Linda Istanbulli

Faculty Fall 2023: Linda Istanbulli

Unravelling the Nation: Criticality and Agency in Contemporary Syrian Womenโ€™s Fiction

Caroline D. Eckhardt Early Career Professor of Comparative Literature and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Through the lens of contemporary Syrian womenโ€™s fiction, my book project reflects on the crisis of nationhood in the Arabic-speaking world and on the ways in which the novel as a genre both reflected and created the conditions of possibility for the 2011 uprisings known as the Arab Spring. โ€œUnravelling the Nation: Criticality and Agency in Contemporary Syrian Womenโ€™s Fictionโ€ brings literary criticism in conversation with the linkedquestions of gender and sexuality, and the logics of nationalism and secular modernity to explore Syrian women novelistsโ€™ critique of the intellectual project of Arab modernity and its gendered paradigms as the oppressive legacy of a colonized past. With the advent of the new millennium, I propose, a new generation of women novelists in Syria spearheaded an investigation into both the nation and the novel as male-constructed spaces. Evoking histories and sensibilities that literary, epistemological, and political authorities aim to repress or reshape, their works interrogate the totalizing models of sovereign paternalism that a previous generation of intellectuals produced, the genealogies they constructed for Arab modernity and its normative interpretation of the world in terms of identity, secularism, and nationalism. Tracing what I term as an โ€œaesthetic of unraveling,โ€ I tarry with these women authorsโ€™ use of innovative literary practices, which, I argue, enable them to contest history; undermine the notion of an unquestionable author(ity); and re-gender the multicultural spaces within the Syrian collective, cultivating alternative reading and sociopolitical practices.