AWEJ Arab World English Journal INTERNATIONAL PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ISSN: 2229-9327 جمةل اللغة الانلكزيية يف العامل العريب Special Issue on Literature No. 3 AWEJ October - 2015 www.awej.org Arab World English Journal AWEJ INTERNATIONAL PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ISSN: 2229-9327 جمةل اللغة الانلكزيية يف العامل العريب Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Team of this issue Guest Editor Mohamed BENZIDAN Professor of English at Department of English, Faculty of Letters Benmsik, Casablanca, Morocco ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank all those who contributed to this volume as reviewers of papers. Without their help and dedication, this volume would have not come to the surface. Among those who contributed were the following: Prof. Ebtisam Ali Sadiq Department of English, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Prof. Dr. Hamdi Hameed Al-Douri Tikrit University, Iraq Dr. Malika BOUHADIBA, Translation Institute, Oran University, Algeria. Dr. Shadi Saleh Neimneh, Department of English, The Hashemite University Zarqa-Jordan Dr. Kinana Hamam, Teaching Affiliate, Dept. of Culture, Film, and Media School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies, The University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Dr Mashhoor Abdu Al-Moghales Department of English, Faculty of Science and Arts, University of Bisha, Saudi Arabia Dr. Rania Khalil English Department , The British University in Egypt (BUE), Cairo, Egypt Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Team of this issue BENZIDAN Dr. Yousef Awad Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Dr. Abeer Refky College of Language and Communication (CLC) Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT),, Egypt. Dr. Isam M Shihada Department of English, Al Aqsa University, Gaza City, Palestine Dr. Elmouhtarim Said Ezzrektouni High School, Beni-Mellal Délegation, Morocco Dr. Neema GHENIM Faculty of Foreign Languages, Department of Anglo-Saxon Languages, University of Mohamed Ben Ahmed, Oran 2, Dr. Husam Abuaisha Department of Languages, College of Humanities and Educational Sciences, Palestine Polytechnic University, Hebron, Palestine Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal AWEJ INTERNATIONAL PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ISSN: 2229-9327 جمةل اللغة الانلكزيية يف العامل العريب Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Pp.1-2 Contents Article Titles & authors Pages Team of this issue 1 Contents 1-2 Editorial 3-4 Mohamed Benzidan Biblical Proximity and Women: The Image of Arabs in Victorian Works of 5-17 Religious Nature May A. Witwit Narrativising Illness: Edward Said's Out of Place and the Postcolonial 18-28 Confessional/Indisposed Self Shadi S. Neimneh & Marwan M. Obeidat Morocco as an Exotic and Oriental space in European and American Writings 29-44 Rachid Agliz Anger, Resistance and the Reclamation of Nature in Audre Lorde's Ecopoeticsi 45-57 Hadeer Abo El Nagah The Introduction of a Sub-plot in Shakespeare’s Play King Lear and its 58-71 Dramatic Effect Jamal Nafi Demythologizing the Sacred: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a 72-85 Misnomer Sayed Mohammed Youssef Children of the Alley: Mahafouz's Allegory of Violence and Oppression 86-94 Abdulrahman Mokbel Mahyoub Hezam Imperializing Femininity: Falsehood Production and Consumption in Joseph 95- 114 Conrad's Heart of Darkness Iman Morshed Mohammad Hammad Sabrah Colonel Jacks Americas and Spiritual Allegory 115-1126 Khaled Aljenfawi A Postcolonial Reading of two Arabic Novels Translated into English: Abdel 127-137 Rahman Al-Sharqawi’s Egyptian Earth and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s The Ship Nedal Al – Mousa Revisiting the Theatre of the Absurd in Christopher Durang’s For Whom the 38-152. Southern Belle Tolls (1993) and Desire, Desire, Desire (1995) Hend Mohamed Samir Mahmoud Khalil The Concept of Nature in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost: 153-166 A Comparative Study Muthanna Almiqdady , Abdel-Rahman Abu-Melhim &Mahmoud Al-Sobh Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Contents Materialism versus Human Values in the Victorian Novels: The Case of Great 167- 173 Expectations and Wuthering Heights Karima BOUZIANE Alterity in Moroccan Francophone Literature: Rethinking Postcolonial Reading 174 -182 in Light of an Aesthetics of the Text Aicha Ziyane Dublin: Of the City and its Literary Legacy 183-196 Tahani Alghureiby An African Condition in a European Tradition: Chinua Achebe and the English 197- 210 Language of Native Narratives Nabil Baazizi The Rise of the 20th Century American Novel in the Inter-War Phase 211-223 Abdelkader Nebbou Crossing Borders: Narrating Identity and Self in Willow Trees Don’t weep by 224- 229 Fadia Faqir Majed Hamed Aladylah Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Pp. 3-4 Editorial