Emotion in Postmodernism and Beyond : Autobiographic metafiction in two Egyptian novels of the 1990s (Nūrā Amīn and Muṣṭafā Dhikrī)

Abstract

Are there emotions left in Postmodernism? And if so, which consequences do they have for postmodernist assumptions? This study approaches the experimental writing of the Egyptian ‘Generation of the 90s’ as a rather unstudied example of postmodern Arab writing. It focusses on two major representatives of autobiographic metafiction – i.e. fiction about the fiction(s) of the self – and pays particular attention to emotions before, during and after the process of writing the self. Relying on the Appraisal Theory of Emotion, this essay retraces the tight interactions between writing and feeling and between writing emotion and writing the self –and thereby challenges some postmodernist assumptions on the self.