Post-67 Discourse and the Syrian Novel

Résumé du livre

This project discusses conceptualizations of post-67 discourse within the context of novelistic production in Syria. Although understood as a phenomenon that responds to a historical event, the discourse is also read as a response to a literary history dominated by ideological "positioning-takings." The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work on "fields" is employed as an organizing principle to investigate a process of disengagement from a dominant discourse. Competition within fields of cultural production often concerns the authority inherent in recognition, consecration and prestige, and in this way the founding of the Syrian Writers' Collective in 1951 marks a significant new element in the literary field. The Collective (later the Arab Writers' Union) acted as an identifying forum and embodied a socio-political vision that transcended literary association. The crisis of 1967 disrupted the constructive posture of the literary field and dismantled its relationship to the field of power, leaving litterateurs without the ideological legs that had served as a literary framework for the previous 15 years. Furthermore, it catalyzed cultural battles that would culminate in the formation of an autonomous literary field (in the sense that it creates and recycles itself and is self-interrogating). The three works analyzed in this study (Haydar Haydar's al-Zaman al-m uh&dotbelow;ish, 1973; Ham al-Rahib's Alf laylah wa laylatan, 1977 and Hanna Minah's al-Thalj ya'ti min al-nafidhah, 1969) challenged a pre-existing order and shed light on the dimensions of this critical discourse. Despite their differences, each novel interrogates notions of legacy and suggests new possibilities for envisioning a relationship with the past, a position that was the source of much post-67 discourse. Embarking on a criticism of the self, these novels contribute to the process of writing the crisis, and in this way inform the reality of a crisis. This study suggests then that in Syria post-67 discourse needs to be read as an element in the struggle for power in the cultural field and not merely as the consequence of a defeat.