Modernity and crisis of values in "The Yacoubian Building": The place of Alaa Al Aswany in the Egyptian literary field
Abstract
In dialogue with novelistic tradition in Middle East, the article tackles the introduction to the literary field of Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, who in The Yacoubian Building (2002) sets a position before the official discourses prevalent in his society at end of 20th century and beginning of 21st.
In first place, it contextualizes the region’s literary history, understood as a stage of conflicts between agents and institutions that from an emerging national consciousness included the notion of identitythrough novelistic genre; this, as background essential to warn the irruption of the author. Finally, the aim is to develop the approach of opposite axiologies that consolidate the construction of the literary proposal, through characters who embody attitudes and ways of being in the interval between rise of Nasserism and Gulf War; phenomena relevant to Aswany, who is inserted in contemporary literatura updating determinant episodes of Egyptian history.
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