Grenzgänge

Hudā Barakāt’s novels are complex and densely woven texts that focus on the obsessions and inner conflicts of their protagonists. The first monograph dealing with the Lebanese author’s work, this book presents in-depth analyses of her first three novels, each of which addresses one key aspect: androgyny as metaphor, madness between lovesickness and mystical experience, and utopia or ‘real’ counter-worlds. <br/>In the context of the ‘spatial turn’, the study analyzes these aspects as transgressions or borderline situations. It starts by developing a concept of ‘Grenzgänge’ (‘moving across/along borders’) that encompasses various physical as well as conceptual spaces, combining ideas from different disciplines: heterotopy, borderline and transgression, threshold and liminality as well as interspaces or ‘Third Spaces’ and ‘ZwischenWeltenSchreiben’ (‘writing-between-worlds’). The concept elaborated here offers an instrument for analyzing literary texts that opens up new perspectives and reveals analogies and differences between various borderline situations.<br/>

Modern Arabic literature is all too often seen one-dimensionally as a mirror of political and social conditions. Aspects like war, trauma, memory, and – in the case of women writers – female self-assertion thus appear to be the pressing issues when examining contemporary Lebanese literature.<br/>The Lebanese author Hudā Barakāt (b. 1952), who has lived in Paris since 1989, is one of the most prominent figures in Arabic literature. Densely woven and complex, her novels address a wide range of aspects of human existence. With refined subtlety her literary writing is at once a reflection of and on both universal and specific Lebanese experiences. Although they are mainly set in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the war – one of many possible extreme experiences – functions like a kind of ‘blind spot’ which, although not the focus of attention, nevertheless determines events. The texts focus rather on the individual protagonists and their inner conflicts and obsessions – fragile characters who, each in their own way, live on the margins of society, transgress boundaries, cross borders, encounter limits, or move in borderline situations.<br/>The first monograph devoted to her work, this volume analyses in detail the author’s first three novels, focusing on one key aspect in each: androgyny as metaphor in “Ḥajar al-ḍaḥik”, madness between lovesickness and mystical experience in “Ahl al-hawā”, and utopia or ‘real’ counter-worlds in “Ḥārith al-miyāh”.<br/>In the context of the ‘spatial turn’, this study analyses these aspects as transgressions or borderline situations. For this purpose a chapter devoted to literary and cultural theory elaborates a corresponding concept of ‘Grenzgänge’ (‘moving across/along borders’) capable of comprehending the most diverse facets of both physical and conceptual spaces, drawing on and combining ideas from a variety of disciplines: heterotopy (Michel Foucault), borderline and transgression, threshold and liminality (Victor Turner), as well as interspaces or ‘Third Spaces’ (Homi K. Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldúa, Edward Soja) and ‘ZwischenWeltenSchreiben’ (‘writing-between-worlds’; Ottmar Ette).<br/>By combining insights from cultural and literary theory with a close reading of the texts which traces and elaborates cultural-historical and intertextual references, the study establishes the concept of ‘Grenzgänge’ as a fruitful instrument of literature analysis that opens up new perspectives and reveals analogies and differences between various borderline situations.<br/>

• By (author) Barbara Winckler