Writing the revolution : Egypt and the story of Tahrir -

Abstract

This thesis interrogates three works of modern and contemporary Egyptian literature on revolution to validate the field’s need for a nuanced reading method, one that celebrates close reading for cultural specificity in an attempt to challenge politically and culturally reductive readings of Egyptian narratives in a world-literary context. “Popular intellectuals” have responded to the 2011 uprisings in Egypt across various genres; their local-global reception verifies that modern Egyptian writing retains culturally-specific voices. This study highlights cultural nuances in contemporary Egyptian literary texts from three genres – Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Awlad haratina (1959; translated in 1996; republished in 2011), Magdy el-Shafee’s graphic novel Metro: A Story of Cairo (2008; translated in 2012), and Ahdaf Soueif’s memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) – by evaluating their representations of revolution through narrative voice and heteroglossia; situating them as narratives of resistance to ideologies of social injustice; and challenging simplified global readings of these local texts circulating in translation. With the assistance of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) ideology of form, this study uncovers a resistance ideology carried by each text’s representations of polyphony and heteroglossia in a pre-revolution context. The term heteroglossia, coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, is expanded beyond the novel to delineate a text’s ability to include rather than stifle voices of dissent. The more heteroglossic a literary text is, the more representative of revolution it thus becomes. The purpose of conducting this study is to ascertain which, if any, of the aforementioned genres better represents popular revolt, a phenomenon that demands free and uninhibited speech as well as resistance to forms of intellectual and physical state oppression. By doing so, these texts move towards a culture of voice and visibility in modern-day