Irving's Dialogism in the Alhambra

Cross-culture and/or multiculturalism have become catchwords and phrases in certain studies within academia, but they have mostly become battle grounds for contestation and convergence with contestation of identity, cultural authenticity and/or supremacy and hegemony. Yet, over and above all these skirmishes, convergence tends to win the day as it struggles for a cosmopolitan culture and polity, albeit very difficult to achieve. The present work follows the same line of thought by trying to bring a new perspective into what it calls cultural dialogism inherent in the corpus of texts borrowed from The Alhambra by W. Irving. The texts selected display a dual characteristic: the first is addressed as organic in the sense that the texts reflect some eight hundred years of natural copulation between Muslim culture brought up by Muslim conquerors to the Andalusian Christendom; the second underlines a volition on the part of the author to merge the culture by intruding into the structures of the language and the texts. The present works intends to show that these characteristic hybridities transgress the generic boundaries as well as the cultural one producing a ‘brassage’ breaking the fixity of the boundaries (cultural and other) causing brisures and sutures. This endows the texts with a certain liminality that makes it difficult to authenticate them as belonging to either culture.