A poetics of Arabic autobiography : between dissociation and belonging /
Ariel M. Sheetrit.
- 1 online resource.
- Routledge auto/biography studies .
Decentering the Self in Arabic Autobiography -- Entwined Voices, Embedded Auto/Biography: Hanan al-Shaykh's My Life is An Intricate Tale -- Engagement and Separation in Leila Abouzeid's Return to Childhood -- Self in the City in Abd al-Rahman Muniff's Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman -- Inscribing the Self in a Landscape of Rupture: Salim Barakat's The Iron Grasshopper -- Casting the Self through Outcasts: Mohamed Choukri's Streetwise -- Personal Myth and Self-Invention: Autobiographer as Ironic Hero in Samuel Shimon's An Iraqi in Paris -- Autobiographer as Auto-ethnographer: Hanna Abu Hanna's The Cloud's Shadow -- Conclusions.
"This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. These are indeed autobiographies, Sheetrit argues, albeit articulating the story of the self in unconventional ways. Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text's distinct strategy for life narrative. Crucial to this book's approach is the innovative theoretical foundation of relational autobiography that reveals the grounding of the self within the collective-not as symbolic of it. This framework exposes the intersection of the story of the autobiographical subject with the stories of others and the tensions between personal and communal discourse. Relational strategies for self-representation expose a movement between two seemingly opposing desires-the desire to separate and dissociate from others, and the desire to engage and integrate within a particular relationship, community, culture or milieu. This interplay between disentangling and conscious entangling constitutes the leitmotif that unites the studies in this book"--