Poetics of Exile and Dislocation in Saad Elkhadem's Wings of Lead (1971), the Plague (1989), and Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian (1990-1992)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
He traveled abroad to quench his thirst for freedom, knowledge, and love, but his heavy wings could lift him no higher than a few feet before he fell down, shattering his dreams. (Saad Elkhadem; epigraph of Wings of Lead 1971) ABSTRACT/RESUME As indicate by the title, this paper deals with three of the works of Egyptian-Canadian writer Saad Elkhadem (1932-2003): Wings of Lead (1971/1994), The Plague (1989), and Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian (Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian 1990; Chronicle of the Flying Egyptian in Canada 1991; and Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian 1992). The focus is the transnational themes harboured in these experimental novels that seem to bear the mark of the political and the collective value of utterances. The underlying narrative techniques used in the making of these complex experimental, bilingual mini-novels (Arabic/English) will be highlighted in view of the writer's contribution to Arabic-Canadian literature, his reception in Canada, and the linguistic choices he faced as a minority writer. Tel que son titre l'indique, cet article a pour objet l'etude de trois romans experimentaux de l'ecrivain canadien d'origine egyptienne, Saad Elkhadem (1932-2003): Wings of Lead (1971/1994), The Plague (1989), and Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian (Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian 1990; Chronicle of the Flying Egyptian in Canada 1991; Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian 1992). Ces mini-romans parus darts des editions bilingues (Arabe/ Anglais) seront etudies quant a leurs themes sous-jacents (qui portent la marque du politique et la valeur collective de l'enonce) ainsi que les techniques narratives avancees par l'ecrivain. La contribution de ce dernier au corpus de la litterature canadienne d'origines arabes, sa reception au Canada et les choix linguistiques qu'il a effectuds, informent cette etude. INTRODUCTION This article's aim is multifold; its main purpose is to examine three of Saad Elkhadem's major novels, namely Wings of Lead (1971/1994), The Plague (1989), and Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian (1990-1992). The analysis underscores the major themes harboured in those innovative works, outlining the highly experimental narrative techniques used in their creation. Elkhadem's relatively recent death in 2003 engenders another goal, that of drawing a bio-bibliographical profile, including the public's reception of his abundant production, as well as the linguistic choices he faced as a Canadian multilingual minority writer. The place Saad Elkhadem holds among other Canadian writers of Arabic origin is also discussed. AUTHOR'S PROFILE Saad Elkhadem (1932-2003) was born in Cairo, Egypt, where he grew up and received his Bachelor of Arts degree. He earned his doctorate in Graz, Austria, and then worked for the government in both Egypt and Switzerland for a short while before teaching at the University of North Dakota. In 1968, he was hired as an associate professor in the Department of German at the University of New Brunswick (Canada) where he taught German and comparative literature. He spent the rest of his career there, attaining Professor Emeritus status in 1995. Elkhadem produced more than twenty-three books, of which fourteen are fiction (some are banned in Egypt), and the rest are reference books. He also translated works from German and Arabic into English, including in some instances, some of his own, such as Ajnihah min Rasas/Wings of Lead (1971/1994) and Rijal wa Khandzir, Men and Pigs (1967/1977), much in the tradition of Brecht and Beckett, who were themselves writers/translators of their own writing. Moreover, Elkhadem was an editor and an eminent publisher. As such, he was amongst those Egyptian-Canadian mediators (such as Alonzo and Naaman) who played a significant role in the transmission and diffusion of their own and other writers' products through the literary reviews and the publishing houses they founded. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".