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The Twisted Mother-Daughter Relationship in Jawaher Al Rafaia’s ‘The Gypsies and the Girl’ (1989) and Alifa Rifaat’s ‘Thursday Lunch’ (1983)

ملخص البحث

In a relationship of mother and daughter, the distorted negative image of mother, as both a victim and a guardian of the patriarchal norms, becomes a constituent part of both the literary and the sociocultural context of humanity. By comparing the various images of mother in Jawaher Al Rafaia's 'The Gypsies and The Girl' and Alifa Rifaat's 'Thursday Lunch', this study tries to show that motherhood is practiced under the hegemonic force of the patriarchal norms, despite of the social cultural changes in the postmodernist age. The distorted image of mother in relationship of mother and daughter is enhanced by the patriarchal ideology that is still repeatedly depicted and produced. Among many others, notions like family honor, female traditional role, overprotectiveness, displacement of women for the sake of being with their husband and the concept of being a good mother are all tools used by the patriarchal ideology to control mother/ daughter connection and shape its details. The patriarchal motherhood which puts daughters in a frame to meet the society's expectations, which raises daughters as copies of mothers, which prepares daughters to marry and to 1 be good housewives, and which neglects daughters' needs and deprives them from a model to identify are all explored in this study.

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الكلمات المفتاحية
relationship, mother, daughter, distorted image, patriarchal society, postmodernism.

Between Orientalism and Post-modernism: Robert Irwin's Fantastic Representations in The Arabian Nightmare

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This article considers Robert Irwin’s representation of the nature of Oriental dreams, nightmares and storytelling in the medieval city of Cairo during the Mamluk period in his novel The Arabian Nightmare (2003). Through a process of close textual analysis and an application of germane theoretical frameworks (drawn from the study of Fantasy and Postmodern thought) we argue that Irwin forges a innovative link between the medieval Oriental world and contemporary post-modern culture in the West in order to destabilise what had become a Western ‘comfort zone’ concerning the East. Throughout the novel, Irwin uses the tools of historiographic metafiction to challenge the belief that Cairo's mysteries had been discovered by the beginning of the twenty first century and that the city could be completely known and understood by its Western observers, enmeshed in epistemological systems of scientific rationality and empirical knowledge.

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الكلمات المفتاحية
Orientalism, Postmodernism, Robert Irwin, Arabia, nightmares, rationality, West

The Disintegrated Identities in the Orient of the Post-war American Fiction: Paul Bowles’ Character Dyar as an Example in Let it Come Down

ملخص البحث

Abstract This paper discusses Bowles’ philosophical accounts of the psychological destruction of the unwary American pilgrims who seek a new life in North Africa. In his novel, Let It Come Down (1952), he demonstrates innovative traits for dealing with the macabre and the cruel oriental landscape by presenting it as being responsible for the disintegration of his American heroes. The paper takes Bowles’ character, Nelson Dyar from Let It Come Down, and analyses it in terms of disintegrated identities in the orient of the Post-American war era. Indeed, Dyar, an American bank clerk, descends into the sordid underworld of Tangiers’ dope inferno. By escaping from the monotony of his dead-end job in the States, Dyar; promised a job within a travel agency in Tangiers, hopes for a relocation which delivers him from the sense of dejection he had been suffering. Arriving in Tangiers, Dyar starts posing those recurrent questions of whether or not Tangiers is the right place to relocate and allow him to find meaning to his existence. By the end of the novel, Dyar, the representative of the modern West, has hammered his companion’s head by a nail; he has finally destroyed the oriental other. The paper will show how the novel resists this and instead we cannot finally judge if Dyar is happy or unhappy since we are left only with the chilling weather and the endless rain.

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الكلمات المفتاحية
disintegrated identities; post American war era; character Dyar; Paul Bowles; Let It Come Down

‘ “Sahib, you are no longer a guest . . . You are one of the family”: Wilfred Thesiger and the ‘Problem’ of Participant Observation’

ملخص البحث

This article examines Wilfred Thesiger’s second text The Marsh Arabs (1964) through the prism of participant observation. More specifically, we explore the, at times, complex self-depiction of Thesiger’s relationship with the Madan tribes’ people. Thesiger’s rapport with the Madan, we argue, offers a decidedly more nuanced engagement than might at first appear. Indeed, while it is possible to read Thesiger’s account of his time in the southern area of Iraq in The Marsh Arabs as adhering to many of the established and entrenched critical ideas concerning the behaviour of Western explorers in the Middle East (imperialist nostalgia, the trope of self-discovery, romanticism), the text also allows for less ‘conventional’ readings. Though Thesiger, like his predecessors, intended both to reify and narrativize the Arabs, thereby documenting their lives for an occidental audience, his first hand engagement with the Madan gives rise to a host of paradoxes that create a more balanced account of this vanishing people’s way of life.

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الكلمات المفتاحية
Participant observation, anthropology and literature, Wilfred Thesiger, Orientalism, Arabia

Lucky Jim: The Novel in Unchartered Times

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Kingsley Amis’ satire on academic life, Lucky Jim (1954) was published at a time of almost unprecedented and (as yet) never repeated social upheaval in Britain. Clement Attlee’s landslide Labour victory in 1945 had led to the introduction of a comprehensive program of reform, including the introduction of the National Health Service, child benefit and old age pensions, an increase in the amount of social housing and the nationalisation of several of Britain’s industries. His government also presided over the decolonisation of a large part of the British Empire. This transformation of British society was intended to be profound; the labour party manifesto of 1945 states that ‘The nation needs a tremendous overhaul’ (Labour Party Manifesto 1945) and changes in the political landscape were soon accompanied by changes in the artistic and cultural life of Britain. The so called ‘Angry Young Men’ popularised ‘kitchen sink’ realism as the Modernist era fell into decline. David Lodge describes this as a struggle between ‘contemporaries’ (Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe etc.) and ‘moderns’ (William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell etc.) and he notes in Language of Fiction (1966) that the immediate post-war era represented a debate on ‘the meaning of the word ‘life’. Lodge explains that ‘Life to the contemporary is what common sense tells us it is, what people do […] To the modern, life is something elusive, baffling, multiple, subjective’ (245).

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الكلمات المفتاحية
,Lucky Jim, Postmodernism, Novel, post-war debates

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