Resumen de “Scheherazade goes West”: between creativity and imitation
Literary creativity resembles an interconnected series of human creations. The fact that, in literary texts, what comes before a story is similar to what follows does not mean that the authors’ signature on a book epitomizes their own creation. It is fair to argue that this claim does not ignore literary texts’ uniqueness; however, it stresses their impurity, their capability to influence other texts and to be influenced by them.
Hence, each creative text, whatever its genre, is an outcome of series of previous influences that the text undertakes through different other texts and different other people, who had been themselves previously influenced by a thing or another.
This engenders the impotance of “intertextuality theory” in literature because it tries to observe as well as to highlight the texts’ direct or indirect interrelation to other texts. Using “intertextuality theory”, this article tries to explore, to investigate, and to scrutinize the series of influences that a text goes through. In order to achieve this goal, this article examines one of the most prominent Arabic literary narratives that conquers world literature: One Hundred and One Nights. The book influences world literary tradition by its creativity, wittiness, and diversity; it creates worldly cultural symbols via timeless characters viz. Sindbad, Aladdin, and Alibaba among many others. This article, hence, tracks OneHundred and One Nights’ effect on Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West.
Mernissi book symbolizes a sub-text to One Hundred and One Nights especially through Mernissi’s attempt to mention the text’s storyteller in the title: Scheherazade. Therefore, this study highlights instances of transtextuality in Mernissi’s book, as mentioned by Gérard Genette, which he demarcates in the following concepts: intertextuality, metatextuality, paratextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality.
This article exposes Mernissi’s literary uniqueness as well as Mernissi’s imitation of One Hundred and One Nights, examines the ways intertextuality empowers Mernissi’s intellectual and emancipatory journey, and underscores the borderline between creativity and imitation. Therefore, this study sheds light on the ability of intertextuality to demarcate the borderline between texts although their interconnectedness and to embrace similarities and difference vis-à-vis the same topics, which signals the text’s uniqueness and splendour.
