Notions could be warriors in a battle, totally ready to fight against other notions without shedding the blood of their utterers. Naguib Mahfouz's two allegory-based novels Khufu's Wisdom (1939) and Sons of Our Alley (1959) were banned when they were first published because they symbolized some religious figures. Accordingly, Mahfouz became a subject of an issued fatwa of a death sentence that led to an unsuccessful assault in 1994.This paper attempts to prove that Mahfouz's main target behind using religious symbols was to criticize and attack some political figures. Mahfouz's aspirations of a classless society, a democratic system, freedom of speech and acceptance of diversity did not come true after the revolutions of 1919 and 1952. This paper tries to analyze the two novels through neither allegorical nor religious level, but through Greenblatt's New Historicism and Foucault's theory of power. The two narratives display myriad types of counterpower that can challenge and defy coercion and oppression. The paper aims to find an answer to which extent the oppressed can stand out against the single power wielding and defeat the oppressors' invincible coercion.
Place is a field that is related to various disciplines like geography, sociology, psychology, environment and literature among others. In this interdisciplinary study, place attachment and place identity and their correlation with self –identity (its formation and transformation) are being traced to reveal that similar to real life powerful place experiences that influence one’s identity, literary place experiences have deep ramifications on a literary work’s characters. Borrowing theories from geography and Social Psychology, Edward Relph’s phenomenology of place with its vast array of levels of insideness and outsideness, together with Glynis Breakwell’s Identity Process Theory are employed to closely follow Ezzedine Fishere’s Farah in his latest literary production Farah’s Story (2021). Although Farah’s childhood attachment to place form her conformant identity, later powerful place experiences transform her into an iron-willed rebellious woman who rejects all forms of attachment or authority.
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