Under the patronage of the Dean of the College, Prof. Dr. Majid Abdul Hameed Al Kaabi, and within the Cultural Unit program at the college, Prof. Dr. Mohamed Najib Al-Amami, Professor of Narration at the University of Sousse in Tunis, delivered a lecture entitled: “The Perspective on the Phonetic Approach” on Wednesday evening, 5/1/2022.
The lecture included a detailed explanation of the developments in the concept of the point of view, which was settled in its structural form by Gerard Gent, and later developed by critics such as Alain Rapatal. Those tried to get the concept out of the narrow textual boundaries, which were confined by structuralism, to more effective meanings related to society and other fields of knowledge such as linguistics and discourse analysis, taking advantage of linguistics after dystopianism that tried to look at language in circulation, and in communication, seeing the language as a discourse influences by circumstances of speech, and responds to it by choosing the appropriate form to reach the aim of the speech. Accordingly, Dr. Al-Amami reviewed the perspective on the phonetic approach, by linking it to the narrator’s vision once, and then to the speaking person, and their awareness, speaking about the patterns that result from this, applying this to examples from the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Adwar Al-Kharrat, concluding the need to benefit from linguistics modernizing narrative criticism, in understanding the relationship between perspective and narrative, in formulation and vision, and in deducing narrative’s position on the world, values and ideology.
Dr. Al-Amami has a number of important books in the field of narration: The Narrator in Contemporary Arab Narration (2001), On Description Between Theory and the Narrative Text (first edition 2005 and second edition 2010), Research in Arabic Narrative (2005), Narrative Discourse Analysis (2010), Subjectivity in Narrative Discourse (2011), Structure and Significance in the Novel (2013), Lectures on Narrative (2020), Plot and Fiction Techniques (2021). He translated: The Language of the Story, Introduction to Verbal Narratives, Linguistic Exercises for the Literary Text, Narrative Genres, Narration of Texts and their Genders. He also co-authored the reference book: The Dictionary of Narratives, published in 2010.
It is worth mentioning that the Cultural Program at the College of Arts hosted a number of Arab and foreign professors in the fields of translation, philosophy and Arabic language, in an attempt to exchange scientific, cultural and academic experiences between the college’s researchers and professors, and other researchers, on the Arab and international levels.
