Books by Ariel M . Sheetrit
A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography: Between Dissociation and Belonging, 2020
This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouze... more This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna.
These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the “self”—the “auto” of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although every autobiography naturally includes and relates to others to one degree or another, these autobiographies tend to foreground other characters, voices, places and texts to the extent that at times it appears as though the autobiographical subject has dropped out of sight, even to the point of raising the question: Is this an autobiography? These are indeed autobiographies, Sheetrit argues, albeit articulating the story of the self in unconventional ways.
Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text’s distinct strategy for life narrative. Crucial to this book’s approach is the innovative theoretical foundation of relational autobiography that reveals the grounding of the self within the collective—not as symbolic of it. This framework exposes the intersection of the story of the autobiographical subject with the stories of others and the tensions between personal and communal discourse. Relational strategies for self-representation expose a movement between two seemingly opposing desires—the desire to separate and dissociate from others and the desire to engage and integrate within a particular relationship, community, culture or milieu. This interplay between disentangling and conscious entangling constitutes the leitmotif that unites the studies in this book.
Reviews of A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography by Ariel M . Sheetrit
Journal of Arabic Literature , 2023
Book Review by Teresa Pepe of my book A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography.
Papers by Ariel M . Sheetrit
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2021
This study focuses on two films in which weddings are conspicuously absent, Villa Touma (Suha Arr... more This study focuses on two films in which weddings are conspicuously absent, Villa Touma (Suha Arraf, 2014) and In Between (Bar Bahr, Maysaloun Hamoud, 2016). Both films have a distinct focus on weddings: they are mentioned repeatedly-whether with longing or loathing, occasionally rendered in the films' hazy perimeters, in ways that mark them as unsubstantial, inane and infecund, but most often they are occasions that end up not happening, non-doings that I call 'un-weddings'. I examine the significances of this absence, especially as it contrasts with prevailing representations of weddings in Palestinian films that tend to portray weddings in powerful opposition to death and as the fulfillment of a profound personal longing and communal expectations that may also symbolize national aspirations.
Middle Eastern Literatures, 2020
This study examines three Palestinian works, Hanna Ibrahim’s short story “Infiltrators,” (1954), ... more This study examines three Palestinian works, Hanna Ibrahim’s short story “Infiltrators,” (1954), Mahmoud Shukair’s short story “Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cat” (2004) and Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2014). Remarkably, each features a Jewish Israeli as a central character in the story; more intriguing, in each, the story is
mediated through the perspective of that character– focalized by
him or her. I address the significances generated by using focalization as a rhetorical strategy, particularly fraught because the perspective is that of a character from the other side of a national conflict. My analyses address whether the narrator reinforces the focalizer’s perceptions or undermines them, and how the technique of focalization unsettles established perceptions and offers critique of the system. I work through how conveying a story through the perception of a character on the opposite side of the conflict foregrounds and complicates structures of representation and power dynamics.
Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema, Rachel Harris and Dan Chyutin, eds., 2021
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies , 2015
This article examines three short stories and one novella by contemporary Palestinian writer Ala ... more This article examines three short stories and one novella by contemporary Palestinian writer Ala Hlehel which manifest a preoccupation with the breakdown of human relationships and related themes of failed communication and miscommunication between people, as well as the absence of compassion. These themes articulate the alienation, isolation and estrangement of individuals from one another, and from
community and society. They are reflected in the interpersonal relations depicted in the stories, and accentuated through motifs conveying decay and hypocrisy, and through rhetorical devices such as irony.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies , 2015
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This article presents an analysis of the Moroccan wri... more http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15525864-2886532
This article presents an analysis of the Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid’s Rujuʿ ila altufula
(1993; Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, 1998) through the
prism of relational theories of autobiography. It exposes narrative strategies of voice and
language to bring out the autobiographical subject’s struggle to identify with and against
authority figures while forging her own voice. It highlights Abouzeid’s mother’s powerful
presence voicing indigenous and traditional perspectives and the father’s silent (and silenced)
voice, despite his patriarchal dominance. It unfolds the dynamics of “giving voice” to Abouzeid’s
illiterate mother and grandmother while challenging the content and principles
underlying their utterances. These dynamics are further complicated by her father’s formative
yet problematic political stances. The final section discusses Abouzeid’s engagement with
tensions triggered by colonial encounters and postcolonial nation building.
Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2014
This study treats the masterpiece Sīrat madīna: ʿAmmān fī ’l-arbaʿīnāt (1994; translated into Eng... more This study treats the masterpiece Sīrat madīna: ʿAmmān fī ’l-arbaʿīnāt (1994; translated into English as Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman, 1996) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf. I read it through its unconventional and original formal and aesthetic choices in which the story of the city and the protagonist are narrat-ed relationally in terms of each other. The goal of the present study is to deconstruct its multifaceted rela-tional strategies, pinpointing the formal choices and thematic proclivities which situate the autobiographical subject in a particular social, cultural, temporal and historic sphere, and in constant tension with these same elements. It also pinpoints the text’s paradoxically obverse tendency to dissociate and distance the autobio-graphical subject by way of formal narrative techniques and content, ostensibly favoring the city as the focus of the text over the “self” of the protagonist. Under the surface, the autobiographical subject is constantly present, and is discursively constituted through the historical, cultural and communal accounts of the city. Finally, this study reveals that in Sīrat madīna, both the porousness of geographical boundaries as well as the traversing of personal boundaries are expressed through metaphors and accounts of death.
Journal of Levantine Studies, Dec 2013
In this article, I argue that Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī's Brooklyn Heights (Brūklīn Hāyts, 2010) and Salmān... more In this article, I argue that Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī's Brooklyn Heights (Brūklīn Hāyts, 2010) and Salmān Nāṭūr's She, the Autumn and Me (Hiya, Anā, wa-l-Kharīf, 2011) call into question the very fixedness of the concepts of "homeland" and "diaspora/abroad," and obscure the distinction between the indigene and the relocated diasporic subject. She, the Autumn and Me (Hiya, Anā, wa-l-Kharīf, 2011) is the most recent novel by Palestinian Israeli writer Salmān Nāṭūr (b. 1949), a seasoned writer of short stories, novels and critical writings. Brooklyn Heights is the fourth and most recent novel of the Egyptian Bedouin Mīrāl al-Ṭaḥāwī (b. 1969), who stands out as the first Egyptian Bedouin woman to publish modern Arabic prose. Through their portrayal of characters who are outcasts or loners, these contemporary novels complicate and deconstruct axioms which imply a reciprocal association between homeland and belonging, on the one hand, and exile/diaspora and foreignness or estrangement, on the other. In this study, I interrogate portrayals of the homeland in both texts, as it is conceived through shades of belonging and foreignness; and how "abroad" is portrayed vis-à-vis an originary homeland, in layered diasporic terms, and yet also conflated with home and homeland.
Journal of Arabic Literature, Jan 1, 2012
This article offers a literary reading of Palestinian poet Fadwā Ṭ ūqān's autobiography, Riḥ la... more This article offers a literary reading of Palestinian poet Fadwā Ṭ ūqān's autobiography, Riḥ lah ṣ aʿbah, riḥ lah jabaliyyah (A Mountainous Journey, 1985). This text's literary complexities have not yet been adequately addressed, despite the critical attention it has received. The present study maps this text's central tension, namely, that on the one hand, it is populated by many characters and contains many voices, and on the other, that most of the voices which are sounded do not belong to the characters one might expect. In examining the voicings in this text, this study reveals how the text invokes genres not only through excerpting, but by writing in relation to traditional narrative structures, integrating them into a new context. It offers a reading of this text as an inverted riḥ lah, that is, as a journey of one who cannot travel. It also argues that this text recalls the tradition of the short story cycle, showing how the purported linearity of the text is imbued with circularity in content, language and structure. By implicating other genres, the text subverts patriarchal tradition from within ostensibly masculine cultural and literary structures (such as the riḥ lah), overlaying it with the more feminine-inclined framework of the short story cycle. In so doing, it challenges and extends the purport of the original texts, positioning them in dialogic conversation with Ṭ ūqān's criticism of them and her own textual compositions.
a/b: autobiography Studies, Aug 2013
This article considers Shimon Ballas' 2009 autobiography Be-Guf Rishon in light of theories of se... more This article considers Shimon Ballas' 2009 autobiography Be-Guf Rishon in light of theories of selfhood in diaspora and border-crossings. It argues that the text's hybrid stance and multiple ruptures are articulated through a language of beginnings, and as such, this analysis engages theories of beginnings and origins in narrative.
