Scenography in the Novelistic Narrative: A Cultural Reading of Ismail Fahd Ismail's Novel "Al-Sabiliyat"

Abstract

This article investigates three fields of knowledge that seem distant from one another: scenography as a visual theatrical art, narrative as a discursive art, and critical discourse analysis as an analysis of discursive and social practices. It reveals a deep convergence underlying this distance, since all three answer two questions: how do humans produce meaning to represent the world, and how do they use that meaning to reproduce, stabilize, or destabilize social relations? The study opens with an introduction to scenography and its uses in theater and narrative. The first section examines the scenography of space and its relation to identity, social relations, and the structure of time amid conflicting social actors. The second section addresses audio-visual scenography—sound and lighting as mechanisms producing epistemic systems and social relations—drawing on "discursive normalization," borrowed from Fairclough's dialectical-relational approach. The conclusion affirms the need for cultural studies to remain open to discourse analysis