The Discourse of Hegemony in Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Neighborhood: A Conceptual and Analytical Study

Abstract

Modern Arabic literature is rich in knowledge and literary works that address significant societal issues, whether they are social, cultural, political, or educational. Many novels have demonstrated, through their language, characters, and central themes, that hegemonic discourse plays a pivotal role in shaping and revealing the plots and issues they address. One such example is Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Children of the Neighborhood, which explores various dimensions of hegemony at the familial level through parental authority, as well as at the level of social power and class conflict. This study aims to identify manifestations of hegemonic discourse in the characters’ dialogues of the novel and to examine how the author employs such discourse to represent power, control, and domination. This study adopts an analytical methodology to examine the novel through observation and note-taking as the primary research tools. The novel is analysed from this perspective through the adoption of Gramsci’s (1971) theory of cultural hegemony. As this study is conceptual, it is guided by several hypotheses that seek to determine the validity of the following assumptions. First, Naguib Mahfouz employs hegemonic discourse to reveal the nature and varying degrees of dominance utilised by the characters in the novel. Second, hegemonic discourse in the novel reflects the social and cultural factors that influence the lexical choices made by the characters, thereby representing the reality of conflict among different social groups as they interact and communicate with one another. Third, the writer of the novel seeks to demonstrate how his society responds to this type of linguistic structure and how it perceives it, whether through acceptance or rejection. The study recommends that future researchers examine the novel from a sociolinguistic perspective, with particular attention to the social influences that shape the nature of dialogue among the characters according to their social roles, class positions, and levels of authority.