Papers by Dr. Hanan Alazaz
ARABIC AND WORLD LITERATURE: COMPARATIVE AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world... more Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world beyond what the living can experience with their senses. This perception especially in Abrahamic religions and cultures shaped by these religions is the source of the spiritualization of death. The process of dying becomes a journey of the spirit leaving the body, and it is a journey that needs to be honored. The adoption of Western medicine in the Arab world, however, has shifted these perceptions from venerated spiritualization to being viewed as a strictly biological process of the end of life. This cultural shift is represented in some short stories by the Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs (1927-1991). His narrative might have been an allusion to a secular cultural shift that is experienced by medical staff in the 1960s and 1970s, who found themselves in a liminality of cultures. Yūsuf Idrīs's short stories are analyzed in comparison with The House of God (1978) by the American author Samuel Shem (b. 1944). This comparative study of the two authors' texts will examine the representation of cultural tensions in the medical field caused by the shift toward secularism, as these writers focus on how the spirituality of death can be shifted to the body and even sensualized. However, as Seamus O'Mahony suggests in The Way We Die Now (2016), in the medical field, dealing with death has become an attempt to control nature. These two representations may also be related to the illusion of control over death in the medical field.
AWL Journal , 2023
Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world... more Many cultures venerate the process of dying and view it as a moment of passing into another world beyond what the living can experience with their senses. This perception especially in Abrahamic religions and cultures shaped by these religions is the source of the spiritualization of death. The process of dying becomes a journey of the spirit leaving the body, and it is a journey that needs to be honored. The adoption of Western medicine in the Arab world, however, has shifted these perceptions from venerated spiritualization to being viewed as a strictly biological process of the end of life. This cultural shift is represented in some short stories by the Egyptian writer Yūsuf Idrīs (1927-1991). His narrative might have been an allusion to a secular cultural shift that is experienced by medical staff in the 1960s and 1970s, who found themselves in a liminality of cultures. Yūsuf Idrīs's short stories are analyzed in comparison with The House of God (1978) by the American author Samuel Shem (b. 1944). This comparative study of the two authors' texts will examine the representation of cultural tensions in the medical field caused by the shift toward secularism, as these writers focus on how the spirituality of death can be shifted to the body and even sensualized. However, as Seamus O'Mahony suggests in The Way We Die Now (2016), in the medical field, dealing with death has become an attempt to control nature. These two representations may also be related to the illusion of control over death in the medical field.
American Research Journal of English and Literature
The representation of grieving mothers and fathers in American literature is shaped by gendered p... more The representation of grieving mothers and fathers in American literature is shaped by gendered perceptions of how women and men should mourn the loss of their children in different ways. In what could be described as the surveillance of the modes of mourning maternal characters were granted more space to display emotions publicly while paternal characters were not. The scrutiny of public display of emotions by men due to perceptions of masculinity was challenged in two texts published in the 1990s. Although Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) and John Irving's A Widow for One Year (1998) adhere at times to the representation of traditional norms of gendered grieving, both novels challenge the association of excessive emotionality to women and rewrite the narrative into what can be described as the sad man in the attic who shows his emotions in some instances in the narrative. Like the mad woman who lives in the attic in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) who sneaks into Jane's room, the grieving father displays his emotions publicly in some parts of the novels then hides them in an attic of masculine conventions and expectations. The two texts, along with an earlier American text, question perceptions of masculine modes of grieving that is shaped by the norms of gendered grieving. The texts challenge these perceptions by shifting male grieving, making it a public display of emotions and associating it with hysteria and feminized modes of sentimentality.
American Research Journal of English and Literature , 2022
The representation of grieving mothers and fathers in American literature is shaped by gendered p... more The representation of grieving mothers and fathers in American literature is shaped by gendered perceptions of how women and men should mourn the loss of their children in different ways. In what could be described as the surveillance of the modes of mourning maternal characters were granted more space to display emotions publicly while paternal characters were not. The scrutiny of public display of emotions by men due to perceptions of masculinity was challenged in two texts published in the 1990s. Although Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) and John Irving's A Widow for One Year (1998) adhere at times to the representation of traditional norms of gendered grieving, both novels challenge the association of excessive emotionality to women and rewrite the narrative into what can be described as the sad man in the attic who shows his emotions in some instances in the narrative. Like the mad woman who lives in the attic in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) who sneaks into Jane's room, the grieving father displays his emotions publicly in some parts of the novels then hides them in an attic of masculine conventions and expectations. The two texts, along with an earlier American text, question perceptions of masculine modes of grieving that is shaped by the norms of gendered grieving. The texts challenge these perceptions by shifting male grieving, making it a public display of emotions and associating it with hysteria and feminized modes of sentimentality.
Revenant Journal, 2016
This paper reviews a number of folktales that represent the Salu'ah, the she-wolf of Arabia.
Three Second Wave Feminist texts that are considered now as part of a wider rich American feminis... more Three Second Wave Feminist texts that are considered now as part of a wider rich American feminist heritage of the 1970s and 1980s revolve around motherhood and mothering to investigate the possibility of finding the female within the mother.
This thesis is an exploration of representations that revise perceptions of motherhood and gender... more This thesis is an exploration of representations that revise perceptions of motherhood and gender through the concept of rejection of traditional maternal ideals in American novels written between the 1970s and early 21st century. Themes of voluntary childlessness, postpartum depression, child abuse and infanticide are explored through representations that narrate alternative and nuanced perceptions of motherhood and gender. Shifts in the perspective of representative maternal characters revise perceptions of motherhood and disrupt the discourse structuring the maternal ideal. Theorized by Lisa Baraitser in Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2008), the maternal ideal is deconstructed through the concept of interruption to the mother’s perception of herself as a maternal subject. Concepts like maternal ambivalence, revealed through the portrayal of interrupted transformation into the maternal subject, revise the discourse about the potential mother in every female which...
The article examines the nuanced representation of the rejection of motherhood in three postwar A... more The article examines the nuanced representation of the rejection of motherhood in three postwar American novels to highlight the perspectives on maternal subjectivity. A close reading of the texts is utilized to analyze patterns of the rejection of motherhood displayed in abortion and infanticide or rejecting the traditional model of motherhood that is limited to females. This close analysis reveals the nuances in the representation of the rejection of motherhood. Although the novels highlight a feminine subjectivity that is independent from the maternal one, their representation reveals that these examples of the literary production of the seventies may not be completely independent from conservative approaches to feminine subjectivity.
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Papers by Dr. Hanan Alazaz