The Palestinian Narrative in Modern Arabic Literature

This course offers an overview of Palestinian literature, with a special focus on the Palestinian novel and its development since the second half of the 20th century. With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the brutal annihilation of the Palestinian people, their land and their collective memory began, resulting in a ‘nakba’ which saw the displacement of thousands of Palestinians. For their part, Palestinian novelists were adamant to write against these processes of uprootedness and erasure, employing storytelling as a tool of resistance against the Zionist settler-colonial project. They were also grappling with their status as refugees in diaspora, a new “minority” inside Israel, or as Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” as of 1967.

It is within this context that the Palestinian novel came to acquire one of its central themes, namely the preservation of Palestinian collective memory. But more than just re-enact stories of home and confront the colonizer, Palestinian writers were equally committed to inspiring resistance, giving agency, documenting the Palestinian people’s relentless struggle against, and their unyielding sumoud (steadfastness) in the face of, the Zionist enemy as well as providing a critique of Palestinian society itself.

This course aims to familiarize students with some of the important literary contributions made by Palestinian novelists since 1948, and trace how this body of literature continued to respond to the changing local, regional and global contexts. While this course is interested in tracing how the political, historical and literary converge in the Palestinian novel, it is equally concerned with unpacking the literary work itself, and exploring the aesthetic shifts that occur within the Palestinian novel over time.

Authors to be studied in this course will include Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habibi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sahar Khalifah, Elias Khoury and Anton Shammas. Literary texts will be studied in their original language (Arabic except for Shammas’ text which we will be reading in English). Additionally, we will be reading selections from autobiographical accounts (in both Arabic and English) by Edward Said, Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwish, Raja Shehadeh and Suad Amiry, and supplementary reading material in both English and Arabic. We will also be watching films and inviting guest speakers.

Students enrolled in the course are expected to read the assigned texts on a weekly basis, to lead panel discussions based on the assigned literary work of the week, and to write a mid-term comparative paper based on two of the texts discussed in class, as well as a final paper so that students can further explore one of the themes discussed in any of the assigned literary works.