Re-visiting Sophocles’ Antigone: Dr. Dina Amin’s 2022 Egyptian Version Antigone’s Law

Abstract

This paper attempts to compare Sophocles’ Antigone to the Egyptian adaptation Antigone’s law (2022), to highlight the significance of intertextuality. The study entails contributions to intertextuality that will be integrated in analyzing the adapted discourses. It will also capitalize on the political and social dimensions illustrated in the adapted play. The study aims to explore the oppressed female voices in the concerned texts and how the adapted work is appropriating to any oppressed culture that suffers from the same sense of oppression throughout the ages. In this respect, the paper reflects the oppressed female character who defies her uncle who embodies the tyrannical figure that does not want her to bury her brother. In this respect, the paper rests on Julia Kristeva’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s development of intertextuality. It will also rely on Lorna Hardwick’s and Robert Fraser’s reference to the use of verbal and semiotic techniques which give the audiences a new comprehensive meaning that could be linked to their real life. This paper will also explain Susan Bassnett’s concept of polyphony or plurivocality that is set in contrast to the earlier model imposed by the colonial power of univocality. In other words, the other voices can be heard rather than the dominant single or monolithic voice. Plurivocality is capitalized on as it is at the heart of post-colonial thinking. Therefore, the study aims at proving that the experience was not only limited to the individual, but also to a whole community and humanity as well, and that reflects and highlights the power and the wisdom of women through the ages with different manifestations in the examined discourse. The study therefore, attempts to prove how the notion of intertextuality is found deeply in the Egyptian adapted work.