“Habituation Devours Things”: Radwa Ashour’s Specters and the E(n)strangement of Life-Writing
In Specters, her multi-genre novel-length work of life-writing, Radwa Ashour engages with the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization” to explore how history shapes lives and lives shape history. The double-voiced narration and mise-en-abyme structure of...
| Published in: | Hawwa |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2014
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| In: |
Hawwa
Year: 2014, Volume: 12, Issue: 2/3, Pages: 169-194 |
| Further subjects: | B
Radwa Ashour
Mourid Barghouti
Defamiliarization
Egypt
Granada
Palestine
Viktor Shklovsky
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | In Specters, her multi-genre novel-length work of life-writing, Radwa Ashour engages with the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “enstrangement” or “defamiliarization” to explore how history shapes lives and lives shape history. The double-voiced narration and mise-en-abyme structure of the novel, a mirror-within-a-mirror plot layered with metafictional passages on writing, coheres through the motifs of ghosts, threads, and silences. These motifs bring to the fore, if only momentarily, those individuals whom history has effaced from the nineteenth century onwards. Ashour, who in her words seeks to construct a “geographical space dense with a resonant history, a composite of past and present, overlapping territories constitutive of an emotional and moral space for self-awareness and self-definition”, engages the theory of enstrangement on both counts as she crafts a personal and political history that resists final closure and affirms life. |
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| ISSN: | 1569-2086 |
| Contains: | In: Hawwa
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15692086-12341262 |