Citation
 

• Selim, Samah, and Inc NetLibrary. The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985. RoutledgeCurzon, New York, 2004.

Contents
 

•  Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt
•  1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue
•  2 Novels and nations
•  3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral
•  4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel
•  5 The Land
•  6 The exiled son
•  7 The storyteller

Author

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature.^[1] She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.

Selim is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (2004). She won the 2009 Banipal Prize for her translation of Yahya Taher Abdullah's The Collar and the Bracelet.

Context

Thesis

The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed a bifurcated narrative and social geography, are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre.

Methodology

Periodizing the role of the village as an object of ideological projection during different periods of 20th century Egyptian history: Nahda standarization, early nationalism, the hayday of socialist realism, and the new sensibility. 

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

very good book, but focuses on individual authors along with a stulted idea of the structure of feeling, without talking barely at all about the literary community, and the way these ideological projections were collectively formed. 

Notes 

 

•  Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt

Fallah originally seen in 19th century as romanticized emblem of the nation
Foil to the problematization of the modern subject
Fallah pre-nahda featured in shadow-plays, al-Shirbini's work, linguisticlly hybrid popular narratives (1001), also Fallah character in the Maqama of al-Muwaylihi's Hadithh Isa Ibn Hisham, maqama prone to dialogism
relationship between language and representation played out in the village, diglossia heightened ideological effect of colloquial speech.
folk narrativity is constructed in dialectical opposition to the language of the modern subject
The novel as a history of a dialogue and a conflict between classes, discourses, and ideologies

•  1 The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue

Abdallah al-Nadim and Ya'qub Sannu' (d. 1912), both Urabists, while touting nationalist cause, foregrounded a class-specific representation of the coarse, earthly peasant. 
Nadim wrote in a combination of registersm broad range of contrapuntal voices, linguistic play as parodic tool. (wrote a series of didactic essays and dialogues)
Nahda experimentation with old genres like maqama and new genres like journalistic essays and novels went hand in hand with conscious effort to reform literary Arabic. 
Early 20th century school called the madrasa al-haditha committed to linguistic compromise, some like yusuf idris and sharqawi continued to write in the colliquial
writing of narrative proper in dialogue were luwis awad's "mudhakkarat talib bi'thah and bayram al-tunisi's al-sayyid was miratuh fi bariz
Sannu and Nadim's parodic colliquial voice continued in the character of the fallah.
Chatterjee nation attempts to create united identity  through sanitization of dissonant cultures and voices, disciplinary project

 

•  2 Novels and nations

-artistic novel emerges when national bourgeois intelligentsia begins self-consciously to articulate role as exclusive political and cultural vanguard. 
New School journal was (al-fajr), and big advocate was Mahmud Taymur, Isa Ubayd.
Attempt to create pharonic fallah authenticity (salama musa and ibrahim al-Masri)
-peasant simultaneously seen as noble authentic source of Egyptian nation, but also flea-ridden and ignorant. 
Egyptian novel constantly in tension between alienated modern subject and the collectivity of the rural hinterland. 

•  3 Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral

Zaynab (1913) foundational vilage text then Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's the maiden of Dinshaway (1906) (account of british massacre) and Tawfiq al-Hakim's county prosecutor (1937) are counter-texts which illuminate and strip the neurotic national romance presented.
Zaynab the peasant's voices are erased where as in country prosecutor they challange canonical language and authority.
Zaynab offers original inscription of autonomous narrative subject AND offers complete pastoral image of countryside. (Rousseau natural man)
-minimal dialogue attempts to mimic syntax of colliquial speech but erases all traces of ungrammattical vernacular usage. 
Hakim's peasants in country prosecutor speak in parodic colliquial register (court interrogation), used comically, but also a folk critique of hegemonic disourse.
  

•  4 The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel

Both committed realism and neo-realism are essentially political interventions into reality, ow what Stephen Heath has called "the space of discourse" within which cultural ideologies repeat themselves, i.e. difference lies not in mechanics of representation as it does its politics. It is through shared space, and not through particular political pedagogy, that modern fiction mounts its challenge to hegemony. 

list of social realist novels

struggle against oppression
The Land - Abd al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi (1952)
Al-rihlah - Fikri Al-Khuli (1987)
Al-Awbash - Khayri Shalabi (1978)

individual struggle for self-knowledge

Seven days of man (1969)
east of the palms (1985) - Baha Tahir

through prism of sexuality

the band and the bracelet (1975) - Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah
Al haram - Yusuf Idris (1959)

1958 Ministry of Culture founds Center for popular folk art, no less than 22 village novels between 1952 and 1970.
Corporatist structure of Nasserism depended on reificiation of Egyptian countryside.

Mid-century revolutionary period writers and critics
critics:
Mahmud Amin al-Alim, Ali al-Ra'i (committed realism)
Luwis Awad (free verse and colliquial)

theatre:
Alfred Faraj, Nu'man 'Ashur, Sa'd al-Din Wahbah

Fiction:
Yusuf Idris
Fathi Ghanim
Sharqawi

Larger literary iconoclasm
Iraqi poets Nazik al-Mala'ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
al-Adab in Lebanon.

Lots of specific stuff on New Realism you should go back and have pg. 139-151
critical terrorism (Ghali Shukri) of ossified left literary establishment (Egypt: portrait of a President)

Neo-realist village novel (yusuf al-qa'id, khayri shalabi, abd al-fatah al-jamal) challenge middle class image of fallah.  


 

•  5 The Land

expells bourgeois subject from the text and challenges the language of authority

•  6 The exiled son

Seven Days of Man (Abd al-Hakim Qasim) and East of the Palms (Baha Tahir) double alientation from organic collectivity and technological modernity

•  7 The storyteller

band and the bracelet - Yahya al-Tahir Abdallah - omniscient prophetic narrator simultaneously panoramic and intimate vantage point. 

Conclusion

Village novel has repeated a powerful opposition between epistemologically and geographically defined modes of narration - linear pragmatic disciplinary vs. circular, affinitive, subaltern.