Individuality Lost, Fun Gained: Some Recurrent Motifs in Late Twentieth-Century Arabic and Turkish Novels
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.4581Abstract
Starting from an alternative description, based mainly on German literature, of what has come to be called ‘postmodernism’, the present study re-examines Arabic and Turkish novels from the 1980s and 1990s in the light of this description. It is argued that the descriptive categories developed on the basis of European texts also make sense for texts from the Middle East and North Africa, suggesting that the way life is perceived in these regions at the end of the twentieth century does not differ fundamentally from how it is experienced in a Western country − there is a global discursive community with similar outlooks on life on both sides, rather than a ‘clash of civilizations’. The alternative description also assigns many ‘postmodern’ features their place in a ‘structure of meaning’, which sheds some new light on the inner architecture of the period in question and on the function of the parts in a complementary whole.
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