Symbol of Males and Females as Social Actors in Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley: A CDA Study

Abstract

This paper has aimed to investigate representation of gender roles in Naguib
Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, a novel originally written in Arabic, in terms of critical
discourse analysis by applying Fairclough's (2001) three-dimensional model as
well as drawing onVan Leeuwen's (2008) representation of social actors. The
purpose of the study is firstly to find out which of the two genders has been more
frequently portrayed as the primary social actor in the text; and, secondly, to
unveil the ideological orientations behind certain gender-related linguistic choices
in the discourse of the novel –that is, by analyzing the text on the basis of
linguistic instances like male/female proper names, male/female honorifics,
genders’ fitness in order of appearance in the text or in mixed-gender dialogues,
appraising lexical items describing characters, and characters ‘physical
identification. The findings of the analysis of the text revealed that the dominant
discourse in Midaq Alley is mainly male-oriented in almost all of the genderrelated instances under investigation