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3 - Engagements in Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

Muhsin J. al-Musawi
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

Chapter 3 discusses other sides of narrative properties, taking as examples and models a number of writers from Bethlehem to Havana, to demonstrate two sides of engagement with the Nights: its role in consolidating predispositions to the art of narrative, as in the case of the Palestinian-Iraqi novelist, critic, poet, and painter Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and also its generous loans to writers across the globe. A narrative globe-trotter of a sort, Scheherazade of the Nights is an ever welcome guest and host in almost every culture. If she gives the French novelist Michel Butor a second mendicant of multiple adventures and transformations that converse with his experimentation in new fiction, it is Proust’s self-reference for an unfinished narrative journey. Barth reads its frame tale as a dialectic between sex and narrative. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Najīb Maḥfūẓ presents the cosmopolitan female narrator as an adept who cannot dispense, however, with her Sufi master’s guidance to see behind the thick material barriers of arrogance, passion, vicissitudes, wide challenges, and the need to combat evil. Scheherazade is the trope for the confabulator nocturni.

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The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures
Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry
, pp. 93 - 131
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Engagements in Narrative
  • Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593847.004
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  • Engagements in Narrative
  • Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593847.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Engagements in Narrative
  • Muhsin J. al-Musawi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593847.004
Available formats
×