Tag Archives: political literature

Al-Zayni Barakat: Narrative as Strategy – Samia Mehrez

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Relevance:

good conversation on the political relevance of the narrative choices of al-Ghitani, specifically in Zayni Barakat, but not a deeper explanation of the social world.

Notes:

  • Gamal al-Ghitani was born in 1945 in Suhag, in Upper Egypt. The family then moved to Gammaliyah, in Old Cairo, where al-Ghitani remained until he married.
  • Two of the major events in al-Ghitani’s life have been the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, which culminated in peace with Israel. He describes these periods as being some of the blackest in his life. For him these two historical moments represented the erosion of principles and the destruction of an ideology that he had grown up with.
  • Al-Ghitani, who was one of the young writers imprisoned in 1966 because of “political activism,” spent six months in a detention camp. Thereafter he refrained from direct political involvement. The choice to remain silent on the open political front has been paralleled by a very strong political and ideolog- ical message delivered through his fiction.

the revolution). He probably started school advent of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. One of t Officers’ regime was to breed a new generation f rhetoric and a new self-image. Through a process and rewriting history in a manner that would do ary period, the new “democratic” regime succe that strongly believed in this newly forged im “strongest nation” of the “Arab world.”9 On regime fully realized the politically significant r pre-revolutionary period. Consequently, one of t revolution was cen

In other words, the war led to a reexamination of the ideology and the very language that expressed that ideology.

ng to destroy t hostile propaganda,” and “acting against the n writers had to face many challenges, among Arabic language) that had been robbed of its rich that medium, and the need to refashion “conven longer represented

  • pastiche and hypertextuality

The Soviet Novel, History as Ritual – Katerina Clark

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Citation

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981

Contents

 

Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture

 

  1. Socialist Realism before 1932
  2. What Socialist Realism Isand What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature
  3. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction
  4. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties
  5. High Stalinist Culture
  6. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society
  7. The Stalinist Myth of the “Great Family”
  8. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age

III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel

  1. The Prototypical Plot
  2. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice
  3. Soviet Fiction since World War II
  4. The Postwar Stalin Period (1944-53)
  5. The Khrushchev Years
  6. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?

Author

 

Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor (with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Context

Thesis

the Soviet novel “in terms of the distinctive role it plays as the repository of official myths.”

Methodology

Key Terms

Socialist Realism, the Master Plot, the Positive Hero, the “spontaneity”/”consciousness” dialectic, the “Great Family,”

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

middlebrow- more like police novel, rests on canonical examples

tools for studying medieval hagiography or other formulaic genres better suited than highbrow lit tools

question of extratextual meaning, aesthetics not important ideology is

started in 1932 with writer’s conference

canon

Gorky – mother, klim Sangin

Furmanov – Chapeau

Gladkov – Cement

Sholokhov – quiet flows the Don, virgin soil upturned

Ostrovsky – how the steel was tempered

Fadeev- The rout, the young guard

***

Master plot is a ritual in the anthropological sense, a focusing lens for cultural forces, parables which confirm Marxist-Leninist stages of history over course of Soviet novel the cliches represented different things.

[Patristic Texts]

Lenin 1905 – “Party organization and party literature” – foundational text, party-mindedness

Gorky’s mother as putative foundational text / Borges on Kafka: each writer creates his own precursors

1927- Stalin consolidates power

Gleichschaltung –  a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

comic combination of verisimilitude and mythicization

bad because it’s schitzophrenic

German debates (Lukacs and Brecht) not found in USSR

topics @ the congres: form vs. content, bracketing of modernism

-Lenin and Stalin as classic texts, dismissal of use of dialect as alienating (peasantry)

-validity of realism and surpassing of critical realism, good and bad romanticism, sense of history and the new man

Trotsky – against neologisms and regionalisms

skaz – oral form of narrative

Babel – Odessa tales (dialects)

obsession with transparency

“a monologic dream of cultural and ideological homogeneity”

Skaz and experimentation of 20s came under strict militaristic regimentation in 1930s

 

***

 

-it makes (perfect) sense to study socialist realism “from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, to discriminate the meaning of texts and the tradition they form, as opposed to their brute structure, by appealing to differences in different culture systems.”

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)

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 Politics of Literature – Jacques Ranciere

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the poetic function of literature as a method for decoding life, addressed to the masses, and so already political

Sartre on committment: Sartre proposed a kind of gentleman’s agreement, by opposing the intransitivity of poetry to the transitivity of prose writing. Poets, he assumed, used words as things, and had no commitment to the political use of communicative speech. Prose writers, by contrast, used words as tools of communication and were automatically committed to the framing of a common world. But the distinction proved to be inconsistent.

– Sartre explains Flaubert’s petrification of language (intransivity of prose writing) as the contribution of bourgeois writers to the strategy of their class.

classically there was a hierarchy of style with subject matter, Flaubert made the absolutization of style radically egalitarian same thing going on with Arabic and Turkish, interesting comparison to make here

Voltaire says that Corneille’s audience was made of officials, people for whom speaking was the same as acting.

“the mute letter,” by contrast, spoke to anybody, without knowing to whom it had to speak, and to whom it had not.

– In my book The Names of History, I proposed to give the name of “literariness” to this availability of the so-called “mute letter” that determines a partition of the perceptible in which one can no longer contrast those who speak and those who only make noise, those who act and those who only live. Such was the democratic revolution pinpointed by the reactionary critics.

– Literature is the art of writing that specifically addresses those who should not read.

-Meaning was no longer a relationship between one will and another. It turned out to be a relationship between signs and other signs.

1800 De la littérature, Jules Michelet : writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things.

-new “politics” of literature is at the core of the so- called realistic novel. Its principle was not reproducing facts as they are, as critics claimed. It was displaying the so-called world of prosaic activities as a huge poem—a huge fabric of signs and traces, of obscure signs that had to be displayed, unfolded and deciphered.

-In the old representational regime, the frame of intelligibility of human actions was patterned on the model of the causal rationality of voluntary actions, linked together and aimed at definite ends. Now, when meaning becomes a “mute” relation of signs to signs, human actions are no longer intelligible as successful or unsuccessful pursuits of aims by willing characters. And the characters are no longer intelligible through their ends. They are intelligible through the clothes they wear, the stones of their houses or the wallpaper of their rooms. Language, dialect, dialogue in their sociolinguistic complexity as the “mute signs” of T/E literature

-deciphering literature using the Marxian of Fruedian key, their critical explanation of what literature “says” relies on the same system of meaning that underpinned the practice of literature itself. Explaining close-to-hand realities as phantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, this pattern of intelligibility was the invention of literature itself.

-Literature had become a powerful machine of self-interpretation and self-poeticzation of life, converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a poetical element.

-First, I have tried to substantiate the idea that so-called interpretations are political to the extent that they are reconfigurations of the visibility of a common world. Second, I would suggest that the discourse contrasting interpretive change and “real” change is itself part of the same hermeneutic plot as the interpretation that it challenges.