Literature essays

Petro-capitalism, petrofiction, and Islamic discourse: the formation of an imagined community in Cities of Salt. ABDELRAHMAN MUNIF’S CITIES OF SALT is an Arabic novel about the discovery of and subsequent drilling for oil in a Persian Gulf community in the 1930s. The novel was published in Lebanon in 1984, and in 1987 it was translated … Read more

The Other Side of Silence voices some dark truths about the history of the Partition of the Punjab Province and reveals some striking facts, kept in a shroud of silence. It highlights how men were convinced that though they could protect themselves, women were somehow incapable of doing so. To save a woman’s honour, by … Read more

Isn’t life in general just a lot of choices pieced together? Every choice we make can have an influence on our lives later on. Especially when growing up it can be difficult to know if you’re making the right decisions and know in what direction you should go and what way to choose. Therefore it … Read more

Literary critic Umberto Eco once recorded his irritation with people who suggest that writing about the past is ‘a way of eluding the present’ and I for would agree with him. For although Sarah Waters, Pat Barker and Toni Morrison each use a different technique to incorporate source texts, historical personages and period details into … Read more

The beginnings of a fictional tradition in Modern Arabic literature are part of the wider process of revival and cultural assimilation. This process involved a creative fusion of two separate forces. One is the rediscovery of the treasures of the Arabic literary heritage and the emergence therefore of a ‘neoclassical’ movement. The other is the … Read more

The novelist observes captures, collects and writes…. Take care dear readers! The novel today is such a compass and a barometer. Perhaps would not you like to bet there? However, a bad compass reading or negligence of the barometer will be expensive. A. R. Munif, The Writer and exile, 398-99 After the war of 1967, … Read more

The Many Characters of Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt: Understanding a Chorus as Culture “When they said nothing, he went on. “I told you all before. The Americans are the source of the illness and the root of the problem.”” (626) -Ibn Naffeh in Cities of Salt “One of the striking aspects of the … Read more

Narrative Techniques and Modes of Writing in ‘Abdul Rah man Munf’s Mudun al-milh: al-tih In several places in his book Al-Katib wa-al-manfa (The Writer and Exile), Abdul Rahman Munif asserts his preoccupation with producing a national tradition of the novel. 1 Such a preoccupation involves a great deal of experimentation2 with new narrative techniques and modes … Read more

Whilst This Side of Paradise gave us an insight into Fitzgerald’s early development, his following novel, The Beautiful and Damned, explores the uncertainties that the author faced concerning his future as a writer alongside his commitments to his new wife, Zelda. For Amory concludes in This Side of Paradise that art and life are hostile, … Read more

  The basis … of the establishment of Arab revolutionary thought is the analysis of Arab reality. Adonis I am very much trying to work against literature that tries to build up a relationship between a character and the reader. What I am trying to do is to get the reader involved in drawing his … Read more

The Geography of Identity   Abstract This study treats the masterpiece Sīrat madīna: Ammān fī ’l-arbaīnāt (1994; translated into English as Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman, 1996) by Abd al-Rahmān Munīf. I read it through its unconventional and original formal and aesthetic choices in which the story of the city and the … Read more

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION American Literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales and lyrics of Indian culture among more than five hundred Indian Languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived. The result of this arrival, Native American oral literature is quite divers. Natives from Quasinomadic hunt cultures … Read more

Introduction Draupadi, the courageous woman of Maharabharata epic is striking and real even at the season of trouble. Her spouse, Yuddhistira respecting his soft spot for betting stakes and loses everything one by one including himself and his own wife in a fixed session of shakers. Indeed, even as of right now Draupadi does not … Read more

A young English man by the name of Leonard Marnham, an employee of the Post Office, is assigned to a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin. They were tunnelling underground to tap the Russian telephone lines to Moscow. This of course had to be kept a secret for as long as possible. One day, … Read more

In the nonfiction novel, “Changes in the Land by William Cronon” it evaluates the dynamic lifestyle of the nature’s populace of wildlife and animals during the time period of the Native Americans losing dominance to the European community. The approach Cronon took involves an examination of the impact of the changing ecology had on Native … Read more