Katara Book Fair Attracts Large Audience

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) The Peninsula

Doha, Qatar: In its ninth session, the Katara Festival for Arabic novel continued its many activities, while the Katara book Fair attracted an audience who loved reading, and 23 publishing houses and libraries and destinations interested in culture and heritage participated in the first edition of the event.

In addition to 13 publishing houses and 6 libraries, entities interested in publishing, such as museums, also participated.“Qatar Reads,” an initiative of the Qatar National Library, the Hassan bin Mohammed Center for Historical Studies, and the International Relations Forum in Katara are among such organisations.

The exhibitions that were held on the sidelines of the festival received public attention, including an exhibition of the biography and career of Ihsan Abdel Quddous, women in his novels, and an exhibition of creatives. These exhibitions included quotes from Ihsan's novels, along with the most prominent posters for cinema films adapted from his novels, in addition to the participation of artists from Egypt, Iraq and Algeria.

On a related level, a symposium was held on Sunday in Hall 12, entitled:“Language Techniques in Novel Narration,” in cooperation with the Qatari Arabic Language Association, in which both Prof. Moulay Youssef Al Idrissi, Professor of Criticism at Qatar University, and Dr. Muhammad Mustafa Selim, Associate Professor, spoke.

In the Department of Arabic Language at Qatar University, Prof. Dr. Murad Abdel Rahman Mabrouk, Professor of Criticism and Theory at Qatar University, and the symposium was moderated by novelist Jamal Fayez.

The symposium dealt with three axes: the first dealt with the aesthetics of linguistic formation in the novel“The Season of the Hunting of the Zigzags” by the Moroccan writer Ismail Ghazali. The second axis discussed language and imagination in constructing the narrative event, while the third axis dealt with linguistic geopolitics in the Arabic novel in light of colonial theory.

In the beginning, Prof. Dr. Moulay Youssef Al Idrissi discussed the novel“The Hunting Season of the Zangur” by the Moroccan writer Ismail Ghazali, which he considered a wondrous and wonderful labyrinthine novel. It adopted a brilliant and exciting narrative program that took the skill of description, the accuracy of depiction, the depth of focus, the intertwining of events, and the overlapping and reproducing of stories as the subject and scope of the narrative.

Dr. Muhammad Mustafa Selim spoke about language and imagination in constructing the narrative event, by answering an important question related to the narrative action, which is: To what extent can language constitute an experimental horizon? Considering that language is not only a medium, but rather a constantly present component, through which the work of fiction is controlled, and the event is presented in an unconventional manner.

In turn, Prof. Dr. Murad Abdel Rahman Mabrouk published a paper on linguistic geopolitics in the Arabic novel, by studying the relationship between linguistic geopolitics and colonial theory, and applying it to the Arabic novel, explaining that the term geopolitics means analysing international political relations in light of the geographical conditions and structure, while linguistic geopolitics is related to how the influence Geopolitics on language and literature, and how these factors can be used to create narratives and literary works that express geopolitical issues and challenges.

This paper addressed the factors that led to the spread of linguistic geopolitics in the literary text, which are political, social, technological, cultural, and other factors.

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