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371762

Negative Dialectics in John Updike’s Terrorist: A New Historicist Reading

Article

Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

اللغات الأجنبية

Abstract

Widely acknowledged as one of the best narratives that depict the atrocities of 9/11 in America, Updike's Terrorist has been tackled as the magnum opus that embodies cultural hegemony, the life of Muslim Americans as an ethnic minority in America, and how they interact with the forms of oppression practiced against them. A scrutinizing look, however, at the text in terms of being a discursive formation initiates a process of a textual analysis that transcends the binary oppositions of the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant culture and the marginalized one, and casts light on the epistemic fabric that shapes the linguistic input of the text. The aim of the present paper is to explore the hidden enunciative function that endows different signs with all their possible interpretations, and that ultimately determines how discursive analysis to be carried out in the research points out how the experience of terrorism, and the sophisticated process of identity formation should be deterritorialized. Interacting within the space of the text, terrorism as a political and a human phenomenon, and identity formation as a highly complex and incessant process, feed the discourses of politics, history, and religion, and are mutually determined by them. The research explores, with no a priori assumptions, the interstitial space in which terrorism, identity formation, and the discourses of history, politics, and religion interact and overlap. It also makes use of new historicism as the critical approach that envelopes the argument presented, and that can, due to its revolutionary assumptions, reveal how politics, religion, and history function as negative dialectics in a way that allows the reader to reason phenomena without being victimized by fixed points of reference, reductionist binary oppositions, or ambiguous elementary propositions.

DOI

10.21608/jwadi.2024.371762

Keywords

discourse, Negative Dialectics, terrorism, identity formation, Politics, religion, History, discursivity, episteme, deterritorialization

Authors

First Name

Alia Abbas Mohammed Hassan

Last Name

Mabrouk

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Department of English Faculty of Languages and Translation Ahram Canadian University

Email

ahassanmabrouk@gmail.com

City

-

Orcid

-

Volume

43

Article Issue

43

Related Issue

49651

Issue Date

2024-07-01

Receive Date

2024-08-04

Publish Date

2024-07-01

Page Start

31

Page End

52

Print ISSN

2536-9555

Online ISSN

2682-4582

Link

https://jwadi.journals.ekb.eg/article_371762.html

Detail API

https://jwadi.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=371762

Order

371,762

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

1,243

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة وادي النيل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانية والاجتماعية والتربويه

Publication Link

https://jwadi.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Negative Dialectics in John Updike’s Terrorist: A New Historicist Reading

Details

Type

Article

Created At

25 Dec 2024