Historical Imagination between Text and Power: Tamer Rady’s Novel “Alwabbas” as a Model

Abstract

History represents a fertile, necessary field for the narrative imagination to work on, which is rather reread and interpreted in light of contemporary data. It is not surprising, thus, that history constitutes the main idea around which the novel “Alwabbas” revolves, which reads the contemporary political scene in light of the term “historical imagination”. The objective of the study examines the duality of text and power to demonstrate its effectiveness in representation and depiction, reveal its semantic dimensions in reading the manifestations of power and the form of its presence in the political rendering in light of the novelistic text, besides its ability to open an unrestricted horizon for writing as stated in “The Novel Al-“Wabbas” by Tamer Rady as a Model." The study adopted narrative semiotics and the Greimasian perspective, due to the abundance of characters, events, plots, diversity of places. The study concluded that historical imagination is effective in representation and depiction, as the title formed a representative discourse of authority in all its relations: religious, cultural, mythological, and political. The study concluded that historical imagination is effective in representation and depiction, as the title formed a representative discourse of authority in all its relations: religious, cultural, mythological, and political, which revealed the nature of authoritarian regimes, just as the strategy of language and naming revealed the mechanism of the formation of cultural, religious, and mental systems in understanding authority and the position towards it in loyalty and confrontation. The effectiveness of historical imagination and its metaphorical dimension emerged in the entire scene of the geography of Ras al-Khayl, as it revealed an ancient and new historical and existential conflict, which is the conflict between the Persians and the Romans.