الأنساق الثقافية في قصص غادة السمان

Abstract

The literary discourse has been dealt with in different ways, all of which were outlined at the outset on the contextual aspects according to psychological, historical, and social approaches in an attempt to find out the aesthetics of the text. However, this has excluded the artistry of language, so new theories have established this structure through systematic approaches. They enclosed the text and isolated it from the environment that it produced, based on the cognitive frameworks and basic concepts of linguistics and considering the text as an independent unit. Thus, they eliminated the role of the author and the context, prompting critics to search for new outlets that give the text an outlet through which to make its aesthetics and artistry and give different connotations. The cultural criticism is one of the most prominent postmodern critical strategy that appeared in the critical arena and came as a response to the structural approaches that viewed the literary text as a linguistic body, in which it starts from the text and returns to it to nullify the author’s role and the context that contributed to the formation of these linguistic structures. The cultural criticism gave a new reading to the literary text closed to its linguistic structure, and it opened up to its cultural component and thus became a cultural incident whose its explanation and interpretation returns to the context that produced it. The literary text has transcended its aesthetic artistic value, and has become a cultural component that considers the systems that contributed to its formation, which are hidden behind the linguistic aesthetic and are implicit and hide the flaws of the culture. The cultural criticism acts as a procedure of digging into the texts and elucidating the cultural systems that have controlled the ideas and the mentalities and leaked through their hegemony into the texts. It takes from the culture component its material, including manifestations, behavior, beliefs, arts, and literature. Nevertheless, it attaches importance to the marginal who was excluded by the institution or the literary approaches that focused on the aesthetics of the text itself, considering this criticism came in a postmodern period that dislocated the general order, and has undermined the center and brought the margin to the fore, taking a space for it in critical studies, and from this literature, it is the feminist literature. The feminist writing was associated with struggling movements that led women to claim their material and social rights at the beginning, and then sought the equality with men in all rights. So, for this reason the content of these narratives changed in different and successive periods, as their concern in the beginning was to achieve themselves and their existence and to keep pace with the man’s writing, and then seek to contradict the male model and search for a text whose content is the woman’s concerns and problems; This text was the one which bore its privacy and raged around the debate and the controversy. The feminist writing sparked a great debate in the critical arena immediately after its emergence, and several pens poured into it in an attempt to theorize this literature by accepting or rejecting it as marginal literature. It raised doubts and differentiation between its texts and the man’s texts. So, it looked at it with different terms, such as feminist literature, feminine literature, and woman's literature, all of which increased the denial of meaning, isplacement, weakening, and characteristic of feminine feature and specifcitie Feminist writing in the 1960s was considered a major challenge to the prevailing cultural frameworks. Many Arab female writers went, however, through this experience and created various texts on different topics. The writer Ghada Essamman was one of them. Rather, she was a pioneer in this field. She was immersed with her writings in various social issues, feminist issues and the exclusion and marginalization that women suffer from due to the male authority. Moreover, she delves into the essential, decisive of both national and pan-Arab issues. She also sought to expose the silence and revealed along the way the drawbacks of the Arab society. This is what was clearly evident in her narrative achievement, and was searched and elucidated in this study tagged “Cultural Patterns in the Stories of Ghada Essamman” according to a cultural, critical approach in which the aesthetic aspect was transcended in order to dig beyond the linguistic structures to find out the hidden cultural systems by applying the mechanisms of cultural criticism, with the use of feminist criticism, as the text is largely feminist. This study came in four hapters, preceded by an introduction and appended to a conclusion. The first chapter of the study provides a theoretical background for the basic research terms (format, culture, cultural context, cultural criticism, feminist criticism, and story).Considering these terms basic pillars in the research, they can be used as a starting point to define their concept and connotations, as well as their cognitive and historical context to illuminate the practical side. These terms are particularly the subject of a controversy and divergence in visions due to their association with post modernism, in which several concepts changed. Others appeared as "cultural criticism", raising various discussions as to proving its effectiveness and its denial in extracting the implicit formats.The latter has worked hard to investigate its manifestation in narrative texts by digging and stripping, according to multiple approaches criticals in practical chapters. The first practical chapter exposed one aspect of the uffering of the female with the male. It did not stop at the other/man as a party to the conflict. Rather, it went beyond to the authoritarian other An element loyal to the relationship of the intellectual with the authority after the defeat of June was also touched upon. The clashes that resulted from this tense relationship between the two parties often ended with the exclusion, imprisonment or deportation of the intellectual. The authority has also worked to exercise its might and operate its media mechanisms to mislead and maintain its existence and continuity, depending much more on the female as a sensory and physically influencing factor. In an other step in the research stages, the margin formats were clarified, the beginning of which was the marginalization of female writing by the male establishment, as though the female does not have the grounds for writing and expressing. However, Ghada Essamman defended this woman through a feminist writing in which she turned both sides of the equation and whitewashed misconceptions when, according to a feminist narrative, she withdrew the oman to the center so she became an actor, and pushed the man to the margin so that he became acted upon. This was clearly evident in the element of the centralization of the margin and the marginalization of the center. Also present is the social margin that revealed the class differentiation during that period as well as the uffering of the poor and marginalized classes from harsh social conditions. The research also made bare the internal psychological conflicts of the Arab man who lived through exceptional circumstances - conditions of war, lienation, emigration from the homeland, living in societies that differ in terms of customs and traditions, which formed a fragmentation in his identity, as a result of his failure to evade the mother's identity and his inability to adapt to his new conditions. Then the transition is made afterwards to the study of the value of the female hysique, being the source of sins and evils in the collective memory. It also discloses the female suffering, her subsequent marginalization, exclusion, live burial, oppression and disrespect by viewing her as a commodity or a means of seduction. These obstacles and prohibitions were created for the feminist entity,out of physical fear. They sought to undermine her femininity to keep pace with the desire of male society.On the other hand, the body brings up the identity in her battle with the authority. Moreover, Ghada did not limit herself to exposing the inferior view of the female body, but rather revealed the sanctity accorded to the male body to the extent of its deification, and centralization that make it a deterrent power. She then revealed the female suffering as a result of her strong belief that the case is greater than a (male, female) issue - when it is simply a core issue seeking to liberate the human subject as a whole from the old legacies, and set him free to build a new thought in which the male is liberated from his own worn out ideas to join modernity. In the end, it can only be said that the writings of Ghada Essamman, despite her wide readership and the academic research she gave rise to,did not stand as a barrier against the study of her works, especially the stories, according to postmodern pproaches that revealed the implications of the Arab culture and its patterns that control Arab taste,which is vident in the patterns of stories under study.