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Article published In: Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 13:1 (2022) ► pp.45–66

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A sociopragmatic account of religiosity and secularity in fictional narratives

 | Gulf University for Science and Technology
Published online: 21 March 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.19070.els
Abstract
This paper investigates the religiosity/secularity dichotomy in Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, which is shaped by cultural narratives that convey his ideas. It analyzes a defined corpus of Mahfouz’s narratives that articulate his notions of religiosity/secularity. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining the application of pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, and contextual analysis, it aims to determine Mahfouz’s potentiality for perceiving and narrativizing religiosity and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. It discusses how Mahfouz adopts sociopragmatic techniques to give a bright picture of the secularist discourse but a negative one for the Islamist one presented as inevitably incapable, crude, schizophrenic and idiosyncratic. Mahfouz openly destabilizes the religious/secular dichotomy by juxtaposing religious and secular discourses in his early and later narratives, where he scrutinizes secularity, advocating it as the only way out of and uprooting, religiosity. The adoption of an interdisciplinary framework proves to be theoretically and empirically motivated in order to show how Mahfouz’s narratives reflect their originator’s own beliefs and those of the narrated society, including its value systems.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Rationale and study questions
  • 3.Theoretical framework
    • 3.1Interactional sociolinguistics
    • 3.2The pragmatics framework
  • 4.The dichotomy of religiosity and secularity in Mahfouz’s narratives
    • 4.1Religiosity and secularity in Mahfouz’s early narratives
    • 4.2Religiosity and Secularity in Mahfouz’s later narratives
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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