Sonora Jha’s Campus Novel The Laughter as an Example of Minor Literature: a Deleuzoguattarian Reading | ||
| مجلة وادي النيل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانية والاجتماعية والتربويه | ||
| Volume 48, Issue 48, October 2025, Pages 39-66 PDF (571.4 K) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/jwadi.2025.427170.1258 | ||
| Author | ||
| Mona Salah Eldin Mohamed Elnamoury* | ||
| Associate Professor, English Department, Faculty of Arts, Tanta University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This analytically descriptive study reads The laughter (2023) by the Indian/American novelist Sonora Jha as a campus novel preoccupied with the present-day world deterritorialization/reterritorialization. The study uses Deleuze’s concepts about the physical/ psychological/cultural process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization that happens to the characters against a supposedly liberal and free academic background: the university. It also examines the argument that the novel belongs to Deleuzoguattarian minor literature. The novel in question does not only satirize academia and its hypocritical ethics, but harshly criticizes the society that allows those power structures to form and affect others as well. Findings point out that the third world characters in The Laughter are forced to deterritorialize from their homelands, strain themselves to reterritorialize in the supposedly liberal world of the US academia, but end up either frustrated or dead. The intricate complex narrative, heavy intertextuality, and the fact that the novel subverts the existing power structures from within, all these factors categorize The Laughter in the category of minor literature in the Deleuzoguattarian way. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Jha; The Laughter; Deleuze; deterritorialization/ reterritorialization; Campus novel | ||
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