Archive, Trauma, and Reconstruction: New Forms of Literary Remembering

Abstract

Elias Khoury is not Hala Kawtharani, Hyam Yared is not Rashid al-Daif—the comparison of two generations of authors clearly places us in peril of producing these kinds of truisms of great logic consistency and little explanatory power. The idea that a 30-year-old woman should find different words and stories when writing about a war that ended when she was barely 15 than those a 40-year-old former communist would have chosen writing about the same war more than a decade previously seems natural enough. The aim of this chapter, then, is not merely to underline the differences between these two generations, but to show how the forms of writing about the war specific to the postwar generation are connected with the authors’ position in the literary field, the role that war writing has acquired in it, and the writers’ habitus.