College of Arts / Department of English Language and Literature

Dr Wasfi Raja Ibrahim Shoqairat


Professor
Dr Wasfi Raja Ibrahim Shoqairat

Curriculum Vitae
  • Major: The Modern Novel
  • College: College of Arts
  • Department(s): English Language and Literature Department
  • E-mail: Wasfi.Shoqairat@ahu.edu.jo
  • Phone No.: 032179000 فرعي 7439

Wasfi Shoqairat, a professor of English literature, was awarded his English Literature PhD from Birmingham City University- United Kingdom in 2006 for a thesis which researched representations of Arabia and North Africa in twentieth century English novels and prose. He teaches English Literature at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University in Jordan. His research interests are interdisciplinary and include Medieval literature, post-colonial studies, modern novel.

Although my PhD field was in the area of modern novel in the twentieth century, I am also interested in other areas of Literature such as postcolonial literature, literary theory, and magical realism. Moreover, my future plan is to conduct more academic research papers, rather the ones that I published worldwide, on travel writing, ethnic literature, and postmodernism.

The Twisted Mother-Daughter Relationship in Jawaher Al Rafaia’s ‘The Gypsies and the Girl’ (1989) and Alifa Rifaat’s ‘Thursday Lunch’ (1983)
  • Research Summary
    • In a relationship of mother and daughter, the distorted negative image of mother, as both a victim and a guardian of the patriarchal norms, becomes a constituent part of both the literary and the sociocultural context of humanity. By comparing the various images of mother in Jawaher Al Rafaia's 'The Gypsies and The Girl' and Alifa Rifaat's 'Thursday Lunch', this study tries to show that motherhood is practiced under the hegemonic force of the patriarchal norms, despite of the social cultural changes in the postmodernist age. The distorted image of mother in relationship of mother and daughter is enhanced by the patriarchal ideology that is still repeatedly depicted and produced. Among many others, notions like family honor, female traditional role, overprotectiveness, displacement of women for the sake of being with their husband and the concept of being a good mother are all tools used by the patriarchal ideology to control mother/ daughter connection and shape its details. The patriarchal motherhood which puts daughters in a frame to meet the society's expectations, which raises daughters as copies of mothers, which prepares daughters to marry and to 1 be good housewives, and which neglects daughters' needs and deprives them from a model to identify are all explored in this study.
  • Research link
  • key words
    relationship, mother, daughter, distorted image, patriarchal society, postmodernism.
Between Orientalism and Post-modernism: Robert Irwin's Fantastic Representations in The Arabian Nightmare
  • Research Summary
    • This article considers Robert Irwin’s representation of the nature of Oriental dreams, nightmares and storytelling in the medieval city of Cairo during the Mamluk period in his novel The Arabian Nightmare (2003). Through a process of close textual analysis and an application of germane theoretical frameworks (drawn from the study of Fantasy and Postmodern thought) we argue that Irwin forges a innovative link between the medieval Oriental world and contemporary post-modern culture in the West in order to destabilise what had become a Western ‘comfort zone’ concerning the East. Throughout the novel, Irwin uses the tools of historiographic metafiction to challenge the belief that Cairo's mysteries had been discovered by the beginning of the twenty first century and that the city could be completely known and understood by its Western observers, enmeshed in epistemological systems of scientific rationality and empirical knowledge.
  • Research link
  • key words
    Orientalism, Postmodernism, Robert Irwin, Arabia, nightmares, rationality, West
The Disintegrated Identities in the Orient of the Post-war American Fiction: Paul Bowles’ Character Dyar as an Example in Let it Come Down
  • Research Summary
    • Abstract This paper discusses Bowles’ philosophical accounts of the psychological destruction of the unwary American pilgrims who seek a new life in North Africa. In his novel, Let It Come Down (1952), he demonstrates innovative traits for dealing with the macabre and the cruel oriental landscape by presenting it as being responsible for the disintegration of his American heroes. The paper takes Bowles’ character, Nelson Dyar from Let It Come Down, and analyses it in terms of disintegrated identities in the orient of the Post-American war era. Indeed, Dyar, an American bank clerk, descends into the sordid underworld of Tangiers’ dope inferno. By escaping from the monotony of his dead-end job in the States, Dyar; promised a job within a travel agency in Tangiers, hopes for a relocation which delivers him from the sense of dejection he had been suffering. Arriving in Tangiers, Dyar starts posing those recurrent questions of whether or not Tangiers is the right place to relocate and allow him to find meaning to his existence. By the end of the novel, Dyar, the representative of the modern West, has hammered his companion’s head by a nail; he has finally destroyed the oriental other. The paper will show how the novel resists this and instead we cannot finally judge if Dyar is happy or unhappy since we are left only with the chilling weather and the endless rain.
  • Research link
  • key words
    disintegrated identities; post American war era; character Dyar; Paul Bowles; Let It Come Down
‘ “Sahib, you are no longer a guest . . . You are one of the family”: Wilfred Thesiger and the ‘Problem’ of Participant Observation’
  • Research Summary
    • This article examines Wilfred Thesiger’s second text The Marsh Arabs (1964) through the prism of participant observation. More specifically, we explore the, at times, complex self-depiction of Thesiger’s relationship with the Madan tribes’ people. Thesiger’s rapport with the Madan, we argue, offers a decidedly more nuanced engagement than might at first appear. Indeed, while it is possible to read Thesiger’s account of his time in the southern area of Iraq in The Marsh Arabs as adhering to many of the established and entrenched critical ideas concerning the behaviour of Western explorers in the Middle East (imperialist nostalgia, the trope of self-discovery, romanticism), the text also allows for less ‘conventional’ readings. Though Thesiger, like his predecessors, intended both to reify and narrativize the Arabs, thereby documenting their lives for an occidental audience, his first hand engagement with the Madan gives rise to a host of paradoxes that create a more balanced account of this vanishing people’s way of life.
  • Research link
  • key words
    Participant observation, anthropology and literature, Wilfred Thesiger, Orientalism, Arabia
Lucky Jim: The Novel in Unchartered Times
  • Research Summary
    • Kingsley Amis’ satire on academic life, Lucky Jim (1954) was published at a time of almost unprecedented and (as yet) never repeated social upheaval in Britain. Clement Attlee’s landslide Labour victory in 1945 had led to the introduction of a comprehensive program of reform, including the introduction of the National Health Service, child benefit and old age pensions, an increase in the amount of social housing and the nationalisation of several of Britain’s industries. His government also presided over the decolonisation of a large part of the British Empire. This transformation of British society was intended to be profound; the labour party manifesto of 1945 states that ‘The nation needs a tremendous overhaul’ (Labour Party Manifesto 1945) and changes in the political landscape were soon accompanied by changes in the artistic and cultural life of Britain. The so called ‘Angry Young Men’ popularised ‘kitchen sink’ realism as the Modernist era fell into decline. David Lodge describes this as a struggle between ‘contemporaries’ (Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe etc.) and ‘moderns’ (William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell etc.) and he notes in Language of Fiction (1966) that the immediate post-war era represented a debate on ‘the meaning of the word ‘life’. Lodge explains that ‘Life to the contemporary is what common sense tells us it is, what people do […] To the modern, life is something elusive, baffling, multiple, subjective’ (245).
  • Research link
  • key words
    ,Lucky Jim, Postmodernism, Novel, post-war debates

