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Cairo Studies in English 2019 Summer Faculty of Arts Department of English Language and Literature Cairo University CAIRO STUDIES IN ENGLISH Editor Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim Editorial Assistant Fatima-al-zahraa Ahmad Ramy The Department of English Language and Literature The Faculty of Arts, Cairo University Summer 2019 Cairo Studies in English (CSE) is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal of research in literature, linguistics and translation studies, issued by the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. (ISSN: 0575-1624; Online ISSN: 2682-2504) Chief Editor: Hala Kamal. Advisory Board: Susan Bassnett, Uma Chaudhuri, Hoda Gindi, Salwa Kamel, Mahmoud Ali Qudah, Galila-Ann Ragheb, John Carlos Rowe, Fatima Sadiqi, Robert Young. Editorial Board: Amany Badawi, Heba Aref, Loubna Youssef, Maha El-Said, Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim, Walid El Hamamsy. Online Managing Editors: Ahmed El-Shamy, Dalia Youssef, Muhamad Kamal. Reviewers involved in this issue: Amal Mazhar, Doaa Embaby, Faten Morsy, Hala Kamal, Heba El-Abbady, Heba Sharobeem, Hoda Elsadda, Hoda Gindi, Iman Ezzeldin, Inas El-Ibrashy, Jehan Farouk Fouad, Magda Haroun, Mustafa Riad, Omaima Abou-bakr, Randa Aboubakr, Shereen Abouelnaga, Sherine Mazloum, Walid El Hamamsy, William Melaney. Online: https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/ http://edcu.edu.eg/publications/cairo-studies-in-english/ Contact: Cairo Studies in English Editorial Board, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, 12613 Orman, Giza, Cairo, Egypt. [email protected] edcu.edu.eg EDCU website publishing: Mohamed Abdel-Aaty. Cover design: Hala Kamal. Printed at: Cairo University Press. CSE 2019-Summer Copyright©2019 Department of English Language & Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. CONTENTS Editorial 1 The Reification of Aesthetics: Reading Heidegger’s Destructive Critique of Modernity in the Light of his Early Philosophy Amr Elsherif 2 Political Symbolism and Censorship: The Tree Climber and Al-Farafir Revisited Dina Amin 26 Emerging Configurations of Time in Facebook Prod-user Culture Doaa Ghazi 45 The Interdisciplinarity of Post-colonialism and Environmentalism in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Abdel Rahman Munif's Cities of Salt Doaa Sayed 65 The Reification of Revolutionary Consciousness: A Cultural Critique of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution Karam AbuSehly 84 The Production of Heterotopic Spaces Between Theory and Practice: Tahrir Square in Light of Michel Foucault’s and Henri Lefebvre’s Theories Naglaa Saad Hassan 102 Writing Out of the Box: Literary Journalistic Tropes in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of Night Wael Mustafa 119 Resisting the Zionist Grand Narrative and Defying the Palestinian/Arab Metanarrative in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses Zainab Saeed El-Mansi 145 Emerging Voices: The Cartography of Confinement/Escape: Crossing Over from Margin to Center in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife Nariman Eid 167 Generic Exile and Liminal Being in Waguih Ghali’s Published Writings Zainab Magdy 184 EDITORIAL This issue of Cairo Studies in English (CSE) – the Journal of Research in Literature, Linguistics and Translation Studies – marks a further development in its long history which goes back to the 1950s. With this issue, we start a new phase, where instead of appearing annually, we begin publishing two issues of CSE every year – a Summer issue and a Winter issue, that coincide with the two terms of the academic year. Moreover, in addition to the papers typically included in the journal, we here introduce a new section, entitled “Emerging Voices”, devoted to papers written by PhD researchers who seek to publish work derived from their doctoral theses. These particular papers are highlighted as reflecting the most up-to-date works of academic research carried out at the postgraduate level, and hence add a new dimension to Cairo Studies in English as a forum where young scholars can share their research and develop their experiences with academic publishing. The two Emerging Voices papers included here have been initially presented at the Symposium of Comparative Literature in its 2018 edition focusing on “Writing Across Borders” (held in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University in November 2018). These two papers, representative of the research carried out at the postgraduate level, add to the variety and interdisciplinarity marking the other papers included in this issue, which offer a wide range of texts, genres, theories and approaches. Together, the papers provide stimulating discussions of philosophical, literary, cultural and digital texts; thus establishing CSE as a forum for original scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We wish to conclude by expressing our thanks to Prof. Sahar Sobhi Abdel- Hakim who initiated this issue and worked on developing its content. We would also like to extend our thanks to all the reviewers of the articles published in this issue, as well as to all the authors who showed much understanding for the delays in the publication