

This completely explains why tutunamayanlar is tryingto break out of the novel form, by being so uncomfortable with novelistic-bourgeois subjectivity

 

Jabir ‘Asfur suggests that the intelligentsia of this new bourgeoisie appropriated the novel genre as a way of challenging and dismantling the old Ottoman and Arabic social and literary hierarchies. If classical poetry was the proper genre of the courtly aristocracy and the folk tale or epic that of the popular classes, then the novel was the perfect literary vehicle by which the emergent nationalist middle-classes could assert their dominance on the cultural stage

 

Who has claimed that the novel is irredeemably bourgeois?

 

from simply being a neutral and/ or “maturing” mimetic strategy of representation—as implied in ‘Ubayd’s idea of “the dossier”, as well as by developmentalist critical discourse—realism in Nahdawi fiction encoded a specific social ideology, a specific set of social attitudes towards class, gender and culture as they were in the process of being instituted

 

Husayn here clearly understands the representational mechanics of the new fiction as, above all else, a strategic craft that involves a hierarchical and disciplinary relationship between a middle- class national elite, and the rest of society—particularly its “base” classes. It is this kind of understanding of the politics of representation within a particular social context that Arabic novel studies have neglected to take into account when describing and cataloguing the history of the genre.

 

It was not until the period of social and political upheaval of the second half of the twentieth century in the Arab world that the representational politics of narrative realism were interrogated and radically rearticulated by a new generation of social realist and neo-realist writers.

 

It should be noted here that the iconoclastic social realist critics that emerged in the early 1950s (such as Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim in Egypt and Husayn Muruwwa in Lebanon) certainly did both question and elaborate on the representational politics of realism. However, they were mostly interested in the content of realist narrative rather than its semiotic and structural mechanisms