The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital

ISBN-13: 9781137559883 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 263 str.

Felix Lang

Opis

After the Lebanese Civil War, many of Lebanon's best known novelists committed themselves to building a "memory for the future." More than twenty years later, Elias Khoury's and Rashid al-Daif's postwar novels rank among the most important texts in contemporary Arabic literature, fomenting a new generation of writers authors to begin writing about the civil war. The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital argues that the Lebanese Post-Civil war novel is a response not so much to trauma, but to the forces at work in the literary field. From the book market to literary prizes to the similarity of the writers' biographies and socio-economic backgrounds, a number of factors worked in favor of novels offering a literary war narrative for Lebanon's secular upper-middle class.

Recenzje

"This book is a well researched and serious study of two decades of Lebanese novelistic production in English, French, and Arabic. Lang's frank discussion of the forces at play in the Lebanese literary field brings out the grain of generational literary production in Lebanon. His deft analyses of the civil war theme acknowledges but goes beyond trauma theory and 'the memory industry.' His book will appeal to literary critics, anthropologists, and humanists interested in the cultural life of the Levant as well as those interested in next-generation trauma studies." - Ken Seigneurie, Professor of World Literature, Simon Fraser University, Canada

"Felix Lang brings together several theoretical tools, mainly -but not only- Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of the literary field as a locus of struggle for symbolical power. We discover with this book how the notions of memory and trauma are being used and remodeled by these writers, and we feel compelled to read, re-read, or teach the great novels of the likes of Elias Khoury, Rachid El Daïf, Hoda Barakat or Rawi Hage from new perspectives." - Richard Jacquemond, Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Literature, Aix-Marseille Université, France

Spis treści

Introduction
PART I: THE LEBANESE LITERARY FIELD
1. Newspapers, Prizes and Politics: The Field's Institutions and the Global and Regional Context
2. What Makes a Good Novel in Lebanon? The Values of the Field
PART II: "WE'RE ALL IN THE DARK" - THE FIRST GENERATION OF (POST-) WAR AUTHORS
3. The Civil War Novel and the Break with Tradition
4. Revolutionaries Turned Writers: A Secular Left-Wing Habitus
5. Destruction and Deconstruction: Forms of Literary Remembering
PART III: GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE - THE SECOND GENERATION OF POSTWAR AUTHORS
6. The Civil War Novel as Gateway to the Literary Field
7. Humanist Commitment: A New Habitus
8. Archive, Trauma and Reconstruction: New Forms of Literary Remembering
Conclusion: Whose Truth, Whose Power?
Appendix A: List of Authors
Appendix B: List of Novels

O autorze

Felix Lang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg, Germany.