Dictating the Narrative and Resisting Dictatorships in Saᶜdī’s Novel al-Aᶜẓam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Ibrāhīm Saᶜdī’s novel, al-Aᶜẓam, in the context of dictator novels. I argue that Saᶜdī utilizes the forms and modes of narration to dictate, or tell, a story against dictatorship and resist oppressive domination. The novel, I suggest, marginalizes and parodies the voice of the dictator and centralizes the voice of marginalized characters in the overall narrative structure by utilizing a “dictatorial” form which permits who can and cannot speak. And by assuming the role of a dictator, the novel creates room for maneuver to not only resist closures but also to represent and critique the dissemination and repression of national history under autocratic and repressive powers. The article also shows how writers exploit the reader’s ability to relive the past vicariously through the act of reading to suggest the implicit demythologization of dictators.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".