Contemporary Women's Writing, Jan 1, 2011
This study situates Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharhun Yatul (My Life: An Extended Commentary, 20... more This study situates Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharhun Yatul (My Life: An Extended Commentary, 2005) within the realm of the autobiographical. At the crux of this inquiry are the contradictory strategies of self representation throughout. To this end, it explores the consequences of ‘‘speaking for’’ another and of representing oneself relationally. It also examines how the dynamic between the singular and the multiple
within the narrative voice articulates the connected themes of family, gender, and authority, and how its narrative choices engender it as an act of resistance. In this context, it focuses on the theme of illiteracy. This study fleshes out the ways in which this text constitutes self/selves rather than assuming either the uniqueness of the literary self or overall textual coherence.
Arab studies quarterly, Jan 1, 2007
Middle Eastern Literatures, Jan 1, 2010
Book Reviews by Ariel M . Sheetrit
Critical Inquiry, 2019
book review
Mediterranean Historical Review, 2017
Mediterranean Historical Review, 2018
book review
.גיליון כג של כתב העת ג'מאעה
ג'מאעה הינו כתב עת מדעי בין-תחומי לחקר המזרח התיכון, היוצא לאור מטעם... more .גיליון כג של כתב העת ג'מאעה
ג'מאעה הינו כתב עת מדעי בין-תחומי לחקר המזרח התיכון, היוצא לאור מטעם המחלקה ללימודי המזרח התיכון ומרכז חיים הרצוג לחקר המזרח התיכון והדיפלומטיה שבאוניברסיטת בן-גוריון, החל משנת 1998. ג'מאעה מתייחד בהיותו כתב עת אקדמי, שנכתב ונערך במשותף על ידי סטודנטים וחוקרים ותיקים. מטרתו של ג'מאעה לחשוף בפני הקורא הישראלי תחומי מחקר חדשים בלימודי המזרח התיכון, גישות ופרספקטיבות מחקריות עדכניות, ובכך להעמיק את היכרותו עם הסביבה בה הוא חי.
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Books by Ariel M . Sheetrit
These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the “self”—the “auto” of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although every autobiography naturally includes and relates to others to one degree or another, these autobiographies tend to foreground other characters, voices, places and texts to the extent that at times it appears as though the autobiographical subject has dropped out of sight, even to the point of raising the question: Is this an autobiography? These are indeed autobiographies, Sheetrit argues, albeit articulating the story of the self in unconventional ways.
Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text’s distinct strategy for life narrative. Crucial to this book’s approach is the innovative theoretical foundation of relational autobiography that reveals the grounding of the self within the collective—not as symbolic of it. This framework exposes the intersection of the story of the autobiographical subject with the stories of others and the tensions between personal and communal discourse. Relational strategies for self-representation expose a movement between two seemingly opposing desires—the desire to separate and dissociate from others and the desire to engage and integrate within a particular relationship, community, culture or milieu. This interplay between disentangling and conscious entangling constitutes the leitmotif that unites the studies in this book.
Reviews of A Poetics of Arabic Autobiography by Ariel M . Sheetrit
Papers by Ariel M . Sheetrit
mediated through the perspective of that character– focalized by
him or her. I address the significances generated by using focalization as a rhetorical strategy, particularly fraught because the perspective is that of a character from the other side of a national conflict. My analyses address whether the narrator reinforces the focalizer’s perceptions or undermines them, and how the technique of focalization unsettles established perceptions and offers critique of the system. I work through how conveying a story through the perception of a character on the opposite side of the conflict foregrounds and complicates structures of representation and power dynamics.
community and society. They are reflected in the interpersonal relations depicted in the stories, and accentuated through motifs conveying decay and hypocrisy, and through rhetorical devices such as irony.
This article presents an analysis of the Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid’s Rujuʿ ila altufula
(1993; Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, 1998) through the
prism of relational theories of autobiography. It exposes narrative strategies of voice and
language to bring out the autobiographical subject’s struggle to identify with and against
authority figures while forging her own voice. It highlights Abouzeid’s mother’s powerful
presence voicing indigenous and traditional perspectives and the father’s silent (and silenced)
voice, despite his patriarchal dominance. It unfolds the dynamics of “giving voice” to Abouzeid’s
illiterate mother and grandmother while challenging the content and principles
underlying their utterances. These dynamics are further complicated by her father’s formative
yet problematic political stances. The final section discusses Abouzeid’s engagement with
tensions triggered by colonial encounters and postcolonial nation building.
within the narrative voice articulates the connected themes of family, gender, and authority, and how its narrative choices engender it as an act of resistance. In this context, it focuses on the theme of illiteracy. This study fleshes out the ways in which this text constitutes self/selves rather than assuming either the uniqueness of the literary self or overall textual coherence.
