Literary Cairo: A Conversation with Samia Mehrez

Rather, through a deliberate use of a set of aesthetic tools and techniques, art produces an impression of life and human relations in general through rhetoricity, temporality, and narrativity. [...] even though novels are made from the stuff of life, their literary geography or textual topography will necessarily provide analytical tools that dissect the text in unusual ways and will emphasize, as Franco Moretti put it in his Atlas of the European Novel, "the only real issue of literary history: society, rhetoric, and their interaction."