OUTLINE

This course is organized into six distinct sections, each with a macro (sociological, historical, philosophical, psychological aspects) and micro component (the text itself.)

Cluster 1: One of the most important figures of the twentieth century was Albert Einstein. Not only did he revolutionize science with his theory of relativity, but literature, art, philosophy were all transformed by our nonlinear views of time and space. The novel of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust played with time, memory, and space in creative ways undreamt of in previous centuries and cultures. With film, art and contemporary literature we have poked holes in the unities of time and space, opening up narrative to infinite possibilties. Throughout the semester let your imagination play with time and space in your own lives. I have chosen Alan Lightman's EINSTEIN'S DREAMS as your nightly bible. Read a chapter every night before bed and meditate on that timespace change. For more ideas on Einstein, go to twenty/zeller.html or twenty/einstein1.html. As you analyze the books, pay special attention to the use of time and space.

Alan Lightman was born in 1948 in Memphis, Tennessee. Lightman says that ever since he was a child he built rockets and wrote poetry. He majored in physics at Princeton, reasoning it was easier to be a scientist turned writer than the other way around. In 1974 he received his doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Caltech in 1974. Between 1976 and 1899 Lightman taught astronomy and physics at Harvard, moving to MIT in 1989 because there he was given the chance to teach both of his loves--as a physicist and as the director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. Lightman credits Rushdie and Marquez, two other writers on our list, for influencing his work because they are writers who distort reality to see it more clearly. He also enjoys reading writers from other cultures, so he can enter worlds unlike his own. He tries to bring readers into the scientific world in EINSTEIN'S DREAMS which he wrote in 1991 at his summer home on a small island off the coast of Maine.

Our first cluster will examine THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus and NO EXIT by Jean-Paul Sartre. On the macro level, we want to get an introduction to Existentialism and the new Marxism and to how these great writers used literature to further their ideologies; on the micro level we want to examine the works, through close textual analysis, to see how the form of a play differs intrinsically from that of a novel. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born into a well-to-do, highly educated family and graduated first in his class in philosophy from the Ecole Normale Superieure, one of the most schools in Europe. He met Simone de Beauvoir, the second wave French feminist, and thus began a life-long partnership. Sartre was greatly influenced by German philosphers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, thinkers who questioned the existence of God, universal truth, immortal life and many accepted "truths" of Western civilisation, in favor of a more phenomenological approach to existence. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Rene Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Sartre is quoted as saying, "I am, therefore I think;" in other words, existence precedes essence, hence the name Existentialism. What this means is that human consciousness develops as a response to phenomena in the "real" world, as opposed to more Platonian ideals of consciousness coming from man's soul or a higher being.

Sartre spent 1933-34 in Germany and when he returned he wrote his book NAUSEA. Like many twentieth century intellectuals, he also had his stint in prison, in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1940. When he was released in 1941, he became part of the French resistance against the German occupation, and sought to combine his Existentialist theories of human individuality and freedom with the collective responsibility of the new Marxism. Death, without the hope of eternal life, creates anxiety but forces man to act in the present, to make hard choices, to exercise his freedom, so that he carves out a life, that is in essence, the sum of his actions. But this existential philosophy should not make a man more selfish, but more responisible; his choices must include a responsibility for humanity as well as himself. In this respect Existentialism is a Humanism , the title of another of Sartre's works. I use the pronoun "he," because Sartre did, although his partner was a strong feminist.

I received a Master's degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris at a time when Sartre, Camus and the influence of existentialism on the theatre of the absurd was most in vogue, before the post-structuralists and postmodernists like Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva and Barthes had taken over Parisian intellectual life. In fact my specialty was theatre of the absurd and the title of my thesis was "La Chute de la Tradition Theatrale," which involved an analysis of the aesthetic as well as philosophical distinctions between classical dramaturgy and theatre of the absurd such as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and others, and how the media of television and film had forced an anti-naturalist trend on the theatre. I also performed in French theatre as I was completing my degree there. NO EXIT has a classical structure with existentialist themes, so it is different from works by Ionesco and Becket.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born in Algeria to a poor, working class family but because of his talent and brilliance, received distinction in philosophy at the University and moved to Paris. He published THE STRANGER in 1942, about an existential, alienated protagonist Meursault who murders a man, for no apparent reason, and who is subsequently condemned to death. It is as much an indictment of capital punishment and society's social norms as it is an existentialist narrative, written in sparse, pristine prose. In 1947 he published THE PLAGUE, charting the inception, process and resolution of this disease in a fictional North African town. It is a metaphor of the German occupation during World War II but could apply to any event. During the anthrax lockdowns after 9/11 last semester, students identified strongly with this novel, with the different responses to the epidemic, and with the personification of the disease and its devastation. After 9/11, we New Yorkers know how it feels to be in a lockdown. Like Sartre, Camus was aware of the social/cultural/psychological constraints of existentialism, but he was more religious or spiritual. My professors at the Sorbonne thought that he would have become more and more Catholic had he not been killed in a car accident at 46. In fact, Sartre and Camus did split and dissociate from each other after the war.

