Reporting conspiracy (theory) : Sonallah Ibrahim's Al-Lajna and Paul Auster's City of Glass -

Abstract

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” began the scholarly debate on conspiracy theory, which originally focused on the United States and then later included other regions such as the Arab World. For the most part, both Arabic and English scholarship on the subject treats conspiracism in different regions as separate phenomena rather than part of a larger global politic. Accordingly, they have different approaches: while scholarship on conspiracism in the United States deals with representations of conspiracy in the media and the arts, writing on the Arab world focuses almost exclusively on media and historical accounts, and is linked to political rather than social factors. This thesis will address the lack of comparative scholarship, as well as the lack of scholarship on the representations of conspiracy and conspiracy theory in Arab cultural production, by making an interdisciplinary comparison of the novelistic treatments of conspiracism in al-Lajna (1981) by Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim and City of Glass (1983) by American writer Paul Auster. Specifically, this thesis explores how these two novels report conspiracism in the age of multinational capitalism by examining the ways each present the political and linguist implications of conspiracism, portrays the role of the conspiracist in relation to the role of the writer, and treats the relationship between mental illness and conspiracism. In doing so, it draws from the economic debate over the terms “imperialism” and “globalization,” looks at the connection between writer and detective in the two novels, and analyzes the relationship between paranoia, what ‘Issam Mahfuz refers to as “ghurba,” and Timothy Melly terms “agency panic.” This thesis finds that while both novels portray conspiracism as both an empowering and disempowering reaction to a perceived structural agency, al-Lajna describes a structure manned by human agents while City of Glass