The Motif of Metalanguage in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Novel Shadow Play

Abstract

The re-examination of language and its manifold roles, manifestations and ways of perceiving it, is among the foremost motifs in the metafictional and experimental novel Shadow Play (’Aẖyilatal-ẓill) by Mansoura Ez Eldin (b. 1976), one of the Egyptian writers of the younger generation. The novel Shadow Play, first published in Arabic in 2017, and translated into Serbian as Priviđenja iz senke in 2019 (published by Geopoetika), has all the features of contemporary Arabic experimental prose, in which metalinguistic considerations abound. This paper deals with the motif of language in two of its most striking realizations in the novel. These are, on the one hand, language as the metalanguage of literature, where the author reflects on the very act of writing and creativity and literary and artistic use of language, and the other metalanguage as a personal linguistic experience, as the material from which memory is created, where the author deals with the relationship of language and identity.
In the course of analysis, we relied on general theoretical reflections on metafiction and metalanguage of Waugh, Federman and Hutcheon, as well as the most relevant Arabist literary studies of metafictional modernist and postmodernist works in Arabic literature, those by Musawi and Caiani. We point out the most striking examples of Ez Eldin’s original ways of transforming metalanguage into one of the central motifs of her metafictional novel. The analysis of selected indicates that the author viewed both manifestations of the metalanguage motif from an epistemological as well as from an ontological perspective, as she dealt with the strength, potential, meaning and scope of language, both in literature and personal linguistic experience.