Essays on a Postmodern Arabic Novel

Abstract

This dissertation theorizes a postmodern Arabic novel as a project of historical reflexivity. The first chapter presents this theory arguing that the category “postmodern Arabic novel” usefully prompts attention to textual mediation of objective social reality in a fragmentary Arab world remade into a structural extension of globalized postmodernity. The chapter also frames this theoretical work as an intervention in Arabic studies insofar as it models historical interpretation with and beyond scholarship of the “cultural turn.” The following chapters elaborate the theory of a postmodern Arabic novel through engagement with four texts chosen for the presence of specific footholds for interpretation and discussion either in the texts themselves or in related scholarship. The first revisits Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Smell of It (1966) and thinks with previous readings about the novel’s mediation of an early postmodern “state of failure” in Egypt and the Arab world. The second turns to Ghaleb Halasa’s The Question (1979) and draws out the construction of an imaginary social edifice allegorical of an emergent space of stratification and asymmetry. The third learns from Hoda Barakat’s Disciples of Passion (1993), wherein the tragic saga of a narrator caught in the grip of a fantasy of Relation unhinges from social reality an ambivalent pathology of postmodern Lebanon. Finally, the fourth reads Adania Shibli’s recent Minor Detail (2017) as a search for formal composition adequate to representation of occupation despite its ideological operations. The conclusion reflects on these essays in staged interpretation of contemporary Arabic novels as reading attuned to both historical objectivity’s inscription in the literary text and the latter’s formalistic mediations of spatialized yet ungrounded postmodern situations. The conclusion further reflects on a project that stands as provocation in the direction of a collaborative effort to compose critical readings that enrich our sense of situation in history understood as a sequence of modes of production.