Moroccan autobiography [Ressource électronique] : the rhetorical construction of the self and the development of modern Arabic narrative in al-Maghrib al-Aqsa / Gretchen Anne Head

Ph. D. : Near Eastern languages and civilizations : University of Pennsylvania : 2011

Bibliogr. p. 243-252

The question this project addresses is why modern Moroccan narrative developed largely along the generic lines of autobiography. Or, is there a discernable relationship between indigenous precursors in the Arabic narrative tradition in the Moroccan context that led the modern narrative of the region to take the initial generic form of autobiography. While the tendency is to view the Moroccan novel as a Western import, the proposition here is to draw a line of continuity between premodern Moroccan autobiographical writing and the development of modern prose in Morocco. Through a series of close readings, the links between Ahmad Zarruq's fifteenth-century al- Kunndsh fi 'Urn ash, Abu 'All al-Hasan al-YusT's seventeenth- century al-Fahrasah, Ahmad Ibn 'AjTbah's nineteenth-century Fahrasah and al-WazzanT's landmark text, al-Zawiyah, often cited as Morocco's first modern Arabic novel, will be elucidated with the aim of contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the historical development of modern Moroccan prose written in Arabic. These works will be considered as a literary series with tropological shifts related primarily to the evolving role of the institution of the zawiyah in Morocco and these authors' relationship to it. All the texts draw on the same governing model based upon the Prophetic paradigm and share the same core figurative and temporal structures. It is also suggested that the evolution of these texts can be connected to the particular ideological position of the zawiyah or tariqah to which their authors were attached. The shift in al-Wazzanl's twentieth-century al-Zawiyah, which brings spiritual autobiographical writing in line with the modern expectations of the novel genre, can be attributed, as in the Mashriq, to its relationship with the rise of print culture. The Arabic literary history of Morocco remains largely unwritten. This project has tried to suggest a way to view part of that history outside of the common paradigm that draws a sharp distinction between the premodern and modern periods.