The new literary front: public diplomacy and the cultural politics of reading Arabic fiction in translation
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2011 Number 73
The new literary front: public diplomacy and the cultural politics of reading Arabic fiction in translation
Vron Ware pages -
Abstract
The lack of attention to reading and reception in postcolonial literary studies makes it easy to forget that one of the field’s earliest points of reference is a theory of reading. Fredric Jameson’s controversial 1986 essay on ‘Third-World Literature’, which famously distinguishes ‘first-world’ from ‘third-world’ writing, also posits a difference between ‘first’ and ‘third’ world readers by arguing that the ‘first-world’ reader is seriously limited as a reader of ‘third-world’ texts. This essay returns to Jameson, and to the idea of national allegory, as a way of understanding and responding to the popular and academic reception of Palestinian and Israeli literature. Although metropolitan readers have generally been very willing to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts as national allegories in something like the sense described by Jameson, readers of Palestinian and Israeli women’s writing have tended to privilege these writers’ gender over their nationalism. Drawing on the work of two of the most internationally recognizable female novelists from Israel/Palestine, Orly Castel-Bloom and Sahar Khalifeh, the essay argues that national allegory should be understood as a reading and a writing practice, one that writers of both genders anticipate and emphasize in contexts where the nation’s political and imaginative force remains urgent and immediate.
SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article
You have the following options:
- If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
- If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below
Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate
- Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription. - Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon
To cite this article
Vron Ware (2011) The new literary front: public diplomacy and the cultural politics of reading Arabic fiction in translation, New Formations, 2011(73), -