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Unveiling Modern Saudi Society and Culture in Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of a Man Called K



Author(s)

Shahad Alfaqih

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2025.02.003

University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Since modern Saudi novel vividly captures the essence of cultural and social life in Saudi Arabia, this paper aims to unveil the manifestation of historical events that generated new issues and discourses shaping modern Saudi culture and society as depicted in Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of a Man Called K (2021). The examination of its cultural and social context, thus, serves as an evaluation of a historical record that depicts the episteme of modern Saudi society. However, as ample as previous works on Saudi literature may be, most of them disregard the use of New Historicism in examining modern Saudi novels. This paper, therefore, utilizes New Historicism to unveil the nature of modern Saudi episteme as depicted by the young author Aziz Mohammed in The Critical Case of a Man Called K (2021) and to gain insight into modern Saudi discourses and issues shaped by historical and economic events. The study finds that the novel depicts a dystopian reality due to the implications of both late capitalism and globalization in modern Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the novel highlights how far the discourse of Saudi Vision 2030, with its various aims, penetrates both society and culture, shaping a great part of modern Saudi episteme. The paper concludes by affirming Mohammed’s novel assertion of New Historicism’s main assumption that the text cannot be divorced from its historical, cultural, and social context and that it serves as a record indicative of a specific and unique episteme.

Aziz Mohammed, globalization, late capitalism, modern Saudi literature, New Historicism, Saudi Vision 2030, The Critical Case of a Man Called K