The Sound and the fury and ma Tabaqqa la-kum. (c2011)

Abstract

This study focuses mainly on the significance of free readership as juxtaposed against authorial intent through examining the linguistic elements of the narrative discourse shaping the fictional worlds of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Ghassan Kanafani’s ma Tabaqqa la-Kum (1966) (All That’s Left to You). To this effect, the study ventures on the methodology of deconstruction, precisely utilizing Michel Foucault’s notion of the author and Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on heteroglossia, in order to delve into the dramatic and psychological dimensions of the characters inhabiting the two fictional worlds in question. This approach entitles the reader as critic to scrutinize the primacy of language, and at the same time it dethrones and brings the Author back to the parade of readers. Eventually, several inter-textual links are drawn between the two apparently strictly “regional” works, which will stratify the concept that literary art transcends the locale and summarily all authorial idiosyncratic restrictions.