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The Narratives of the Syrian Wars: Women’s Voice between Containment and Resistance
Abstract
This paper researches the Syrian literary discourse during the last three years that witnessed a prolonged war and continuous conflicts by exploring a number of recent representative literary works along with the debates that they aroused. The paper follows closely the ways in which Syrian litterateurs and intellectuals are engaged in a large-scale writing of this agonizing experience of their nation and the way they view war: not only a time of death and destruction, but also a time of ideological upheavals and cultural confusion. The paper begins with a historiographical introduction to discuss the difficulties of defining recent Syrian literature within the conventions of what is termed by contemporary Arab cultural and literary critics as the War-literature, Revolutionary literature and the Resistance literature. These difficulties emerge from the new narrative modes and themes put forward by the Syrian novels that were published after March 2011. The novels are preoccupied by two concerns. The first is: claiming the right to tell the war story from a gendered Syrian perspective by challenging the heroic self-righteous claims of the battling parties and subverting their dominant hegemonic discourse that subjected women consistently to invisibility, containment, appropriation and stereotyping, especially in media. The second is constructing experimental spaces in which they struggle to produce narratives that can be recognized for its literary excellence and find their way into the record of world classics of women’s anti-war narratives. This double-quest is accompanied by more complicated questions related to violence, religion, identity, feminism, modernity, civil rights, patriarchal authority and media cultural construction. Such debates have become inseparable from the literary concerns of the Syrian women’s war-narratives. The paper makes use of empirical work and data collected during 18 month that were spent sporadically in various Syrian towns and cities during the last 3 years, along with drawing upon some master references in war narratives and women’s writing, as well as on recent researches on cultural and literary studies. The argument follows an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the Syrian women’s war-narratives as a central area of scholarly inquiry and as a site of creative resistance, emphasizing that combining historical, cultural and literary perspectives can illuminate these complex texts.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries