‏ " التّحوّل المجتمعيّ في رواية جبّور الدّويهي‏ ‏ حيّ الأميركان"‏

Abstract

The subject of this research is the city and its metamorphosis in the novel "The Neighborhood of Americans" for the Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaihy. This metamorphosis has rendered Douaihy’s Lebanese city, Tripoli, an incubator for some terrorist cells, and contributed to the rehabilitation of some of its youth.

"The Neighborhood of Americans" is a narrative representation of the Arab society of Tripoli, amid its awake on terrorism and how to address it. In that sense, the novel possesses a formative connotation in the concepts of self, identity, authority and culture. It also indicates that its narrative representation is not limited to a historical and local significance, but rather transcends it to the universal and the general, and includes it in the critical reading of a part of the local and national history.

Therefore, this approach seeks to highlight the relationship between the general transformation that afflicted the city’s society, in all its circles, components and personalities, and to investigate and clarify the manifestations of the subsequent transformation and its relations, ending with a productive social interpretation, in the hope that it will be able to reach the significance that the novel sought to generate.

The method adopted, in this research, is the descriptive-analytical textual method and its semiotic narrative structure, which follows up on what the text narrates, and reads its deep formations and the programs of its characters, to contain its connotations and interpretation, based on the content of the story, in order to show the transformation that struck deep in the city / the representation of an entire nation.