School Bullying: Power Abuse and Resistance in Jodi Picoult’s Western American Nineteen Minutes (2007) and Tareq Helal’s Eastern Egyptian Scarab (2019)

Document Type : Original research articles

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English department, Faculty of Arts, New Valley University,

Abstract

This paper explores school bullying as portrayed in two narrative texts of two different cultures: Nineteen Minutes (2007) by the Western American Jodi Picoult, and Scarab (2019) by the Eastern Egyptian Tareq Bassem Helal. Attention is paid to how school bullying is conceptualized in the texts, particularly according to the role that is attributed to Foucauldian power/resistance; showing the power of the bully and the resistance of the bullied. The analysis highlights various relationships related to school bullying: parent-child, boyfriend-girlfriend, peers, and sibling rivalry. As well as it exposes this negative function that the school context performs. It also attempts to prove that ableism and physical shape affect students’ self-esteem. This cross-cultural study follows the comparative analysis methodology to analyze the similarities and differences of school bullying in Western and Eastern cultures as portrayed in two narrative fictions.

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