Abstract

In this article, two seminal concepts presented by two important twentieth-century philosophers are taken as a point of departure and it has been discussed how the two concepts get merged in the selected two texts which are representative of postmodern Arab literature and Arab modernism. One of the concepts is that of minor literature by Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, and the other is Third World allegory by Fredric Jameson, the American philosopher. The two selected texts are Cities of Salt (1984) by the Saudi-Jordanian novelist Abdel Rahman Munif and Men in the Sun (1967) by the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani. The study crystallizes how the incompatible strife between capital and labour has unified the postmodern globe. This struggle has given birth to an ever-increasing number of texts which cannot be precisely described as belonging to this world or that. These texts are indicative of disruptions in unilinear teleological narratives, flows, courses and directions. These disturbances intrude upon the discursive space of the traditional Western novel, and the context from which such disruptions arise cannot be simply described as lying ‘outside’ the context of the Western novel. Cities of Salt and Men in the Sun are examples of such texts.