Build Your Style Language Workshop: Using Cohesive Devices Cohesive devices are words or phrases that connect the ideas in your sentences or paragraphs. Read the article below about Naguib Mahfouz. As you read, look for the cohesive devices used and list them. Write your answers in your notebook.
Naguib Mahfouz's first nine or ten years spent in the old Gamaliya quarters in Cairo plays an important role in his earlier, realistic novels like "Midaq Alley" and "The Cairo Trilogy." This alley of his childhood is a small-scale version of Egyptian society in his works. The family house seems to have inspired Mahfouz and serves as the model for the Abd al-Jawad family house in "The Cairo Trilogy" during that time. The Revolution in 1919 also had a nationalist effect on his writings that he expressed his criticisms through them. In 1920, he published his "The Cairo Trilogy" when his family moved to a new suburban district called Abbasiya. Mahfouz began writing when he was in primary school. He was then a fan of detective, historical, and adventure novels. He continued writing fiction in secondary school with Arabic fiction innovators, Taha Hussein and Ibrahim al-Mazini, as his models for the short story. Mahfouz's forty or so articles were published in various magazines and newspapers; most of which dealt with philosophical and psychological issues. Among his favorite writers were Shakespeare, Conrad, Melville, Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, O'Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg. He published his first novel, "Khufu's Wisdom" in 1939, and wrote 35 more novels, 15 collections of short stories, as well as "Echoes of an Autobiography" in 1994. He worked on some 25 film screenplays from the late 1940s to 1980s. This activity influenced the use of devices like montage and flashback in his prose writings. More than 30 Egyptian films have been based on Mahfouz's novels and short stories. His own books, however, have been adapted for screen not by him, but by others. Mahfouz received the Egyptian State Prize twice for his writings. In 1988, he got the Nobel Prize for Literature.