It would seem legitimate today to wonder about the place of literature in our life. The world having shifted, under the pressure of market economy, into new conceptions of man and the environment, human value is measured against consumerist criteria both at the physical and moral levels. The change has affected not only our conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, but in so doing has necessarily impacted our vision of education and culture. For, in the past thirty years, the academy has witnessed a gradual marginalization of the humanities, in favor of the more useful and practical disciplines that the culture of globalization has imposed, thus reducing education to qualifying students for the job market. In such an atmosphere, the ideal of humanity, of good citizenship lies in drinking in the fountain of common sense so as to perpetuate it and function within an established design. Thinking and conceiving have become superfluous, if not undesirable, or even dangerous sometimes, because they are often misconstrued as opposition and troublemaking. Consumption, on the other hand, is raised to the status of absolute value and so mass education is geared towards the production of executives who become part of often short-sighted plans that turn out to be action plans for problem solving and crisis resolution. The new face of progress and development has shrunk for the individual to simple contentment that results from satisfaction of basic needs, ones that keep changing due to the work of the media in programming life and defining its priorities. Even knowledge and research have been transmogrified to fit in the new era of mass consumption. Instead of thinking and researching that are knowledge production activities through synthesizing information, today’s education often relies on learning as much as possible so as to become ‘knowledgeable’. From a scientific, qualitative approach we have moved to a cultural, quantitative one that often amounts to celebrating the past and its figures, instead of understanding their contributions and utilizing them in the present. This change partly explains young students’ inability to distinguish research from copy-pasting and plagiarism – activities that reinforce the already inculcated beliefs, their lack of self-confidence and self-reliance. In a world that praises action, functionalism, and efficiency, it is useful to wonder about the status of literature. In this ‘new world order,’ which equates the humanities with uselessness, should we still read books and poems, and even scholarly articles written about them, or should we assign them to an irrecoverable past? Should we still teach literature today when it is believed to cultivate laziness and joblessness? Arab World English Journal www.awej.org 3 ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 The answer is definitely yes. For literature is not a useful field in the sense, say, geography, medicine, or political science are. It is rather part of a field of knowledge, not a discipline, together with religion, philosophy, and art, whose object of study is the human condition. Unlike other fields and disciplines that are useful and utilitarian, literature is concerned with the ontological status of humanity and its gradual shift to the margin is symptomatic of a gradual dehumanizing process in which consumerism, both physical and moral, is a pillar. Part of this concern with ontology is a strategy that was theorized by Jacques Derrida and which consists in deconstructing establishments of different kinds. In spite of the many meanings given to the term, I am using it here in a strictly simple sense – that of dismantling, or bringing down a standing edifice. In a world of discursive competition whose target is the Truth that would set the agenda of human life, acquiring the habit of deconstructing is a human duty that guarantees survival. In this framework one can consider most of the articles in the 2015 AWEJ special issue on literature. They, in different ways, try to deconstruct established views, received opinion, and critical assumptions about different works. They start from the assumption that a work of literature, of art, is like an empty space which you can conceive in different ways and suggest different ways of approaching their subject of study. While some articles in this issue deal with philosophical issues and the way they are tackled through presumably pure technical procedures or stylistic devices, others are concerned with the way discourse constructs truths that often pass for absolute ones. While perusing them, let us remember that the merit of these article lies not in whether they are right or wrong, truth being always postponed, but in that they offer alternative ways of approaching literary texts, thus asserting the freedom that is part of the meaning production activity and which undermines the myth of the one final meaning of things.