Both were prolific writers, spreading their energies across novels, short stories, essays, plays and expository books, which is one reason why Existentialism became a popular movement. However, I feel that Sartre was more gifted as a dramatic and argumentative writer, and Camus as a novelist and lyrical essayist.

Read NO EXIT (it's all online, don't buy it) and THE PLAGUE together for comparison and contrast. Note that they both adhere to unities of time, space and action, although THE PLAGUE takes a little longer to unwind. NO EXIT conforms to Aristotelian dramaturgy on most levels. It is simply the conversations of three newly deceased characters, coward Garcin, lesbian Inez, and baby-killer Estelle in hell, which is a Louis XIV drawing room. They are waiting to see when hell will begin until they finally realize that "Hell is other people." There are no mirrors: they must look into each other's eyes for all self-affirmation and approval. And here is the rub because each character wants and needs something from the others that they cannot give him or her. NO EXIT is an excellent example of how interpersonal conflict is combusted into intense, riveting dramatic action. Every stage is carefully orchestrated until the door opens-- and no one can escape. There are unable to exercise their human freedom to choose. But the hell is in essence, of their own choosing, because they lack the strength of the existentialist hero who can become the sum of his actions.

Working only with dialogue, the bourgeois drawing room and a few limited props, Sartre is able to create a play that continues to be performed all over the world as a great work of theatre, as well as a mouthpiece for the chief tenets of Existentialism. The play was originally commissioned as something short and easy to take on tour, with no changes in scenery and only three actors. Sartre was also asked to ensure that none of the three actors felt jealous of the other two by being forced to leave the stage or getting the best lines; consequently, he began to think in terms of a situation where three characters would be locked up together--first, in a cell during an air raid, and then in hell. In this inferno, "hell is other people," because Estelle sees no truth, Joseph hears no truth, and Inez speaks no good, according to former student Jerry Harman. In contrast, THE PLAGUE uses methodical description and precise narration to suck us into another hell, that of a population avoiding and finally facing the ravages of the plague. This is a brilliant sociological study, of how characters work with and against each other to fight a common evil. Dr. Rieux is like Giuiliani after 9/11, making himself stronger by administering to the needs of the population, working night and day with that indefatigable Hizzoner energy.

Note how important descritive writing is to the art of the novel. Sartre often lacks the patience to describe as thoroughly as Camus, preferring to whip and hack and demolish his world with dramatic and philosophical conflict. Camus documents, describes and patiently recreates a world palatable to all our senses, a world that is often a metaphor for some philosophical injusitice or condition he would rather not attack directly through expository writing. Yet he focuses on the community more than the unconscious exploration of the characters.

Since you need to pick a character to play for the semester, you might enjoy playing any one of the characters in these two great works. For the close textual analysis assignment, pick passages from the two books to analyze to show the difference between dialogue and description aesthetically, the main difference between a play and a novel.

I chose the books in Cluster Two, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and NIGHT, to give us a better understanding of the World Wars on the macro level, and the effect of memoir or naturalistic memory on the historical/political novel on the micro level. The tradition of naturalism in literature was fortified in the second half of the nineteenth century with the works of Emile Zola and the Victorians. For the first time, readers wanted to see reality with all its warts, and not use literature for escape, romance or entertainment. These books are in this tradition although they have more twentieth century aesthetic and psychological dimensions. ALL QUIET documents the trench warfare of World War I where soldiers were in another kind of hell for months at a time, fighting against young men for reasons they did not really understand.

NIGHT documents the holocaust and what it took to survive the concentration camps. Both books were drawn from personal experience. Both Remarque and Wiesel suffered, in part, from post traumatic stress syndrome from their experiences during these terrible wars. For a time they ran away from their suffering, and were not able to catharsize their pain fully until these books were published.

Elie Wiesel is the author of 36 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide. Born 1928 in Romania, Wiesel led a religious, communal life until 1944 when he and his family were deported by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. The following words were written with his blood, embedded forever in his memory: "Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never." Is this how you feel about 9/11? What are your memories of the event? What is your "night?" But it was Wiesel's steely will to survive that enabled him to leave Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Gleiwitz after the liberation in 1945 and eventually study at the Sorbonne, which nurtured the French writers, Gao Xingjian and your illustrious Professor Evergreen. Wiesel became chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement.

