The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (19521967)

By (author) Nathaniel Greenberg

Publication date:

02 July 2014

Length of book:

128 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739183694

In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author’s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country’s second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life—through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups—helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation.

Introduction: The Aesthetic of Revolution circa 1952
Chapter One: Criminality and the Public Sphere: Notes on a Post-Revolutionary Aesthetics of Film (1953-1957)
Chapter Two: The Aesthetic of Revolution in NaGuib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley
Chapter Three: The Criminal Inclinations of the Good Society: Naguib Mahfouz and the 1960s
Chapter Four: Partial Politics: Sectarianism and the New Woman Question in Naguib Mahfouz’s Post-Revolutionary Film and Literature
Conclusion: Mahfouz’s Wheel

Nathaniel Greenberg's book is an impressive, many-sided addition to the multitude of studies on Naguib Mahfouz. The author centers attention here on the little-known but important role Mahfouz played in the movie industry in Egypt. He also presents a full and sensitive discussion of the critical writings that have examined the Nobel Prizewinner's works. Mahfouz is properly shown to have played a pivotal role in expressing, with subtle skill and courage, the dissatisfaction and dissent that arose in mid-century Cairo, the Arab world's intellectual and cultural center, a malaise that later contributed to the present turmoil witnessed throughout today's Middle East.