THE NOVELS OF TAWFIQ Al-HAKIM: Princeton University Senior Thesis in the Department of Oriental Studies. 1969 - Paperback

by Denis Hoppe (Author)

Denis Hoppe shows how the tripping, musical language and sensuous beauty of Egyptian women led Tawfiq Al-Hakim to try to put the spoken Egyptian Language into his novels for the first time. He discusses, Hakim's Enchantment with women in Arab Egypt's history, and shows how Hakim uses the Arabic language in all the power of the colloquial to develop a love story of a crush a young boy had on his piano teacher into the novel that is said to have been Gamal Abdel Nasser's favorite, and is still permitted reading in the conservative Gulf states, who have always been opposed to Arab nationalism. Thus, Denis Hoppe's 1969 Senior thesis for the Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University is an essay in literary criticism of the novels of Tawfiq Al-Hakim, containing occasional quotations from Hakims's novels to show the reviewer's point of view--some in Arabic script and some in English script in the reviewer's translation. European (mainly British) critics, as well as Arab critics are cited from the Arabic equivalents of the Reader's Guide to Periodical literature; and the Arabic periodicals were easily available in the Princeton University Library, as they are in big-city libraries in the US. The style of this essay was common at the time when writing about literature in a foreign language often quoted whole pages directly in the original language, at the oppressed woman's housewife-secretary rate of 60 words a minute, typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter with it's interchangeable steel ball that typed the characters for full professors and text-book writers at the time. The reviewer, as a student, did not have the means to buy an IBM Selectric and did the Arabic by hand. Now that fonts are easily available, this essay, with the handwritten script now as an Arabic digital font should be of interest to both high school and college students today, who have at their fingertips fonts in many languages, and thus the writing of such essays in civil discourse between English and foreign languages and literatures with the appropriate fonts and scripts is much less expensive than it was with those IBM Selectrics. Chapter 1-Introduction to the life and Works of Tawfiq Al-Hakim; Chapter 2-The Eastern Enchantment; Chapter 3-Hakim's Patriotic Concerns; Chapter 4-Hakim's View of Life; Conclusion; Bibliography of Biographical and Critical Works on Hakim; Appendix: Chronological Listing of Hakim's Main Work. Denis Hoppe was first introduced to Hakim's Yomiyyat Na'ib fi'al-Aryaf (Diary of a Country Prosecutor) while he was a NUPOSA--National (US) Undergraduate Program for the Study of Arabic--student in the 10-month translator's course at the former British Foreign Service Arabic Center in Shemlan, Lebanon, MECAS (Middle East Centre for the Study of Arabic). He lived with Nazle and George Jabbour in Shemlan, which is also the town where Philip Hitti, then Professor Emeritus at Princeton was from. In thinking to himself of how saying something more personal might interest readers in buying his essay, The Novels of Tawfiq Al-Hakim, the writer said, in his own words this week before Valentine's Day February 2017: "While at Shemlan, my archaeology friend, Mike Schmidt, who founded Carcanet Press, now in Manchester, where he publishes young poets and writes, came to visit me and we both made a trip to upper Egypt. To visit the Middle Kingdom tombs, in Beni Hassan, we got off the train from Cairo in Mellawi, I think, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with only a 5-room hotel and a police station on the corniche facing the Nile. But some intellectuals heard about us and they came to our hotel They told us about how there was nothing to do there, and took us on an evening spin in their 1950's old Packard to show us the green fields, in the evening. I have always associated that little town and that evening with what the town in Yomiyyat was like, and where Hakim, himself was a country prosecutor, having just come back from law st

Author Biography

Denis Hoppe, is an archaeologist with a special interest in the written literature surrounding material, on site, archaeology. Unable to study archaeology, per se, in the US, he did his BA at Princeton University in Oriental Studies, and began moving his archaeological interests from Classical Greece and Rome to the Gothic and Medieval periods in France and Egypt, benefitting from a research scholarship in Islamic Architecture at the American University in Cairo. He did his MA in Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, where his work as a medieval archaeologist on archeological sites in Egypt and Syria was recognized, making the Urban Planning Degree an MA with emphasis on history of cities. He is currently writing a book on Near Eastern archaeology, with citations from literature collected with his scanner and saved to hard drives while moving from place to place teaching English in Saudi Arabia. . He decided to publish his Princeton thesis, partly as an exercise in nostalgia for the days of index cards, typewriters and carbon copies that became HyperCard stacks, printing fonts and "cut and paste,"; and partly to see how the 1969 thesis, though naive, is actually quite good in the way it uses the Arabic equivalent of the typical local American library, "Guide to Periodicals," to cite what others have said on the essay one is writing.