Fictions of Authority

Reclaming Identity through Communal Voice: Narrating Self-Recognition in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies

“…That is to say the very act of articulating her story gives her agency. As Lanser (1992) underlines, first-person narration asserts the narrator's right to explain "her personal experiences" (p. 19). Hence, as a woman, who had always tried her best to hide her insecurities and lack of belonging, Natasha recognizes her right to articulate her true emotions, which in turn endows subjectivity to her.…”

“…This is author's rhetorical choice to empower marginalized voices. Lanser (1992) maintains that such a narrator speaks as a representative of a community and may or may not adopt "we" pronoun. The play with conventions of narrator in this novel is not limited to the blurred and interchangeable relation between the first-and the third-person narrator.…”

“…It passes the boundaries to reach the high authority of the communal voice. It is Lanser's (1992) conviction that the more the I narrator is exposed to class stereotyping, the more it represents the entire class it belongs to as well as its author. Aboulela uses a first-person narrator that first realizes her right to voice her worldviews and then becomes the narrator of historical characters' affairs in the face of imperialism, in disguise of an omniscient narrator that provokes sympathy for characters through clever use of multiple focalization.…”

“…Paratextual elements add another layer to the interrelationship between flesh-and-blood authors and their readers through "appropriation, resistance, and reinforcement" (Dwivedi, 2018, p. 26). Lanser (1992) believes that epigraphs, in an authorized voice, convey author's direct commentary on the subject matter. In the same line of argument, Dawson (2013) also maintains that in their minds, readers infer the message in a literary work to be that of an author, the public figure whom they assume is the creator of what they are reading, and they shape an image of them not only from the narrative text, but from paratextual features like prefaces, acknowledgments, and afterword and from extratextual elements.…”

The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective

“…It is sadly ironic that this resistance to nationalism ended up constructing an androcentric Continentalism that became its own exclusivity. 23 In the twenty-first century, we need to ask what it really means for any practice of writing to be considered to transcend national boundaries. Why is it such a good thing to transcend national boundaries?…”