4 research outputs found
Realities reflected and refracted : feminism(s) and nationalism(s) in the fiction of GhÄdah alâSammÄn and Sah|ar KhalÄ«fah
This thesis examines the literary representations of feminist and
nationalist struggles in the Middle East particularly in Lebanon and Palestine. It
aims to explore the simultaneous articulation of these two pivotal concerns in
contemporary Arabic literature written by Arab women, from the 1960s to the
present. One of the primary goals of this thesis is to explore how contemporary
feminist literature reflects the effects of national crises in the Middle East on
womenâs status. To this end, this thesis reads closely a number of the novels of
two contemporary Arab women writers: GhÄdah alâSammÄn and Sah|ar
Khalīfah whose work engages in this literary interrelationship of nationalist
and feminist struggles in Lebanon and Palestine, respectively. Through the
close analyses of these authorsâ novels, this thesis explores how, in their
response to the political turmoil in the Middle East, contemporary Arab women
writers render reality in creative forms: alâSammÄn cries for freedom by
exploiting literary existentialism to reflect the human struggle against the
backdrop of the Lebanese civil war, while Khalīfah employs critical realism in
her portrayal of the human pain during the PalestinianâIsraeli conflict. This
thesis argues that both writers challenge longâestablished literary traditions by
advancing these themes in new artistic styles: literary existentialism and
realism, and, therefore, considers this a manifestation of the avantâgardism of
both writers for they move the writings of Levantine women to a higher level
by adding these literary forms to the repertoire of contemporary Arab womenâs
literature. The contribution of this thesis lies in its investigation of the
innovative literary styles of these two authors and their place in the writings of
contemporary Arab women. Thus, this thesis aims to remedy the neglect of the
writings of these authors by presenting close analyses of some of the works of
alâSammÄn and KhalÄ«fah with a view to understanding their use of literary
existentialism and critical realism
Situating Arab womenâs writing in a feminist âglobal gothicâ : madness, mothers and ghosts
This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byronâs notion of the âglobal gothicâ, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykhâs The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldinâs Maryamâs Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddadâs The Seamstressâ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding womenâs rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the âtime of ignoranceâ, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of womenâs relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts