Elias Khoury (b. 1948) is one of the most outstanding figures in Lebanon’s cultural, intellectual and literary life today. The study focuses on the theme of memory in Khoury’s novels. In the light of the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990 memory has turned into a disputed and often neglected find in Lebanon. As the study shows, not only do Khoury’s novels hold on to the memory of the civil war and transmit it at a time when memory itself is threatened, memory in its turn effects the novels’ narrative structure. The study takes inspriration from narratology, especially Gérard Genette, and from Walter Benjamin’s writings on memory and history.
Literatures in Context is a peer-reviewed book series devoted to Near Eastern and North African literatures. The editors want the title of the series to be understood programmatically. They presuppose a concept of world literature that includes Near Eastern and North African literatures. What is more, they assume that literatures are in many ways marked by intertextuality, that they constitute readings of extremely diverse earlier texts, and that they are posited within a field of tensions, much broader than their respective national language. For the earlier eras of Near Eastern and North African literatures, this field of tensions geographically covers the regions of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In modern times, it has become a space of interaction that has long since included “global” Western literatures (and realities). This does not imply that the modern Near Eastern and North African literatures have severed themselves from their predecessors. Instead it is precisely the tension between different sets of references in modern Near Eastern and North African literatures, or their “local historical context”, which is a great part of their attraction, that remains a crucial field of research for the modern scholar.
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