Compelling Threads
Genealogies, Chronicles, and In-between
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cristian Bratu
In his study titled “La historiografía medieval: Entre la historia y la literatura”, Jaume Aurell contends that there is a significant paradigm shift between 11th-12th- and 13th-to-15th century history-writing. Aurell notes that between these two periods there is a shift from genealogical narratives to chronicling. According to Aurell, genealogies were quite popular during the 11th-12th centuries because nascent monarchies were fighting to establish and consolidate their potestas and therefore needed simple genealogical narratives in order to justify their claims to power in the clearest and definitive manner possible. Most genealogies tend to be schematic “narratives of origins” that begin with a mythical hero portrayed as the founder of the dynasty, and subsequently focus on the succession of counts, dukes, princes or kings up to the present, or at least close to the time of the current ruler. Aurell notes that the rhythm of genealogical narratives is sequential and predictable. In contrast, chronicles tend to provide considerably more narrative detail and focus less on chronology. In the above-mentioned study, Aurell illustrates this shift primarily within the framework of Castilian and Aragonese-Catalonian history-writing. In my paper, I assess the viability of this theoretical construct in the case of French history-writing between the 12th and the 15th centuries.
Post-apocalyptic America and the New World Order in Omar El Akkad’s American War
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonia Farid
In Omar El Akkad’s speculative novel American War (2017), set in the 2070s, a second civil war erupts in the United States, parts of which already destroyed by climate change, and a new world order is shaped with the emergence of an empire in the Middle East. At the center of the war is the protagonist Sarat, a rebel from the “Free Southern States” whose life, both as a victim of the conflict and a perpetrator of violence, is traced throughout the novel as one typical of inhabitants of war-torn regions. This paper examines how far the dystopia into which the United States metamorphoses and the transformations through which the world goes touch upon contemporary issues pertaining to American foreign policy, the Arab Spring, terrorism, ultra-nationalism, and global warming. This will be done through looking into the reversal of the balance of power in the novel—the rise of the Bouazizi Empire being the most notable—and its implications as far as the current world order and relations between center and periphery are concerned. Through scrutinizing the different aspects of the ominous future Akkad presents against the backdrop of a turbulent present, the paper attempts to position the text as a form of political commentary that deconstructs the dogmas on which civil conflicts thrive and the role of superpowers in igniting/ fueling those conflicts. A link between the future as depicted in the novel and actual events that took place in the 20th and 21st centuries becomes, therefore, necessary.
Berrada’s "The Game of Forgetting": The Pull between Aesthetics and Politics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anouar El Younssi
This paper analyses Mohamed Berrada’s novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (1987, The Game of Forgetting, 1996), focusing on the book’s unorthodox narrative design, where multiplicity, metafiction, and fragmentation are strategic tools that bring to light the author’s vision of (post)modernist literature in a postcolonial nation. The paper examines how the novel’s compelling experimental quality and efficacious engagement of cultural and socio-political issues are at work, highlighting thereby the text’s commitment overtones. I argue that the novel’s well-crafted narrative multiplicity is an allegory of the idea of “accountability.” By putting the accounts of various narrators under scrutiny, the text seeks to hold them accountable, corroborating thereby Berrada’s vision of narrative transparency at the textual level and his commitment to socio-political transparency at the extra-textual level. Indeed, Berrada has created a novelistic world that serves as a microcosm of his native Morocco, where flawed characters are reflections of the social and political ills besetting the country post-Independence. The novel’s maneuvering at the technical level ultimately serves the goal of achieving transparency and integrity in addition to demonstrating, aesthetically, that truth is relative and that doubt is a vital element in how people should perceive themselves, others, and the world at large. Additionally, the novel’s inclusion of characters with contradictory behaviors, attitudes, and traits is in concert with its investment in Freudian concepts regarding the idea of a fractured/fragmented subjectivity. The novel’s forays—albeit in a measured fashion—into taboo topics, such as sexuality and homosexuality, demonstrate its commitment to the question of free speech.
Integrating the Humanities into Undergraduate Courses in Social Sciences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bina Nir
In order to integrate and assimilate the humanities into social science curricula, I propose integrating “hybrid” interdisciplinary courses within existing curricula. In this way, interdisciplinary observation, critical thinking, and humanist thought can be embedded into the teaching of core social sciences courses at the foundation of the structured academic education that students acquire.On this basis, and in the spirit of this concept, I have successfully taught a number of courses over several years in the Department of Communication Studies at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College. I propose to discuss one of these courses as a test case for how philosophy can be integrated in an interdisciplinary manner into social sciences BA programs. The course “Communication and Humanist Thought” combines the department’s core discipline of communications studies with a humanities discipline (philosophy). Structured as an interdisciplinary course, it exposes students to critical humanist thought in the context of patterns of communication in society, public opinion, the individual and the crowd, etc. Throughout the course, students use philosophical texts to analyze cases from current communications, while expanding concepts and ideas beyond the classical theories taught in communications studies, with the aim of developing a broad, critical approach to this field.