· A conference on modern travel writing, ‘Writing Journeys and Places: Tourists, Pilgrims, Ethnographers’ (Trinity College, Oxford University, UK, 10 April, 2003) · A conference on travel writing and anthropology, ‘Travel and Trauma Colloquium’ (Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland 17-18/4/2009) · English Language Teaching Methodology (British Council, Amman, 2000-2001) · Learning and Motivation (Islamic Education Schools, Amman, 1998-2001) · Curricula Design (Islamic Education Schools, Amman, 1998-2001) · ISO Quality Teaching Certificate (2001) · Academic Proposal Writing (The Higher Council of Science and Technology, Jordan, 2010) · E-learning Distinguished Instructors (National E-learning Centre-Saudi Arabia, 2018)

· Member of the recruitment committee in The English/ Library Department at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (2008) · Chairman and member of several academic committees in The Department of English Language and Literature at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University · Chairman and member of the student union’s election committee at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University for the years (2007, 2011, 2012) · Chairman and member of the student disciplinary committee in the Faculty of Arts at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University for the period (2008-2010) · Chairman of the employees appeals council at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (2011) · Member of various student disciplinary committees at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University · Member of the Editorial Board of Al-Hussein Bin Talal's Journal for Research (2013) · Member of the committee appointed to revise the program plan for The Department of English Language- King Faisal University (2015-16) · Member of the quality assurance committee/ The Department of English Language- King Faisal University (2015-16) · Member of the Editorial Board of the Scientific Journal of King Faisal University (2015-2019) · An academic referee for AHU Journal for Research (2019-Current time) · An academic referee for International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES) (2019-Current time) · Member of the English language Proficiency Test for Postgraduate Students at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University – Jordan (2019-2021)

