Introduction

Summary

This is the first book-length analysis of Lebanese Francophone writings of women on the Lebanese civil war from the 1970s through the present time. Drawing on a corpus of writings by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (b. 1937), Etel Adnan (b. 1925), Evelyne Accad (b. 1943), Andrée Chedid (1920–2011), Hyam Yared (b. 1975) and Georgia Makhlouf (b. 1955), some of which has previously received little or no scholarly attention, this book examines the use of distinctive narrative forms in addressing interlinked questions of violence, war trauma and gender relations.

This book considers literature as a semiotic and a mimetic space. It is motivated by a lack of attention to narrative structure due to a general concern with stylistic expression, and it combines the study of the form and the content of the novel and examines ways by which Lebanese women writers of French expression constructed their war narratives. In doing so, this book seeks to answer the following questions: How are war stories told? In what way are war narratives constructed? Who is telling the story and why? In what way does the narrative voice participate in the structure and meaning building of a narrative? Is the narrative voice the only tool that tells war stories or can the body contribute to the narrative? If so, in what way does the body in general, and the female body more precisely, do so? What are the narrative roles assigned to the female body in the construction of war narratives? In what way does a woman's voice or a woman's body factor into the telling of war stories?

To answer these questions, I examine the intersection between the different fields of narratology (classical and post-classical), trauma studies, women's gender and sexuality studies and francophone studies. Narratology, in its narrow meaning, is generally understood as the theory that objectively studies the structure of a narrative. I adopt a broad definition of narratology which regards the narrative as a whole and includes the study of the narrative structure but also its meaning and context. In fact, and as Mieke Bal argues, there is a blurred line between the interpretation of a narrative and an analysis of its form (Bal 1997: 10–11).