Tag Archives: realism

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature – Franco Moretti

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The bourgeois was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of bourgeois identity was the realist novel. In The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, Moretti shows how the novel as form served as the capacious and adaptable home within which the bourgeois could both assert and camouflage itself.

With the passing of the last remnants of feudal society, bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its specificity while finding a language through which to speak for the whole social order.

His method is to track the significance of particular keywords, and the texture of particular kinds of grammatical form

Long before the pioneering sociologist Max Weber identified “instrumental reason” as a key characteristic of bourgeois culture, Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s labors are nothing if not efficient. What is useful is beautiful on the island of bourgeois thought, and what is both beautiful and useful is without waste. The world is nothing but a set of potential tools and resources. “The creation of a culture of work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”

The bourgeois self sees a world of particular things as if they were put there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation

“[F]illers rationalize the novelistic universe,” Moretti writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx describes, in Capital Volume 1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” The creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will reach its apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great narrative invention

In the novel, subjectivity decreases and objectivity increases. Description becomes analytic rather than romantic, induction rather than ornament. Or so it appears. Moretti: “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the novel’s conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and cultural sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and persistence of all things.

Adjectives like “hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment without a judge, the author having retreated behind the screen of her or his putatively neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is the real significance of the bourgeois novel’s free indirect discourse, that strange point of view characteristic of the novel, which hovers close to a character but is not identical to it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning all by itself

The bourgeois realist novel went through three phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, where it falls apart. The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath of the French Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and the emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — it was not able to encompass. The novel then split into two parallel streams. On the one hand, the genre novel, which presses on into uncharted territory, addressing a mass audience on themes the realist novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death of God, the industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as form, while at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the historical event which now outstrips the speed and scope of the trauma of the French Revolution

 

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.”

Antimonies of Realism – Fredric Jameson

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Citation

Contents

Author

Context

Thesis

 

to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

– THE ODD THING about literary “realism” is that it is not a descriptive term at all, but a period: roughly 1830–1895,

-Many classics of 19th-century realism would be conspicuously ruled out if plausibility were any criterion.

-realism becomes, in the folk vocabulary of everyday criticism, simply “the way that we used to do things.”

-This realism was supposedly built on “the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.”

-But there wasn’t subjective plenitude, characters were neurotic, Dickens characters were trager of economic roles.

-Realism is not a cultural logic, but instead multitasking, Realism was instead a period of uneasy transition between two types of narrative: the traditional forms of storytelling like the Bible or medieval romance, and new strategies for describing experience and sensation which were emerging in the 19th century. This struggle between showing vs. telling also had to do with the effort to illuminate historical processes: the attempt to make sense of the social world on the one hand, and the attempt to fully describe personal sensory experience and habits of mind on the other. The harsh truths of life vs. intense self-awareness.  It is more helpful to think about realism not as the unmistakeable presence of a set of classic features, but as an open-ended compromise, a tension arising between these narrative approaches.

– to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

-realism consisted of a number of ambitious deployments and maneuvers to outflank the stalemated face-off between narration and description, story and scene.

-Realism’s antinomies are parsed in terms of three such unrepresentable projections: providence, war, and “staging our own present as historical.” All of these are untellable visions, but they have in common the collective that Utopia gropes to construct. Also, the titanic stature of Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be accounted for anew, as a book that tries to straddle all three straits: to be a historical novel about war, capped by a theory of historical causality.

“Jameson’s two poles of realism, the registering of affect and the unique destiny, suggest another (unmentioned) recent work: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. All of the techniques of Scientology represented — the wall-touching, the unblinking confessional, the various tests of endurance, the states of inebriation — are certainly apparatuses of bodily specification and the discrimination of intensities; while the religious cult and its insertion into a thoroughly “periodized” (Hopper-esque) Americana evoke all of the problems of a collectivity (“The Cause”) and its emergence. The Master ignites all of these Jamesonian nodes — by way of L. Ron Hubbard’s own authorial proclivities, one could even make a connection to science fiction!”

– If there is to be, in Jameson’s phrase “realism after realism,” it will have to mean reclaiming motivation and decisions and the tracing of explanations, in whatever mode available, which will probably have to be invented.

 

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. – Anna Kornbluh

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Citation

Contents

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital — Fictitious capital/real psyche: metalepsis, psychologism, and the grounds of finance — Investor ironies in Great Expectations — The economic problem of sympathy: parabasis and interest in Middlemarch — ‘Money expects money’: satiric credit in The way we live now — London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel — Psychic economy and its vicissitudes: Freud’s economic hypothesis — Epilogue: The psychic life of finance.

Author

Context

 

In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process.

Thesis

 

reality of the financial capital is itself structured like a fiction.

Methodology

 

The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

Key Terms

 

Reading – attending to the aesthetic material of literary language. to the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse. I oppose deconstruction’s insistance on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking.

Social close reading – blending deconstructive techniques and the best historicist impulses to explore the intellectual and political force of literary forms that do not reiterate a preexisting world, but rather limn. ironize, and even unmake forms of worlding.

literature – a mode of thought structured by juxtoposition and condensation, by senuous syntheis and syncretic sedimentation. To pose the question “what connexion could there be?” between voices, motifs, temporalities, and images that and mobilized within one bounded work.

Criticisms and Questions

 

Book is mostly useful in showing a powerful approach to Marxist literary reading. Finding an object of study, and to offer a methodology of close reading.

 

For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of “aesthetic mediation” finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx’s metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels.

The idea that finance is the naturally complex lifeblood of our economy whose path only a rarefied group of white men can chart, and not the triumph of the middle man: that’s a trope. It’s a cultural narrative, with material consequences. It’s a cultural narrative that engages with the question of what is and isn’t real because, for example, only Goldman Sachs’s money was treated as real in the last crisis.

the realms of value, fiction, and language are inextricable from each other. Money is a real fiction, itself a representation, and as Kornbluh writes, it is like literature, “a kind of representation that makes a claim to value.” Money is “a claim to represent an abstraction that lacks ontological positivity, money contrives to effectuate the concrete existence of that abstract substance” that is value. It’s only in seeing this contrivance that we might see how we create value and what is realistically open to change.

Kornbluh wants to denaturalize one of the “seminal metaphors of late modernity”: the idea of “psychic economies.”

– What We Talk About When We Talk About Finance By Michelle ChiharaNotes

“By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes–“fictitious capital–” and “psychic economy”–Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel’s cultural work as well as that of its criticism.”

-Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital —

realism is a destabalization of reified reality, victorian novel’s investigating financial capitalism’s parallel destabilizations.

the realism of capitalism is not a matter of mimetic recording, but rather of aesthetic mediation: “the only true social element in literature is the form” -Lukacs

The truly financial element in realism is the form. The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel —

For Marx, capital functions like a novelistic protagonist.

Two tropes in catpial: personification, the representation of an abstraction for a person, and metalepsis, the substitution of one figure for an another with which it is closely related. And the concert between these two concepts intone the concept of drive. Coats and linen are personified, but people are just trager, agents of the ur-person: capital itself. Capital is the subject in this world.

the psychic economy metaphor is arguably nothing other than the personification of capital.

the power of these metaphors show how Capital realizes its insights not argumentatively, but aesthetically.

 

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.

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.

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.

 

 

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.

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