ARABIC LITERATURE (FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMANITIES)
Year:2020 | Volume:12 | Issue:3|Papers Count:7

There is a clear overlap between postmodern theories such as postfeminism, poststructuralism, and postindustrialism. An exception to this overlap is postcolonialism where the time frames of these theories and movements intersect at a contradictory point, even though the texts of each theory contain literary techniques from the other theories, as is the case in the relationship between postcolonialism and postmodernism. For instance, postmodernism attempts to dismantle the structures and restrictions imposed by the theories of literary genre, power, and value, even if they are prevalent traditions. As for the postcolonial approach, it is, to a large extent, politically oriented and seeks to dismantle the structures that consecrate hegemony, control, and power, and to establish relations between unequal forces through bilateral encounters such as I/the other, we/they, the first world/the third world, and white/black or yellow. Edward Said has been considered the founder of postcolonialism since he wrote his famous book Orientalism. We find traces of this critical field in his biographical book Out of Place: A Memoir. His works, especially his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, opened new horizons to various fields of knowledge. The books of this Palestinian-born writer and intellectual have revolutionized Middle Eastern studies and contributed to the creation of new areas of knowledge, such as postcolonial theory. In Culture and Imperialism, he contends that global imperialism has used its dominance in literature, especially the novel which Western imperialism has effectively employed to gain domination over colonized people. He investigates the compatibility of goals between the novel and colonialism and asserts that the novel in particular and narratives in general play important roles in the issue of identity and belonging, as the novel was employed by imperialist powers in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a vital medium in order to extend their imperial control, subjugate the colonized people, and rob them of their identities.

The study of the narrative structure of texts has had a significant influence on literary criticism. This influence has even spread to the analysis of Quranic stories so that these stories have become an arena for the application of the methods of narrative criticism. By examining the articles that have studied the stories of the Quran through these theories, we encounter a large number of works that have employed various methods in their analysis. This study, in order to investigate how narratology is used in the critique of Quranic stories, analyzes the articles written in this field. We do not merely introduce these works, but, with an analytical method, examine different critical approaches in the papers published in scientific-research journals. We have covered the articles published from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the present in Iran, Iraq, and Algeria. We argue that the different approaches of researchers in the study of Quranic stories can be examined in several main areas. Some of these studies have analyzed Quranic stories in a mechanical way by inserting the text into a predetermined framework, so that the analytical part is but a reflection of the theory. A number of researches have made some changes in their method of critique so as to bring a coordination between the text and the theories. And only a few researches have prioritized the text in their attempts at bringing this harmony between the selected theory and the story, and thus, without merlely following the theories, have obtained reliable and novel results. Meanwhile, in a number of studies, we do not see anything but brief references to some methods of narrative criticism, so that the analytical part of these articles is only a personal interpretation of the text without relying on a clear theory in the research.

Montage is one of the techniques which modern novelists borrowed from cinema. This technique depicts the scenes of novel in a specific order to affect the mentality of the reader and to show the association of thoughts by cutting from one scene to another. Creating concepts using association, fundamental changes in temporal and spatial continuity, displaying the events in specific dimensions of place and time, activating the reader’ s mind and involving them in the creation of events, and manifesting concepts by highlighting a new form of reality are achieved only through the technique of montage. The article studies Sinan Anton’ s novel I’ jaam, which employs stream of consciousness, based on theories of the well-known Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. We focus on stream of consciousness because it reveals the true essence of characters. To make stream of consciousness possible, cinematic innovations such as montage can be used. In this article, we first introduce Sinan Anton and his ideas on conflicting scenes and then discuss different kinds of montage which, according to Eisenstein, are linear montage, rhythmic montage, musical montage, and mental montage, as reflected in the Iraqi writer’ s novel. Eisenstein asserts that each sequence should be made up of conflicting scenes and that each cut should highlight a conflict between two scenes. We argue that in I’ jaam Sinan Anton uses cinematic montage to show his ability of introducing modern thoughts and ideas and to help the reader understand the novel well. Anton also uses these four types of montage to express the characters’ internal conflict through techniques such as cutting, moving, and close-up in order to give the characters a chance to resolve their conflicts. Moreover, through these techniques he adds to the dramatic tension, creates variety in images and brings the confusion and the psychical conflict of the characters to light.

