This dissertation examines the representation of space in the fiction of seven members of the sixties generation in Egypt. Focusing upon the novels of Jamal al-Ghitani, Muhammad al-Bisati, 'Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Baha' Tahir Yahya Tahir 'Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, and Sun'allah Ibrahim, I contend that the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space is a means to trace the social, political, and economic changes of the post-colonial period in Egypt. This exploration is framed by the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre and seeks to show that the "spatial shift" that has occurred in the humanities and social sciences can enrich the understanding of the contribution of this literary generation. Emerging at a time of instability and uncertainty, the writers of jil al-sittinat (the sixties generation) moved away from the realist techniques of their predecessors, displaying new innovations in their work, in an ongoing struggle to convey their changing experience of reality. This shift away from realism can be registered in the representation of urban, rural, and exilic space and speaks to the writers' growing disillusionment with the post-colonial project in Egypt, in the years following the 1952 Revolution. Chapter One traces the emergence of the writers of the sixties generation onto the literary scene in Egypt, presenting both the aesthetic innovations with which they were associated, and the socio-economic and political context of which they were seen to be both a part and an expression. This chapter also pays attention to the "anxiety over categorization" that the appearance of this generation seems to have caused, an issue that has been overlooked by critics in the field, and which reveals a great deal about how power and authority is negotiated within the literary field in Egypt. Chapter Two moves to the focus upon literary texts, exploring the representation of the urban space of Cairo in the novels of Ibrahim, al-Ghitani, and Aslan. The three novels reveal a move away from the realist depictions of the popular quarters of Cairo, or of the alley as a cross-section of society; the novelists represent "new" spaces within the capital, or "old" spaces in new ways, showing the way in which the relationship between the individual and the state is based upon surveillance and control, providing virulent critiques of the regimes of Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir and Anwar al-Sadat. Chapter Three turns to an examination of the Egyptian countryside as it appears in the novels of Qasim and 'Abdallah, arguing that the move away from socialist realism resulted in the re-imagination of the village as mystical or mythic space. This chapter places these novels within the context of the agricultural reforms intended to improve the lives of the rural population, and that dominated political discussions in the decade of the fifties and sixties. Both novelists present villages that are separate from the rest of the country, calling into question the possibility of revolutionary change. The fourth and final chapter ends with the move beyond the borders of the Egyptian nation; the novels of Tahir and al-Bisati signal a shift to Europe and the Arab Gulf which appear as the spaces of political and economic dislocation. These novels are read in light of the transformations that resulted in migration, and that call into question both national and regional forms of belonging. This dissertation expands the understanding of the literary contribution of the sixties generation by bringing together the discussion of stylistic innovation and thematic preoccupation, while also insisting upon an approach that reads the production of the generation against the socio-economic and political changes that took place in the decades after their emergence on the literary scene.

This dissertation examines the representations of late Egyptian President Gamal `Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) in Egyptian literature and film. It focuses on how the historical character of Nasser has emerged in the Egyptian imaginary--novel, short stories, autobiographies, and films. Rather than engaging in historical arguments about the deeds and legacy of Nasser, my dissertation makes a case for literature and art as alternative archive that questions, erases, distorts, and adds to the official history of Nasser. Employing the famous Aristotelian differentiation between the historian and the poet, and building on Hayden White's argument about the relationship between history and fiction, I argue that the meaning(s) of Nasser for Egyptians must be sought less in recorded history than in fictional narratives. Unlike history, literature and film give voice to marginalized, voiceless witnesses of society. By creating fictional characters that interact with Nasser, these works constitute a space of knowledge, an invaluable window onto the ways people see, personalize, and negotiate their relationships with the President. As this dissertation shows, Nasser constitutes a perfect site for literary and cinematic approaches. Largely seen as the Arab world's most influential political figure of the past century, Nasser was a larger-than-life character, a legend whose image, voice, ideals, accomplishments, deeds and misdeeds, and defeats have been shaping Egyptian and Arabic life to date. Historians, however, often recognize the complexity of Nasser's character, his contradictory traits, and his sometime inexplicable decisions. Particularly ambiguous is how the relationship between Nasser and Egyptians was personalized and often romanticized, transforming a political leader into an attentive audience, a heartthrob lover, and an enigmatic father. Herein lies a major contribution of this dissertation. I argue that history falls short on capturing the centrality of Nasser in Egyptian life. As will be demonstrated, Nasser emerges as a site for plural interpretations, an instance where narratives compete over the meaning of the past. In other words, there is no monolithic discourse on Nasser, but rather various, at times contradictory views that fragment the man into multiple "Nassers." The historical paths and developments which the literary and cinematic Nasser has traversed bespeaks to the shifts in ideals, hopes, and realities that swept the Egyptian society over the past fifty years.