In May 7,2002, Wiesel wrote a letter to George W. Bush just before Ariel Sharon's arrival in Washington with the following pleas: "Please remember that a majority of Israelis favor a Palestinian State alongside Israel if the terror is stopped, whereas a majority of Palestinians, including Yasir Arafat support suicide killing operations against Israel. Please remember that while Palestinian Terrorists were hiding explosives in ambulances, Israeli reservists in Jenin were taking up collections out of their own funds to repay Palestinian families for the damage done to their homes. Please remember that the maps on Arafat's uniform and in Palestinian children's textbooks show a Palstine encompanssing not only all of the West Bank but all of Israel, while Palestinian leaders loudly proclaim that 'Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from Rosh Hanikra (in the North) to Rafah (in Gaza). Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was give. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway. Think of all the other victims of terror in the Holy Land. With rare exceptions, the targets were young people, children and families. Please remember that Israel--having lost too many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers--desperately wants peace. It has learned to trust its enemies' threats more than the empty promises of 'neutral' governments. Today, more than ever, Israel must be trusted to decide what concessions are or are not possible within the framework of its own security. Please remember that Ariel Sharon, a military man who knows the ugly face of war better than anyone, is ready to make 'painful sacrifices' to end the conflict. In fact it was he who carried out the handing over of Yamit, displacing thousands of Israelis, in exchange for peace with Egypt. Please remember that while Israelis mourned alongside us for our nation's tragedy on September 11th, Yasir Arafat was busy suppressing footage of his constituents dancing in the streets. Please remember that American Jews share your moral outrage at international terrorism as well as your determination to defend democratic ideals and religious freedom in the world. As diversified as we are in our political views, we are united in our hope that you, the leader in the campaign against the world-wide terror, will recognize that terror is Israel is but another of its facets, another result of the hatred being systematically taught to Arab children by the Palestinian Authority and state-funded schools elsewhere in the Muslim world. Years ago, we had hopes that we were entering a new era, an era of peace that would see Palestinians living alongside Israelis, in an alliance that would make the entire area flourish. If the Palestinian leadership can be persuaded to stop the abomination of terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, it may still not be too late."

Think about that letter when we get to cluster four and analyse WILD THORNS and MARTYR'S CROSSING.

For the close textual analysis assignment, copy out two passages from each of the books that seem the most moving to you. Then write down your memoir from 9/11. Then look at the relationship of the memoir to the event, to what the personal story gives you that you cannot get in a history book or traditional novel. How does the memoir get closer to reality and give the novel depth and breadth? How does the novel based on memoir allow the personal story to be catharsized completely? How does your memoir give dimension to mainstream news coverage of 9/11?

Cluster Three: Inspired by my trip to the middle east and love of Egyptian culture, (another Western orientalist? not exactly!) I chose the next three books to analyze cross-cultural story expectations, Islamic feminism and the recursive, poetic aesthetics of Arabic story-telling, as well as the different time/space elements. In GOD DIES BY THE NILE the sexual abuse of young girls, the clitorectomies, the stoning of the adulteress, many of the injustices present in contemporary Islam are ruthlessly described by Nawal el Saadawi, the first female Egyptian doctor whose writing was so controversial she was imprisoned by Sadat. THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED is a collection of monologues by three characters about their domestic/love problems around the time Sadat was assassinated, but again, the focus is on the injustice of the arranged marriage that Randa must submit to for social approval and financial necessity, in spite of her love for Elwan, and the grandfather's wisdom, pain and ultimate impotence. Sadat's murder is wedged in between Elwan's beating of his rival to death, which seems almost like a unconscious eruption of rage and jealousy. For more ideas about cross-cultural feminism, go to twenty/bodyf.html.

Neither book has the linear kinesthetic thrust of the traditional western crisis/climax/resolution. In GOD DIES there are so many crises/climaxes that Zakeya's murder of the village leader seems only one of many. When asked where Allah is, she says, in prison, that she killed him-- he is buried on the banks of the Nile. El Saadawi's structure is Arabic in its recursive themes of sun rising and setting on every scene, but also multi-orgasmic with its many climaxes. Mahfouz weaves his climax into the fabric of Egyptian domestic life, never giving in to its finality, always letting each character finish the integrity of his monologue, asserting his own microcosmic reality. WAR IN THE LAND OF EGYPT is also written with very different story expectations than typical Hollywood fare. None of these books have really happy endings, unless one could say that ending up in prison is a happy ending.

