Naguib Mahfouz:Writer Nation

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) is arguably the Arab world’s greatest novelist ever. A chronicler of modern Egypt, he was a prolific writer who single-handedly transformed the novel into a major literary genre in modern Arabic literature, but who also produced quality short story collections and screenplays. Mahfouz enjoyed a glittering career spanning over six decades, and many of his works and fictional characters have become household names for generations of Egyptians and Arabs. While he was not universally recognized prior to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, Mahfouz was a giant figure in the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century, embraced both by critics and by a mass audience, with many of his novels adapted into films and TV shows. This course explores Mahfouz’s major novels as well as the historical and political contexts in which they emerged. It pays attention to the development of Mahfouz’s career, the various narrative techniques he employed, and the key political events to which he responded. While acknowledging the impossibility of doing justice to Mahfouz’s extraordinary career in a single course, the hope is that students will read and analyze a number of Mahfouz’s representative works, will understand his career trajectory, and will examine how his works represented issues of modernity, religion, gender, colonialism, and revolution in the Arab world. Readings will follow the evolution of Mahfouz’s career, with a particular focus on his novels in the three most innovative and significant decades of his life—40s, 50s, and 60s. The course will begin with Khufu’s Wisdom, Mahfouz’s 1939 debut novel in what came be to known as the historical phase of his writing. Next will be the very popular Midaq Alley, while Mahfouz’s magnum opus, The Cairo Trilogy, will be subject to extensive and careful analysis, and students will read the first two parts of the trilogy, Palace Walk and Palace of Desire, in their entirety. The 1952 July revolution and the rise of Nasser’s Egypt had a profound impact on Mahfouz, whose first literary response to it was the 1959 wildly controversial work Children of Gebelawi. Students will read parts of this allegorical novel, before moving to Mahfouz’s more critical portrayals of the revolution, as represented in The Thief and the Dogs and Miramar. The course will end with a reflection on the Nobel Prize moment and its meanings for Arabic literature, world literature, and the politics of translation. This course will be taught in Arabic, and students should expect to read long novels that are teeming with characters. In addition to Mahfouz’s novels in the original Arabic, readings will include relevant critical and historical pieces in both Arabic and English. Also, students will watch some film adaptations of Mahfouz’s novels, and will learn about one case of text migration, in which Midaq Alley inspired the 1995 Mexican movie The Alley of Miracles.