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Palestinian Trajectories: Novel and Politics since 1948

Abu-Manneh, Bashir (2014) Palestinian Trajectories: Novel and Politics since 1948. Modern Language Quarterly, 75 (4). pp. 511-539. (doi:10.1215/00267929-2796886) (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:55307)

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Abstract

This essay offers a materialist reading of the canonical Palestinian novel from the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 to the early 1980s by adapting a Lukácsian periodization to the Palestinian context. The essay connects praxis and historical developments with changes in aesthetic form and delineates the links between Palestinian revolution and realism and between collective defeat and modernism. Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa (‘A’id ila Haifa, 1969) and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Abdelrahman Munif’s untranslated World without Maps (‘Alam Bila Kharai’t, 1982), among other texts, are read as symptomatic of a broad cultural and historical shift. While realism registers the knowability and transformability of the present, modernism captures anxiety and the disintegration of agency. As decolonizing and emancipatory hopes shrink in the Middle East, Palestinian modernism emerges—in Adornian manner—to embody defeat and register utopian desire.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1215/00267929-2796886
Subjects: P Language and Literature
P Language and Literature > PE English philology and language
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Kate Smith
Date Deposited: 06 May 2016 13:05 UTC
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2022 11:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/55307 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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