This dissertation is a study of a variety of constructions in Modern Hebrew and Standard Arabic which involve nominalization processes. Such constructions manifest a certain mixture of verbal and nominal properties and are analyzed as involving a verbal subconstituent, a VP, governed by an underlying nominal head, a nominalizer. The surface form of the deverbal head of such constructions is the output of a head movement operation adjoining a verb to the nominalizer which governs it. The properties and the differences between the different types of nominalization constructions are explained on the basis of certain assumptions about the thematic properties, the argument structure, of the different nominalizers that are postulated. The heads of nominalization constructions are morphological as well as thematic nominalizers in that they provide, in addition to a particular morphological shape, an argument structure particular to nouns. In this approach to verbal nouns, the mixed properties of these constructions are derived from the properties of underlying verbs and nouns occurring within a particular configuration. This approach to nominalizations is embedded within a particular approach to thematic relations and argument structure combined with theoretical techniques developed in recent work within the Government and Binding theory, in particular, the operation known as head movement. Chapter 1 presents the main theoretical assumptions and includes some proposals concerning the structure of infinitival clauses and the phenomenon of obligatory control. Chapter 2 is a comprehensive study of genitive constructions in Hebrew and Arabic. Chapter 3 is a study of Action Nominalization constructions and includes a detailed argumentation in a favour of a non-lexicalist approach. Chapter 4 investigates and compares the properties of two types of infinitival constructions, standard infinitives and the verbal gerund, a construction which is particular to Modern Hebrew. Chapter 5 studies the Agent Nominalization construction and the Benoni relative, a construction which is analyzed as involving a definite article functioning as a thematic nominalizer and an abstract adjectival morpheme which functions as a morphological nominalizer.

No description available.

No description available.

This is a study of two compilations that originated in western Iran before the Mongol conquest. The research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the organization and preservation of knowledge in literate societies. The Muḥāḍarāt al-udabā’ wa-muḥāwarāt al-shuʿarā' wa'l-bulaghā' (Conversations among Men of Letters and Debates between Men of Poetry and Rhetoric) is a major anthology of literary Arabic, ascribed to the lexicographer and philosopher Abū al-Qāsim al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (d. before 1050?). The Rāḥat al-ṣudūr wa-āyat al-surūr (Comfort of Hearts and Wonder of Delights) is a Persian miscellany about the Great Seljuq sultanate that Muḥammad al-Rāwandī (d. after 1209), an obscure calligrapher and theologian, compiled in the first decade of the thirteenth century in Hamadan to petition the Rum Seljuq sultan Kay Khusrau (ruled 1192-1197 and 1205-1211) in Konya. Both works are single-subject encyclopedias, designed as comprehensive textbooks. The circulation of manuscripts and imprints provides a diachronic perspective on the diffusion of knowledge. These textbooks circulated largely between Isfahan and Istanbul. Rāghib’s anthology is a propaedeutic work for a general audience, and is still in print in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. In contrast, Rāwandī’s miscellany is a personalized curriculum of Great Seljuq politics and courtly etiquette, and thus became obsolete in the sixteenth century. The biographical data on their authors offer the complementary synchronic perspective on the geography of knowledge in pre-Mongol Iran. The contents of the Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat illustrate how their authors utilized well-established conventions of transmitting knowledge to compile an anthology of literary Arabic and a miscellany about the Great Seljuq sultanate. The arrangement of their contents is the most original aspect of these textbooks. On the macro-level, the sequence of parts, chapters, and sections follows a principle of associative order of topics and disciplines. The textbooks are witnesses to societal dependence on literacy. The oral transmission of knowledge had lost its monopoly, yet writing was less a replacement than a supplement to the oral tradition. The contents and structure of the Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat document the continued prestige and use of oral practices within a literate society.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-169).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-169).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-169).

This dissertation explores the dynamics of identity construction and nation building in Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Russia and Poland in the decade following the 1905 revolution. It examines these dynamics through a study of the poetry of Yaakov Steinberg between the years 1903-1915. Steinberg, an important but little studied poet and writer, wrote extensively in both languages. He renounced Yiddish upon his immigration to Palestine. Through the comparison of Steinberg's Hebrew poems and the poems he wrote in Yiddish this dissertation exposes the intricate relations between the languages and the political ideologies of Yiddishism and Zionism that accompanied them, in Steinberg's work and in general. The dissertation shows how the constitution of a modern national subject became the prime concern for these literatures, both as a general ideological demand and as a personal, emotional question. By placing the conflict between the two language ideologies in the center of the debate, this dissertation seeks to point out to a serious methodological lacuna in the study of Hebrew literature and of Zionist history. By placing Yaakov Steinberg's poetry in a wide polyglot context and defining his bilingualism as a fundamental characteristic and a major theoretic concern, this work seeks to demonstrate the depth and span of the discourse on the future of the Jews, as individuals or as a nation, that took place in the revolutionary space of turn of the century Russia.