MA Dissertations Supervised 1- Maysoon Kreishan – MA Comparative Literature at Al-Hussein bin Talal University– a dissertation entitled (The Distorted Image of Mother in Mother/Daughter Relationship: A Comparative Study of Four Female Writers’ Short Stories in the Age of Postmodernism) (May 2021) 2- Rahaf Elshqeirat - MA Comparative Literature at Al-Hussein bin Talal University – a dissertation entitled (Imperialist Nostalgia and the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse in Selected Works by Wilfred Thesiger, Paul Bowles, and Albert Camus: A Comparative Study) (May 2022) MA Dissertations Examined 1- Khadijah A Abdulaziz – MA Translation at King Faisal University – a dissertation entitled (The Translation of Metaphors in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss: A Functional Approach) (August 2018) 2- Sodfa Abdullah - MA Comparative Literature at Al-Hussein bin Talal University – a dissertation entitled (Islamic Origins of Edwin Arnold’s Pearls of Faith) (January 2022)

· A member of the technical team appointed to launching Mu’tah University’s website (1998) [www.mutah.edu.jo] · Teaching English Language at The Islamic Educational Schools – Amman/ Jordan (1998-2001) · Teaching English Literature in The Department of English Language and Literature at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University – Jordan (2006 – 2014) (2019-….) · Teaching English Literature in The Department of English Language at King Faisal University – Saudi Arabia (2014 – 2019) · Head of The Department of English Language and Literature, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (2008-2009) · Vice Dean of The Academic Research and Higher Studies, Al-Hussein Bin Talal University (2012-2013) · Translating and proofreading from English into Arabic and Arabic/English in the private sector as a part time and freelance translator/ proof-reader in Birmingham - UK for the years (2002-2006) · Working at The Exam Centre/ The Deanship of E-Learning and Distance Education - King Faisal University (2014 – 2019) · Refereeing a number of academic articles for The Scientific Journal of King Faisal University (2014 – 2019) · Working for the English language Proficiency Test for Postgraduate Students at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University – Jordan (2019-2021)

Courses Taught (BA Level) · Aural-Oral Skills · Advanced Writing · Introduction to English Literature · An Outline of English and American Literature · British and American Novel · Modern English Novel · The Rise of the English Novel · British and American Drama · British and American Poetry · Literary Text Analysis · Shakespeare and the Renaissance · English Short Story · Writing a Research Paper · World Literature · Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory · Children Literature · Seventeenth Century Literature · English Literature of the Renaissance · An Introduction to American Literature Courses Taught (MA Level) · Arabic Literature and The Quran in a Comparative English Context · Postcolonial Studies · Literary Orientalism · Construction of Identity in World Literature · Exilic Writings · Comparative World Literature

My Philosophy of Teaching Teaching is an interactive process between the teacher and learner. The teacher is a co-learner in that process. As a teacher, it is my goal to enhance the students' learning. Learning is as important as teaching because I believe everyone can learn and everyone wants to learn, but each one uses a different way and style to learn. My belief, if a teacher wants to be professional and excellent in his teaching work, he/she needs to be a good learner first, as a good teacher is a good learner. Ideally, I want students to feel personally changed by their participation in a course I am teaching. In my current classroom, I use the first two sentences as a starting point for discussing my philosophy of teaching and generating discussion about learning. Understanding the diversity of learning styles, methods, instruments and student experiences is the key to enhance this engagement and discussion. I frequently adapt, modify and evaluate my philosophy and the teaching methods and styles according to the learners' needs and aims. In my view, teaching is not a process of filling the students' minds with my knowledge. Rather, teaching is a mutual or bilateral process between the teacher and the learner; therefore, students need to take responsibility for their learning.

Academic qualifications and certificates

· PhD English Literature/ The Modern Novel – The University of Central England, UK (2006) (Thesis Title: Representations of Arabia and North Africa in Selected Prose and Novels in English: 1949-1983) · MA English Literary Studies/ The Victorian Novel– The University of Central England, UK (2002) (Dissertation Title: Nature, Time, and Landscape in Two Novels by Thomas Hardy) · BA English Language and Literature – Mu’tah University, Jordan (1998) · High School Diploma [Tawjeehi], Ministry of Education, Jordan (1994)

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