Style, in a general lexical sense, refers to the system and rules for expression in a specific literary genre. Literary style is a set of rules and standards that are distinguished by a literary character and that distinguish a literary text (poetry or prose) from other texts. A stylistic study is a systematic study of the structural elements and the way of formulating them to express the ideology of the literary text. Rashid Salim al-Khouri, known as Shair al-Qarawi, is one of the most prominent poets of the Mahjar — a literary movement started by Arabic writers who had emigrated to America at the turn of the twentieth century. His literary style is distinguished by the characteristics of migrant literature and this is clearly reflected in his poetry collection titled Homeland Poems. This paper employs a descriptive-analytical method to study the literary style in al-Khouri’ s Homeland Poems; it analyzes different structures in his poetry, such as the lexical structure at its morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels, the musical structure at its internal and external levels, the rhetorical structure with its expressive capacities, and the semantic structure. The results express that Homeland Poems is characterized by employing a deviant style in the superstructures and substructures, and this is the result of the poet’ s creative ability. These deviation can be seen in different lexical, semantic, rhetorical, and musical layers of his poetry. Lexical and semantic deviations include employing statements that suggest new meanings to serve the intended purpose musically and semantically. Rhetorical deviations include the use of simile and metaphor to do without traditional images and create new poetic images. Musical deviations include the liberation of the music from the traditional constraints with the re-experience of Andalusian poetry, and the change in the number of poetic syllables that leads to various poetic rythems.

Speech act theory is one of the well-known theories in applied linguistics. By considering language in the context of human acts, it reveals what is left unsaid in the text and enables us to arrive at an interpretation of it. Based on this theory, one does not merely use words and sentences to communicate a meaning, but commits acts which are called speech acts. I saw Ramallah is an autobiographical novel by Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet and writer. The events of the novel revolve around his return to Ramallah and Deir Ghassana after thirty years of exile to European and Arab countries. The article highlights and analyzes imperative-didactic speech acts of the novel in order to determine the author’ s purpose in using them. The importance of the research is evident in the fact that the novel contains emotional speech acts contained in interrogative speech acts in order to express the plight of Palestinians and their resistance against the Zionists. The research argues that two kinds of interrogative speech acts are used in the novel: direct and indirect. The direct speech acts are used by the characters in order to acquire information. The indirect speech acts, however, are used by the writer in accordance with the societal circumstances to express his goals. They are mostly used to express denial, anger, scolding, ridicule, sadness, regret, and surprise upon seeing what has happened and is happening to Ramallah. This type of speech act is prevalent in the novel since it is the most effective in expressing the writer’ s intentions and it highlights the communicative aspects of language, which are convincing, encouraging, and affecting the interlocutor. Thus, the writer uses indirect speech acts to reveal his psychological state, as he wants to influence the reader and stir the feelings of the Arab and Islamic nation so that they realize the issue of the Palestinian people and the right that is taken from them by the Zionists.

Arabic neo-poetry is known for breaking down the traditional structure of poetry and extending its semantic boundaries by equipping the literary discourses with narrative structures which enable the poet to show their creative imagination and aesthetic views towards objects. “ Time” is one of the prominent elements of narration. Formerly, it manifested itself through the logical sequence of events, whereas nowadays narration time does not depend on this sequence and the narrator can change its structure through the interaction between different levels of time to avoid monotonousness. Muhammad Afifi Matar has paid special attention this in his poem “ Uprooted Steps” in which, through forming a semantic bridge between present, past, and future events, we see a temporal overlap. This article seeks to analyze the element of time in this poem. It suggests that the poem has a fluid temporal structure so that inside time present, the past and the future are contained. In many cases, the poet does not narrate the events according to the order of their happening, but rather delays or even stops them. The functions of time in this poem are different, changeable, and intertwined depending on the context of the events. These events sometimes take a long time and sometimes happen in the blink of an eye to create a temporal overlap between the past, the future, and the present. Returning to the past in the context of the present sometimes depicts the unpleasant experiences of the past, and sometimes has epic and hopeful effects through the historical calling of non-narrative characters. The poem uses flashforwards from the beginning to highlight future events and to respond as early as possible to the reader’ s curiosity about the future. The poet continously plays with the time of narration; to avoid monotonousness, he, with the aid of temporal paradoxes, fills the gaps in time past, informs the reader of future events before their happening, and sometimes interferes with the the passage of time.

The novel is a genre of literature that can be employed to reflect the problems of humans and societies, in particular societies in which abundant problems deny people their freedom and dignity and prevent them from access to their human rights. In such societies, women tend to be more vulnerable than men are. To address this issue, the feminist movement was formed, and the writers and leaders of this movement defended the rights and demands of women. The feminist novels of Saudi Arabian literature are more consistent with the feminist movement than other Arabic novels are, because women in Saudi Arabia suffer numerous problems, and live and work under more difficult conditions. Badriah al-Beshr is a contemporary Saudi Arabian writer and novelist. She is one of the most active writers in the field of feminism. She has dedicated many of her writings and activities to solving the problems of women. Hence, her writings are full of tragic cases of women in Saudi Arabia. In her latest novel entitled Love Stories on al-Asha Street, published in 2013, she takes the reader into life in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. The stories are mostly told from women’ s points of view, although male voices also feature. The novel narrates the lives of women under the male domination and the means of violence and oppression that are used against them. Among the female characters of the novel, the problems of a character called Aziza are highlighted. The writer portrays numerous obstacles that prevent her success in the society and how she makes endless efforts to overcome them but fails to do so. The present article employs the definitions and the terminology of feminist criticism in order to analyze the most significant effects of women’ s oppression depicted in this novel through a descriptive-analytical method.