Abstract

Sobia Saleem

“Never Trust the Teller,” he said. “Trust the Tale”:

Narrative Technique from the Arabian Nights to Postmodern

Adaptations by Rabih Alameddine and Pier Pasolini

This thesis stems from an examination of Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati's embedded narrative structure. The roots of this structure reside in the Arabian Night's renowned frame structure, which can be traced to the Islamic aesthetic, primarily its textile culture and organization of the Quran. To further investigate framing, embedding, and interlacing as narrative techniques, the thesis draws upon discussions by M. M. Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Mieke Bal, and Gerald Prince, applying their ideas and definitions to Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. The postmodern text The Hakawati is then reexamined in reference to these backgrounds, and finally, Pier Pasolini's Arabian Nights is analyzed as a cinematic adaptation of the frame narrative.