As a beacon in a storm, John Maxwell Coetzee has established himself through his intellectual contribution to the post-colonial feminism literature in general and South African slavery epoch in particular. Accordingly, this study has been devoted to critically reflect how Coetzee confined his pen to support the oppressed black South Africans against injustice, oppression and deprivation. Moreover, the paper reveals the South African inextricable components and haw the writer has deeply perceived both apartheid and post-apartheid history by his naked eyes. Coetzee’s Age of Iron reveals his unique ability to aptly penetrate his readers based on contradiction where pessimism is shifted to optimism and, therefore, the readers’ mindset is directly shifted from atrocity to love. The study then delves deeply to show how Coetzee provides a solution to bring two parted races, black and white South Africans, together through the role of women characters in his fiction based on both gender and racial schism. Specifically, this study critically scrutinizes Coetzee’s Age of Iron. The study applies the post-colonial feminism theory using discursive strategy based on sociological and anthropological analyses to reveal how colonization destroyed South Africans’ cultures resulting in a crisis of human segregation which is depicted through white women characters in the novel. By drawing the post-colonial black women’s treatment by the colonisers and the forms of resisting their hegemony, the findings of this study are expected to significantly contribute to the researchers whose concern is on black women in Coetzee’s fiction.
This paper aims at analyzing the selected novels of Naguib Mahfouz in the light of the existential predicament of ‘man’. Such predicament is manifested in the aspects of despair, frustration, and poverty. The Characters in the novels play a significant role in displaying the sordid images of the modern futility of the conditions of the post-World War in Egypt. The paper assumes the existentialism as a theory and topic to comment on the situation, hence the researcher conducts the research within the existentialist theory. The texts that are selected in this paper are as follow, Midaq Alley, Cairo Trilogy, The Beggar, and The Thief and the Dogs.
The researcher in this paper elaborates the writings of Naguib Mahfouz from an existential perspective in Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz concludes that western scholars and politicians conceal the realities of daily life in Egypt, which Mahfouz reveals. In Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, one can find an openness and acceptance in Egyptian society for other faiths and cultures. The researcher will illustrate how there is an important acceptance of internal existential and religious struggles amongst individuals in the society during this novel. The researcher focuses on the character and the inner psychological conflicts in these characters. It seems that this is an important aspect of Egyptian identity. The idea that Egyptians or Muslims are struggling mainly with the West is contradictory to Mahfouz’s characterizations. He asserts that Egyptians have their own internal struggles because of the diversity of their ideologies.
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