A Master’s thesis entitled “The Ideological Conflict in the Omani Novelistic Discourse: An Approach in Light of the Concept of Polyphony” was discussed at the College of Arts and Social Sciences. The thesis was prepared by Ahmed bin Saif Al-Hosni, a student in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the College.

The study sought to examine the issue of ideological conflict in Omani novelistic discourse, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony. For its corpus, the researcher selected three narratives: Al-Wakhz by Hussein Al-Abri, The One Who Does Not Like Gamal Abdel Nasser by Suleiman Al-Maamari, and Al-Bagh by Bushra Khalfan. In its first chapter, the thesis addressed the concepts of ideology, conflict, and polyphony, tracing their intellectual backgrounds, highlighting certain issues, and presenting reflections on them.

The research aimed to answer two central questions: what are the ideological voices in conflict within the narratives, and how are these voices narratively constructed within the novelistic framework? In attempting to answer these, the study also engaged with further questions that emerged during the investigation.

In its applied chapters, the thesis employed the strategy of “polyphony” to deconstruct the ideological voices in the three narratives, demonstrating the mechanisms of their formation, multiplicity, textual interaction, and the ideological conflict shaping the characters.

The study reached several conclusions, the most significant being that the Omani novel, in its overall output, tends to align with what Bakhtin terms “everyday ideology”; it leans more towards writing about the local and the rural rather than what is termed “finalised ideology”. The structuring of ideological conflict in the three narratives also displayed artistic diversity, particularly in narration, character construction, and setting. Moreover, the analysis of the ideological voices revealed that conflicts varied and evolved from the local to the Arab and the universal levels. A number of ideological voices were also marked by their contestation of the cultural discourse to which the three narratives belong.

The examination committee comprised Professor Yasser Moustafa Abdelwahab, Chair of the Committee; Dr. Abdelghani Bara, Main Supervisor; Dr. Ahmed Youssef, Internal Examiner; and Dr. Issa bin Said Al-Hoqani, External Examiner.