Toward a Poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus Novel

Selma  Benaziza; Yousef  Awad

doi:10.35516/hum.v50i1.4433

Authors

Selma Benaziza School of Foreign Languages, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan
Yousef Awad School of Foreign Languages, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35516/hum.v50i1.4433

Keywords:

Anglophone Arab campus novels, Henry Lefebvre, xenophobia, Bildungsroman, Satire, love affairs

Abstract

This paper aspires to delineate the poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus novel. It shows how the genre of the campus novel, which has always been perceived as exclusively American and European, has now reached the Arab region and it took a local shape. This research proves that the Arab world, via the works of Arab writers in the diaspora, is witnessing the birth of the genre of the campus novel. It highlights some of the basic features of the western campus novel and how the selected novels appropriate these features. This paper deals with Laila Lalami’s Secret Son (2009), Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). These novels are selected because they highlight different campuses, and therefore, they represent different experiences of Arab academics and students. Some of the aspects that will be discussed throughout the research are the microcosmic relationship between the campus and real life, the state of xenophobia that Arab academics and students face in the west, the process of the protagonists’ growth in the university as well as satire and love affairs.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Aboulela, L. (2015). The Kindness of Enemies. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Akbar, A. (2010). Secret Son, by Laila Lalami. The Independent. Retrieved August 18, 2020 from https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/secret-son-by-laila-lalami-1903812.html.

Allen, R. (1982). The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction. Manchester: Syracuse University Press.

Al-Musawi, M. J. (2003). The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV.

Al-Qazzat, A. (1980). Education of Women in the Arab World. Arab Perspectives, 1(7). Retrieved September 8, 2020 from https://middleeast.library.cornell.edu/content/education-women-arab-world

Awad, Y. (2012). The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, diaspora, and trans-cultural dialogue in the works of Arab British and Arab American women writers. Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publication.

Awad, Y. (2018). Fiction in CONTEST with History? Faith, Resilience and the War on Terror in Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies.18(1), 71-90.

Awad, Y., & and Tayem G. (2015). Winners and Losers: Morocco’s Market Liberalization and Contemporary Cultural Representations. Canadian Social Science, 11, (3), 76-86.

Bailey, D., & Slay, J. (2003). A Counterhegemonic World: James Hynes’s Tales of Academic Horror. Studies in Popular Culture, 25(3), 25-32.

Belok, M., & Enger, M. (1972). Alienated: The College Professor. Journal of Thought, 7(4),280-288.

Bhandari, R., & El-Amine, A. (2012). Higher Education Classification in the Middle East and North Africa: A Pilot Study. New York: Institute of International Education.

Blackburn, S. (1975). The Academic Novel: A Faint-Hearted Genre. The Magazine of Higher Learning, 7 (7), 55-56.

Cao, D. (2020). Academic Barbarism Reconsidered—A Comparative Study of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin and Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged. Comparative Literature: East & West, 4(1), 15-27.

Dalton-Brown, S. (2008). Is There Life Outside of (the Genre of) the Campus Novel? The Academic Struggles to Find a Place in Today’s World. The Journal of Popular Culture, 41(4), 591-600.

El-Enany, R. (2006). Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.

Erbayraktar, S. (2017). Hegemony and Class-Conflict in Academia: Lucky Jim. DTCF Dergisi Journal, 57(2), 1271-1296.

Eve, M. P. (2016). Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict. Cambridge: Open Books Publishers.

Fiedler, L. A. (1964). The War against the Academy. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 5(1), 05-17.

Gana, N. (2013). The Intellectual History and Contemporary Significance of the Arab Novel in English. In N. Gana (Ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture (pp. 1-35). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Global Education Monitoring Report. (2017). Six ways to ensure higher education leaves no one behind. (Policy Paper No 30). Paris: UNESCO.

Hague, A. (1985). The Academic World in Modern Literature. Midwest Quarterly, 26(2), 171-178.

Hammad, I. (2019). The Parisian. London: Jonathan Cape.

Hassan, W. S. (2017). Toward a Theory of the Arabic Novel. In W. S. Hassan, (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (pp. 19-47) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hogg, E. J. (2020). Human Rights, the Family and the Bildungsroman in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. Textual Practice, 34(2), 303-321.

Kelly, F. (2012). Seekers after Truth? Images of Postgraduate Research and Researchers in the Twenty-First Century. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(4), 517-528.

Khater, A. F. (1993). Emile Habibi: The Mirror of Irony in Palestinian Literature. Journal of Arabic Literature, 24(1), 75-94.

Lalami, L. (2009). Secret Son. North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Lambertsson Björk, E. (1993). Campus Clowns and the Canon: David Lodge’s Campus Fiction. (Doctoral theses). Sweden: University of Umeå.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Basic Blackwell Ltd.

Lodge, D. (2008). Nabokov and the Campus Novel. Cycnos, 24(1). Retrieved April, 28, 2020 from http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1081.

Lyons, J. (1974). The College Novel in America: 1962-1974. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 16(2), 121-128.

McGurl, M. (2011). The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. (M.A Thesis). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Naous, M. (2020). Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Rossen, J. (1993). The University in Modern Fiction. When Power is Academic. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Salhi, Z. (2006). Introduction: Defining the Arab Diaspora. In Z. Salhi & I. Netton (Ed.). The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream (1-10). London: Routledge.

Showalter, E. (2005). Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tierney, W. G. (2004). Academic Freedom and Tenure: Between Fiction and Reality. The Journal of Higher Education, 75(2), 161-177.