ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses three novels issued from the literary avant-garde that surfaced in Egypt in the 1970s and 1990s. Sharaf (1996), by Ṣun‘allāh Ibrāhīm, is a novel from the “second narrative phase” of a pioneer author of the historical avant-garde of the ’60s. The novel is read here as an anti-Bildung set in a prison, where the (anti)hero’s emotional draining is the only transformation to occur. Faraj (2008, Blue Lorries, 2014) by Raḍwā ‘Āshūr is a generational novel, where the experiences of the 1970s student is portrayed in the wavering movement of the protagonist and narrator’s memory. Al-Khibā’ (1996, The Tent 1998) by Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī portrays the painful growing up of young Fāṭima, raised without emotional care in a family of sedentary Bedouins, as a contemporary anti-heroine.
The chapter shows how, while the “Sixties Generation” introduced the figure of the “motionless” character, the women authors of the 1970s reclaimed certain pattens of the Bildungsroman in a vivid and many-voiced narration. The “Nineties Generation” offers, in turn, an intimist writing where the boycott of the narrative of development is unfailingly portrayed alongside the (almost literal) dismantling both of the function of the character and the very concept of the telos.
