Rita Sakr

There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, sothese discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in this respect, the different authority of the novel. This study crosses this boundary by means of dynamic interdisciplinary movements between selected novels by James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk, on the one hand, and various theoretical perspectives,history, and cultural geography, on the other. Through the specific choice of literary texts that represent monumental space in a typical post-imperial geopolitical contexts, Monumental Space and the Post-Imperial Novel brings into question many postcolonial paradigms. Sakr establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history,and cultural geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space.

An Interdisciplinary Study

Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel

Caroline Rooney

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of other traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege’s effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives.

Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut

The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism

Establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history, and geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space.

Rita Sakr

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