English Art/Literary Poetry & Literature

Thus, when asked to give up the choice of the Doctor as research subject, the protagonist asks himself, “Would a drowning man let go of a life preserver?” (83). But his commitment to an object of study is also a type of defiance, for it comes after a demand to give up his pursuit. In other words, it works to create identity, to elevate an empty life to a new one of purpose and discovery. Its difference from colonial or postcolonial identifications lies in its discovery, through research engagement, of global capital and its native middlemen. This intellectual pursuit, the one that we trace in writings by a great number of scholars, poets, critics, novel-ists, and journalists like Robert Fisk and Seymour Hirsch, should draw attention to it as a minority discourse of great potential. No matter how disturbed are the national elites by phenomena of desperate individual or group acts, the latter should be seen in the context of unsettling challenges to communal identities and self-styled recreations of the past. The construction or invention of identities is a narrative marker of many novels in Arabic.