عنوان المقالة English
المؤلف English
The study of place and environmental settings within human societies extends beyond mere topographical or geographical inquiry. Place can also be explored through cultural and intellectual lenses, particularly within the framework of literary criticism. As a socio-literary form, the novel not only recounts events but, in line with the theoretical perspectives of Paul Ricœur and Hayden White, engages in emplotment—the process of transforming disparate facts into a coherent narrative structure. This entails weaving together spatial environments and their associated events, vividly rendering their features so that they resonate alongside the characters, embodying life in its diversity, strengthening and enriching identity, and serving as a non-historical record of human experience. Shahad al-Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, one of the most prominent contemporary Iraqi novels, portrays the socio-cultural realities of Iraqi society within the context of war. The narrative situates Baghdad and its diverse locales at the center of events, allowing the city itself to shape the plot’s architecture. In doing so, the novel constructs a multi-dimensional representation of Baghdad as a site of intellectual, civilizational, and cultural identity for its people. This study employs a descriptive–analytical approach to examine the semantic and symbolic dimensions of place in The Baghdad Clock. It argues that the novel undertakes a form of historical emplotment by fusing reality with imagination to articulate the evolving identity of Iraqi society—particularly that of Baghdad—across temporal boundaries, from past to future. Through lived experience, the text conveys that the identity of place is inseparable from the identity of the individual. In the narrative, Baghdad emerges as an imaginative and vibrant space where locations become potent symbols of collective memory and belonging, actively contributing to character development and the formation of collective consciousness. The novel blends the real and the imagined to construct a resistant literary image of Baghdad and its locales, crafting a narrative identity rooted in pain, nostalgia, and hope. Locations—from the neighborhood to the Maʾmun Tower, from the grandmother’s house to Al-Zawraa Park and the Baghdad Clock—are reframed through the narrator’s personal memory, transforming into vessels of cultural, historical, and emotional significance that encapsulate the depth of the inhabitants’ collective experience.
الكلمات الرئيسية English
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