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URI [dataset] UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON FACULTY OF Arts And HUMANITIES English Reading Egypt after Edward Said A Study in the Worldliness of Secular Criticism by Islam Aly El-Naggar Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2019 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF Arts and HUMANITIES English Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Reading Egypt After Edward Said: A Study in the Worldliness of Secular Criticism Islam Aly El-Naggar This thesis aims to extend and mobilize Edward Said’s critical thought through a reading of three contemporary Egyptian novels: Bahaa Tahir’s Love in Exile (1995), Radwa Ashour’s Granada (1998), and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999). Whereas previous accounts of Said’s critical corpus have focused mainly on Said’s affiliation with Foucauldian theories of knowledge and power, this thesis considers how Said’s secular and humanist philology, his reflections on lost causes, contrapuntal reading, worldliness, and the public intellectual provide a more nuanced critical frame of reference through which varied modes of essentialism can be identified and challenged. More specifically, these readings trace how concepts such as human subjectivity, political agency, and cultural resistance are mediated in and through the narrative conventions and generic codes of these three Egyptian novels. By bringing these novels into conversation with Said’s critical thought, my readings seek to identify the limitations, as well as the strengths of Saidian reading, particularly (though not only) in respect of considerations of literary form. The introductory chapter of this thesis presents an overview of the rationale behind rethinking Said’s Orientalist critique and the selection of the literary texts. Chapter Two considers how Radwa Ashour’s Granada registers the multiplicity of the secular traces of the Islamic past as it is refracted through multiple interpretations of cultural loss. Continuing my concerns with the importance of secular modes of tracing/reading the past contrapuntally with the present, chapter three considers how Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love stages an extended critical dialogue through the writing of an English woman (whose letters and notes disclose many features of colonial Egypt) met by the reading of an Egyptian woman after the passage of more than ninety years. Finally, chapter four considers how Bahaa Tahir’s Love in Exile uses the conventions of narrative fiction to represent the struggles of the Egyptian public intellectual to ‘speak truth to power’ in the codified language of print journalism. In the conclusion, I try to draw out the wider political implications of these Saidian readings of contemporary Egyptian fiction and suggest ways in which they might also allow us to better understand the challenges of imagining national solidarity and political agency in post- revolutionary Egypt. Table of Contents Table of Contents Table of Contents ....................................................................................... i Academic Thesis: Declaration Of Authorship ..................................................... v Acknowledgements ................................................................................. vii Chapter 1 Introduction .............................................................................. 1 1.1 Essentialism, Arabic Literary Criticism, and the Legacy of Orientalist Critique ......... 1 1.2 Rethinking Said ................................................................................................ 10 1.2.1 Rethinking Orientalism: Humanist Philology in Said’s Thought .................... 10 1.2.2 Challenging Neo-Orientalist Modes of Representation in Narratives of Arab Nationalism: Said’s ‘Philological Heroism’ .................................................. 14 1.2.3 Searching for a New Secular Vocabulary in Saidian Thought ........................ 19 1.2.3.1 Narrative, Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism: A Tension in Said’s Thought ......................................................................................... 20 1.2.3.2 Secular History, Religion and Nationalism ........................................ 21 1.3 World Literature, Comparativism, and Said’s Secular Criticism............................ 23 1.3.1 Said’s Critique of Literary Representation in Arab National Narratives ......... 24 1.3.2 The Worldliness of Arabic Narratives and the Political Agency of Arab Subjects26 1.4 Mapping the Thesis .......................................................................................... 28 1.5 Concluding Remark .......................................................................................... 35 Chapter 2 On Edward Said’s ‘Lost Causes’: Sites of Memory and the Genealogy of the Dispossessed in Radwa Ashour’s Granada ....................................... 37 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 37 2.2 The Genealogical Narrative Structure of Ashour’s Granada ................................ 40 2.3 The Historical Consciousness of the Early Generation ......................................... 42 2.3.1 (Mis)understanding Temporality: Outside Forces, Imaginary Communities, and the Deferral of Judgement .................................................................. 45 2.3.2 Seeds of Religious and National Essentialism in the Narratives of Muslim Granada ................................................................................................... 48 2.3.3 Lost Causes, Mourning the Nation and Pan-Arabism in Granada ................. 60 i Table of Contents 2.4 The Emergence of New Modes of Understanding Secular Time among the Younger Generations in Granada ................................................................................... 64 2.4.1 The Tradition of the Dispossessed and the Limits of Nostalgia .................... 67 2.4.2 Mourning the Father, Mourning Granada ................................................... 71 2.5 Secular Historicism: The Polyvalence of the Family’s Secular Traces of Cultural Traditions ........................................................................................................ 72 2.5.1 The Limits of Secular Judgement: Hermeneutics and the Secular Interpretation of Religious Texts ................................................................ 73 2.5.2 The Maternal Body and the Family Trope in Ashour’s Granada .................... 77 2.6 Spaces of Loss in Ashour’s Granada .................................................................. 82 2.6.1 The Interpretation of Borders in Ashour’s Granada .................................... 84 2.6.2 Granada’s Lost Community: Reading the Spatial Figure of the House in Ashour’s Granada ..................................................................................... 86 2.6.3 Reading the Spatial Trope of the Bathhouse in Ashour’s Granada ............... 89 2.6.4 De-essentializing Space: Maryama’s Secular Reading of Shifting Borders and Centres .................................................................................................... 94 Chapter 3 An Inventory of Traces: Towards a Saidian Reading of Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love ............................................................................ 97 3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 97 3.2 A Saidian Reading of the Narrative Structure of Soueif’s The Map of Love ........... 98 3.2.1 Letters, Historical traces, and Narrative Construction: The Epistolary Narrative Structure of Soueif’s The Map of Love ....................................................... 101 3.2.2 Said’s Philological Historicism and the Construction of Inventory in The Map of Love ................................................................................................... 104 3.3 Making an Inventory in The Map of Love ......................................................... 105 3.3.1 Amal’s Preliminary Reflections ................................................................ 105 3.3.2 Searching for a New Beginning: Amal as a Critical Reader ......................... 108 3.3.3 Anna’s Emerging Historical Consciousness: Anna’s Notes in England .......... 114 3.4 From Inventory to Critical Elaboration: Philological Historicism and Philological Heroism in The Map of Love ............................................................................ 119 ii Table of Contents 3.4.1 Anna’s Letters from Egypt: a Neo-colonial Encounter ..............................