Reading Moroccan fiction in the digital age: Abdelouahed Stittou’s novel Zohra Liza as a case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores twenty-first Century Moroccan fiction with a focus on the novels published on social media. By analysing Abdelouahed Stittou’s first Arabic Facebook novel, Zohra Liza, as a case study, I highlight the impact of digital technologies, namely social media platforms, on the contemporary North African novel. On the one hand, I suggest that using Facebook as a medium for publishing Zohra Liza profoundly redefined the roles of the author, Abdelouahed Stittou, who had to adjust to the new reading habits of social media users.In this respect, I contend that this shift in the author/ reader dynamics began with reader response theory, but it came to greater prominence with the advent of digital literature. On the other hand, following Brian T. Edwards (2016), I suggest that the massive circulation of global cultural products, such as Hollywood movies, in the digital age provided a vast representational repertoire for Stittou from which he creatively drew while writing Zohra Liza. To be precise, Hollywood cinema, which is one of the fastest circulating cultural forms globally, found its way into the representational repertoire of Stittou and he creatively incorporates a number of Hollywood films into the fabric of his novel.