TY - JOUR
T1 - Narratology at the checkpoint
T2 - The politics and poetics of entanglement
AU - Lanser, Susan S.
AU - Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 by Te Ohio State University.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Tis essay explores literature signifcantly diferent from the corpus on which classical narratology is based: an international set of narratives focused on Israel's occupation of Palestine. Drawing on traditional narratological concepts, we seek both to identify recurrent narrative patterns-of event, time, space, narration, focalization, and character-and to interrogate assumptions, refne concepts, and fll gaps in conventional narratological frames of thought. Our approach relies on a shif from the traditional comparative model of reading "side by side" to a methodology of "entanglement" or "histoire croisée" that emphasizes connections, hybridities, and asymmetries within the space of the Israeli-Palestinian confict as constituted in an array of fctional and autobiographical narratives. In focusing on checkpoints and border-crossings, we also aim to contrast Bakhtin's view of the road as the Urchronotope of the novel with the narrative impasses that, we argue, evoke the literal roadblocks of occupation. In investigating the mutually constitutive relationship between a political situation and the narrative practices that represent it, we also suggest new directions for a situated narratology. In the end, then, we hope not only that narratology will help to illuminate representations of the occupation, but that narratives of the occupation will modify and enrich narratology.
AB - Tis essay explores literature signifcantly diferent from the corpus on which classical narratology is based: an international set of narratives focused on Israel's occupation of Palestine. Drawing on traditional narratological concepts, we seek both to identify recurrent narrative patterns-of event, time, space, narration, focalization, and character-and to interrogate assumptions, refne concepts, and fll gaps in conventional narratological frames of thought. Our approach relies on a shif from the traditional comparative model of reading "side by side" to a methodology of "entanglement" or "histoire croisée" that emphasizes connections, hybridities, and asymmetries within the space of the Israeli-Palestinian confict as constituted in an array of fctional and autobiographical narratives. In focusing on checkpoints and border-crossings, we also aim to contrast Bakhtin's view of the road as the Urchronotope of the novel with the narrative impasses that, we argue, evoke the literal roadblocks of occupation. In investigating the mutually constitutive relationship between a political situation and the narrative practices that represent it, we also suggest new directions for a situated narratology. In the end, then, we hope not only that narratology will help to illuminate representations of the occupation, but that narratives of the occupation will modify and enrich narratology.
KW - Chronotope
KW - Entanglement
KW - Israel
KW - Narrative
KW - Narratology
KW - Palestine
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076364374&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/nar.2019.0015
DO - 10.1353/nar.2019.0015
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AN - SCOPUS:85076364374
SN - 1063-3685
VL - 27
SP - 245
EP - 269
JO - Narrative
JF - Narrative
IS - 3
ER -