Representative Images of Saudi Arabia and Saudis: An Imagological Study of Some Selected Novels in English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The image of the Orient has been a “construct” of the West, emerging from a dualistic dichotomy of East versus West, or the subject encountering the “Other”—the subservient other that needs the “civilizing mission” of the West (mission civilisatrice in the sarcastic words of Edward Said). In the contemporary scene, the images of Saudi Arabia and the Saudis in western novelistic discourse has not displayed much change, or it may have taken different forms under the effect of the demise of the old colonialism and the prevalence of globalization, especially in the cultural sphere. The Orient has woven itself into Western culture through translations and English-language writings, shaping its own image and sparking significant interest due to the substantial political and economic influence of contemporary Saudi Arabia. The current study investigates some representative images of Saudi Arabia and Saudis in Anglophone narratives of English-speaking novelists, native Saudis’ novels in English, and translations of Native Saudis’ novels. This adds a discussion of the image of the orient created by the orient itself. In analysing these images, the study explores numerous examples, comparing and contrasting them in the manner of imagology, with special reference to three representative narratives: Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), Ghazi Al-Gosaibi’s Freedom Apartment (1994/1996), and Eman Quotah’s Bride of the Sea (2021).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".