process. We also wish to acknowledge the work done by editorial assistant Abdel Rahman Nasser who helped in the earliest stage of this issue. Grateful thanks are due to the team working on developing the CSE website, Muhamad Kamal and Dalia Youssef, led by Dr. Ahmed El- Shamy. And most importantly, it is without the hard work and dedication of Fatima-al-zahraa Ahmad Ramy that this issue would not have come to light. Hala Kamal CSE Chief Editor October 2019 1 The Reification of Aesthetics: Reading Heidegger’s Destructive Critique of Modernity in Light of his Early Philosophy Amr Elsherif* “Art then belongs in the domain of the pastry chef.” (Heidegger 2000, 140) Heidegger’s Understanding of Reification One of the acknowledged goals of Being and Time (2010) is to contest and destroy the modern idealist tradition from Descartes to Nietzsche which presupposes the priority of knowledge, and consequently the knowing subject, over practical involvement in life. This tradition is based on the Cartesian illusion of wiping out the world through doubt in order to establish knowledge on indubitable ground. The subject who abolishes the world is, according to this vision, autonomous from it and able to judge it as if he were not part of it. The ego, hence, becomes an entity in itself separate from the world, standing against it and able to judge it. This separate entity has taken multiple forms in the modern philosophical tradition, all of which share the basic aspect of being a thing-like entity. The Husserlian rejection of the autonomous subject in favor of a pole of receptivity sought to challenge this tradition. Yet in its abolition of the world through the phenomenological practice of Epoché or bracketing, it repeated the Cartesian gesture and situated the receptive pole over and above the world. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) challenged this whole tradition and introduced the idea of Dasein to describe the individual as being-there in the world not autonomous from it or standing above it (Dreyfus 1993, 17). From this position of finitude, he sought to reinterpret the whole of modern tradition which tried to overcome finitude into absolute knowledge. In Being and Time, originally published in 1927, Heidegger acknowledges Georg Lukács’ newly introduced term “reification” and the whole Marxist problematic of viewing consciousness as a thing. Unlike Lukács (1885 – 1971), nevertheless, Heidegger does not regard reification as a modern phenomenon nor does he ascribe it to the dominance of the capitalist mode of commodity * Lecturer in the Department of English, Damanhour University, Egypt. Cairo Studies in English (2019-Summer): https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/ 2 Amr Elsherif production as is evidenced by his inclusion of the religious concept of a substantial soul among the reified forms of consciousness. Heidegger writes: One of our first tasks will be to show that the point of departure from an initially given ego and subject totally fails to see the phenomenal content of Dasein. Every idea of a “subject” – unless refined by a previous ontological determination of its basic character – still posits the subjectum … ontologically along with it, no matter how energetic one’s ontic protestations against the “substantial soul” or the “reification of consciousness” [are]. Thingliness itself needs to be demonstrated in terms of its ontological source in order that we can ask what is now to be understood positively by the nonreified being of the subject, the soul, consciousness, the spirit, the person. All these terms name definite areas of phenomena which can be “developed.” But they are never used without a remarkable failure to see the need for inquiring about the being of the beings so designated. (Heidegger 2010, 45) Nevertheless, Heidegger’s acceptance of Lukács’ criticism of bourgeois philosophical notions of consciousness as reified is not unconditional. He says that no matter how vehement one’s condemnation of reification is, this criticism remains parasitic on an unacknowledged reference to a healthy non-reified state which the latter does not explain. This would be Heidegger’s first remark. The second is implied in his inclusion of the premodern religious concept of the “substantial soul” in the forms of reified subjectivity. This shows that Heidegger does not take reification to be a modern problem resulting from the capitalist mode of production as Lukács does. The problem predates the modern age yet it seizes control of the project of modernity. In order to understand what is meant by reification (Verdinglichung) according to Heidegger, one needs to understand the “being of beings so designated.” Heidegger proceeds to investigate the unreified being of Dasein, “nicht-verdinglichten Sein des Subjekts, der Seele, des Bewußtseins” as well as the being of beings (Seienden) or things (Dinge) which are characterized by thinghood, “Dinglichkeit,” in order to distinguish between them (Heidegger 1977 Sein, 62). As is clear from Heidegger’s constant complaint about the forgetfulness of being (Seinsvegessenheit) in the history of western thought, Dasein forgets its being and being in general because it is part of its nature to do so.
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