Book Reviews by Ariel M . Sheetrit
ג'מאעה הינו כתב עת מדעי בין-תחומי לחקר המזרח התיכון, היוצא לאור מטעם המחלקה ללימודי המזרח התיכון ומרכז חיים הרצוג לחקר המזרח התיכון והדיפלומטיה שבאוניברסיטת בן-גוריון, החל משנת 1998. ג'מאעה מתייחד בהיותו כתב עת אקדמי, שנכתב ונערך במשותף על ידי סטודנטים וחוקרים ותיקים. מטרתו של ג'מאעה לחשוף בפני הקורא הישראלי תחומי מחקר חדשים בלימודי המזרח התיכון, גישות ופרספקטיבות מחקריות עדכניות, ובכך להעמיק את היכרותו עם הסביבה בה הוא חי.
These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the “self”—the “auto” of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although every autobiography naturally includes and relates to others to one degree or another, these autobiographies tend to foreground other characters, voices, places and texts to the extent that at times it appears as though the autobiographical subject has dropped out of sight, even to the point of raising the question: Is this an autobiography? These are indeed autobiographies, Sheetrit argues, albeit articulating the story of the self in unconventional ways.
Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text’s distinct strategy for life narrative. Crucial to this book’s approach is the innovative theoretical foundation of relational autobiography that reveals the grounding of the self within the collective—not as symbolic of it. This framework exposes the intersection of the story of the autobiographical subject with the stories of others and the tensions between personal and communal discourse. Relational strategies for self-representation expose a movement between two seemingly opposing desires—the desire to separate and dissociate from others and the desire to engage and integrate within a particular relationship, community, culture or milieu. This interplay between disentangling and conscious entangling constitutes the leitmotif that unites the studies in this book.
mediated through the perspective of that character– focalized by
him or her. I address the significances generated by using focalization as a rhetorical strategy, particularly fraught because the perspective is that of a character from the other side of a national conflict. My analyses address whether the narrator reinforces the focalizer’s perceptions or undermines them, and how the technique of focalization unsettles established perceptions and offers critique of the system. I work through how conveying a story through the perception of a character on the opposite side of the conflict foregrounds and complicates structures of representation and power dynamics.
community and society. They are reflected in the interpersonal relations depicted in the stories, and accentuated through motifs conveying decay and hypocrisy, and through rhetorical devices such as irony.
This article presents an analysis of the Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid’s Rujuʿ ila altufula
(1993; Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, 1998) through the
prism of relational theories of autobiography. It exposes narrative strategies of voice and
language to bring out the autobiographical subject’s struggle to identify with and against
authority figures while forging her own voice. It highlights Abouzeid’s mother’s powerful
presence voicing indigenous and traditional perspectives and the father’s silent (and silenced)
voice, despite his patriarchal dominance. It unfolds the dynamics of “giving voice” to Abouzeid’s
illiterate mother and grandmother while challenging the content and principles
underlying their utterances. These dynamics are further complicated by her father’s formative
yet problematic political stances. The final section discusses Abouzeid’s engagement with
tensions triggered by colonial encounters and postcolonial nation building.
within the narrative voice articulates the connected themes of family, gender, and authority, and how its narrative choices engender it as an act of resistance. In this context, it focuses on the theme of illiteracy. This study fleshes out the ways in which this text constitutes self/selves rather than assuming either the uniqueness of the literary self or overall textual coherence.
ג'מאעה הינו כתב עת מדעי בין-תחומי לחקר המזרח התיכון, היוצא לאור מטעם המחלקה ללימודי המזרח התיכון ומרכז חיים הרצוג לחקר המזרח התיכון והדיפלומטיה שבאוניברסיטת בן-גוריון, החל משנת 1998. ג'מאעה מתייחד בהיותו כתב עת אקדמי, שנכתב ונערך במשותף על ידי סטודנטים וחוקרים ותיקים. מטרתו של ג'מאעה לחשוף בפני הקורא הישראלי תחומי מחקר חדשים בלימודי המזרח התיכון, גישות ופרספקטיבות מחקריות עדכניות, ובכך להעמיק את היכרותו עם הסביבה בה הוא חי.