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Insourcing Resilience: Self-Writing and Self-Help in Palestine-Israel
Abstract
The proliferation of works of autofiction and autotheory has not spared the literary field in Palestine-Israel. Authors such as the Palestinian Adania Shibli and the Mizrahi Zohar Elmakias play on these genres, centering the self, her emotions or her biography as means for making sense of the world and for coping with it. But what if the literary trend of self-writing itself participates in the contemporary discourse of resilience, which commands us to engage in “self-care” and “self-help” thus privatizing welfare? Arguing that part of the appeal of Western autofiction is its modeling of “successful” narratives of self-help for its readers, I look to contemporary works of autofiction in Palestine-Israel to examine whether they exhibit similar traits. Do authors foreground the personal as a mode of resilience, to recuperate a shuttered self and an inaccessible history? Do they suggest instead the impossibility of such recuperations? What are the social and political implications of such choices and modes of narration? And what might we learn from the specificities of Arabic and Hebrew autofiction works that might shed new light on this genre more broadly?
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Hebrew