During his stay in Egypt, the French Arabist Richard Jacquemont was able to form the research vision for this book so that he could return to France and write his doctoral thesis, which was discussed at the beginning of 1999 at the University of Aix-Marseille, entitled “The Egyptian Literary Field since 1967.” From this research nucleus, this book emerged. In its French language, it was then translated to be between
The hands of the Arab reader.
The book seeks to monitor and analyze the attempts of actors in the literary field to achieve independence, as all of these attempts fall within the narrow space that separates the intellectual’s vision of himself, his hopes and ambitions, from the vision and expectations of the authority and its desire to benefit from him and from him as the conscience of the nation, or its endeavor to
Domesticating, marginalizing or silencing it.
Did the Egyptian intellectual want independence from the institution in protest against its practices that did not enable him to engage in it, or was he convinced of the idea on the cognitive level? This is what the writer discusses, starting from the sixties of the last century until the end of the nineties, by reviewing the Egyptian cultural scene and reading its reality during the clash with the literary, political and social field.
Richard Jacquemont is a French Arabist and distinguished academic, who studies contemporary Arabic language and literature at the University of Aix-en-Provence (France). He is a professional translator who has translated many Arabic novels, especially Egyptian ones. Jacquemont also spent more than fifteen years in Egypt, where he learned and mastered Arabic, and worked as director of the translation department at the French Cultural Mission. He contributed to translating more than a hundred books from French to Arabic, in addition to... A number of translations in the opposite direction.
