The main goal of my dissertation is a reconsideration of how we approach modern Arabic autobiographical texts. By referring to Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical framework of heteroglossia as my roadmap in approaching these texts, my conflated studies highlight the literary freedom and heterogeneity asserted by the writers of this mode in Arabic. The crux of my thesis is that this theory, which has heretofore been applied to the novel, is also applicable to modern Arabic autobiographical texts. I assert that it provides a framework through which to exemplify and bring out the diversity which characterizes modern Arab/Arabic autobiographical texts. The reason I believe this theory applies to such texts lies in the proximity between the modern Arabic novel and the modern Arabic autobiography. These two genres are similar inasmuch as they tend to employ a multiplicity of voices, a characteristic, which, according to Bakhtin, is the essence of what makes a novel a novel. I explore the fluid boundaries created by this overlapping. My analyses focus particularly on the centrality of the voices of family members, as expressed both through narrative function and through other modes of expression.

Rather than attempting to tame this unruly genre by boxing it into generic definitions, my study shows the dynamic multiplicity of languages, voices and genres within it, which makes Arabic autobiography both so alluring and rich, and yet so difficult to pin down into a single clear-cut category. The goal in my analyses is to pinpoint, understand and analyze this dynamic complexity. I develop a methodology for approaching individual autobiographies, not the genre as a whole, since what I show is that each text is truly a world unto itself, sometimes bearing close resemblance to other autobiographical texts, and sometimes seemingly only distantly related, marked only by autobiographical intent, some semblance of an ongoing story of the self, and characterized by a multiplicity of inserted genres and voices. Focusing on six autobiographies, rather than on a broader corpus, enables me to treat these issues in depth while attempting to shape a methodological and thematic blueprint for further studies.