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العنوان
Image of contemporary society in the fiction of Wole Soyinka and Alaa Al-Aswani :
المؤلف
El-Sayed, Tamer Ali Mohamed.
هيئة الاعداد
باحث / تامر على محمد السيد أبوالمعاطى
مشرف / سماء أحمد الشربينى
مشرف / منى عبدالمنعم قاسم
مناقش / أحمد محمد عبود
مناقش / على محمد على مصطفى
الموضوع
Authors, Nigerian - 20th century. Nigerian literature. Theater and society.
تاريخ النشر
2017.
عدد الصفحات
265 p. ;
اللغة
الإنجليزية
الدرجة
الدكتوراه
التخصص
الأدب والنظرية الأدبية
تاريخ الإجازة
1/12/2017
مكان الإجازة
جامعة المنصورة - كلية الآداب - English Language and Literature
الفهرس
Only 14 pages are availabe for public view

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Abstract

Wole Soyinka (1934- ) and Alaa Al-Aswani (1954-) are two post-colonial African writers who employ modernist and post-modernist techniques in their writings. They are known for their social interest, political activism, and visualization of post-colonial realties in the third-world states of Nigeria and Egypt. They write novels mainly to portray society in relation to the world of the character in fiction by focusing on marginalized groups including Arab migrants in the west, African Americans, and gays. This study traces, compares and contrasts the image of contemporary society in the fiction of Wole Soyinka and Alaa Al-Aswani. The primary texts subject to study are Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1975) in addition to Al-Aswani’s internationally acclaimed ’Emarr’t Yacopian’ (2002) and its sequel ’Chicago’ (2008). The two authors present a capturing image of their societies from their perspectives through addressing a broad range of issues like political corruption, social injustice, social climbing, racism, religious fanaticism, moral decay, and violence. In the process of presenting authentic images of their societies they explicitly shed light on the ’ East / West’ dichotomy, and present alternative dual depictions of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’. The fictional output of Soyinka and Al-Aswani also tackles other postcolonial issues that are related to the modern nation-state, national culture, individualism, identity formation, gender theory and class demarcations. Soyinka and Al-Aswani draw their social images mainly through the life incidents of the intellectual elites and their fate in their post-independence countries. It is noteworthy that while the intellectual elites in Al-Aswani’s works face the challenge of adapting to the Western way of life and experience a radical transformation in their ’Oriental’ vision of the west as the land of opportunity and dreams, Soyinka’s works, on the other hand, reflect the classical postcolonial realities of Africa’s blackness on the thematic and technical levels by shedding light on issues like resistance, the inferiority complex reflected through the master/ Slave relationship and the conflict between tradition and modernity.