Naguib Nahfouz is the best-known and most studied Arab novelist in the Anglophone world. Mafouz was born in a warren of ancient alleys in the heart of Islamic Cairo, behind the al-Hussein Mosque, in the neighborhood of Gamaliya, in December 1911. His father, a minor civil cervant, was highly traditional, and his mother was doting, his childhood lonely but unremarkable. After attending Islamic elementary schools and a secular high school, he entered Cairo University (then King Faud 1) University and in 1934 graduated with a degree in philosophy. He rememberes that period, which coincided with the anticolonial movement against the British, as the happiest of his life--as "the golden age of patriotism....when the times themselves were listening to you," he wrote in his 1961 novel The Thief and the Dogs.

Until 1971, all his works were written late at night, for he spent his days as a government bureaucrat: as an official film censor, an adviser on the arts, and a minor functionary in various ministries, including the Ministry of Religious Affairs. A private, timid man who married late in life, Mahfouz is a strong believer, a bit of a mystic, and a Fabian socialist of the most passionate sort. Mahfouz married a Christian woman at age 43 and had two daughters and no grandchildren. He has never liked to travel, leaving Egypt some three times in his life. By the late 1950s, social realism had become the defining characteristic of his work. His well-ordered, punctilious, conservative daily life was the antithesis of the world he created in his books. Note what he says in this book we are studying: "We live in a repugnant age of slogans. And between the slogans and the truth is an abyss, into which we have all fallen and lost ourselves."

He published his first novel in 1939 and since then has written thirty-two novels and thirteen collections of short stories. This prolific writer's work appears to have gone through four stages. The first (1939-44) consisted of three novels based on the history of ancient Egypt, focusing on a cherished theme, the heroic struggle of the Egyptians and their patriotic Pharaohs to expel the Hysos, as foreign ruling invaders, from their country. Like Camus' THE PLAGUE, THE STRUGGLE OF THEBES bore a relevance to Egyptian sociopolitcal reality, the British occupation. In 1945, Mahfouz left the history of Phaoronic Egypt to write A NEW CAIRO. This led to the publication of THE CAIRO TRILOGY, in 1956-57, a realistic study of Egyptian urban society between the two World Wars. In THE MIRAGE, published in 1948, Mahfouz experimented with a psychoanalytic novel, inspired by Freud. In 1959 another stage began with OUR QUARTER, an allegory of human history. In the mid seventies he returned to the fourth stage where he asserts the unique voice of Arabic narrative forms in THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS and THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED.

Mahfouz' world view is similar to Sartre's social commitment and responsibility, a far cry from the nihilism of Islamic extremists. His work reveals the irony of a European intellectual woven through the ancient Arabic storytelling. In 1988 the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize and wrote that "through works rich in nuance-- now clearsightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous, Mahfouz has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind." His characters are warm and human, in spite of and because of their grotesque flaws from the tyrannical merchant of the Cairo Trilogy, to his debauched and fanatical sons, to the weak and wayward women who tempt and distract them. Yet there is a robust sensuality, a deep reverence for Islam, a generous tolerance and the creation of world so ripe and vivid that you want to savor it forever. CHILDREN OF THE ALLEY with its autocratic rulers and echoes of prophets found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, proved most controversial and prompted a religious fatwa calling for his death in 1989.

In 1994 there was a near-fatal assault on Mahfouz by Islamic terrorists, wonderfully described by Mary Anne Weaver in her book, A Portrait of Egypt (1999) when he was stabbed while sitting in his car. since then he has only been able to write for 30 minutes at a time because of injuried nerves. He must keep armed guards around his apartment even now, in 2002.90 year old Mahfouz was recently interviewed (2002) for the New York Times. He says that even now he struggles to write every day: "A writer must sit down to write every day, pick up his pen and try to write something-- anything-- on a piece of paper. Perhaps they will succeed, or maybe come up with a new idea that will blossom eventually. Perhaps they will complete a short story, and perhaps nothing will happen at all."

Like many of the writers we are studying, Mahfouz is intensely involved in political, social and philosophical debate. At 90 his eyes and ears are so impaired that a friend arrives every morning to read the headlines for an hour. He gave his first interest payments from his Nobel Prize to Palestinian charities and now defends suicide bombers, a common position among Arab intellectuals:
"They are people defending a cause by sacrificing with their souls, and this is the highest level of noble resistance, although the death of civilians is regrettable. We have to remember that this is not a regular fight, a regular war where you can choose your target and fight only soldiers. This is a desperate situation where you blow yourself up and whoever happens to be on the site."
At the same time he shows little patience for those who want to destroy Israel or censor freedom of expression or intercultural exchanges between Jews and Arabs. At the end of the interview, after discussing death, he said:
"That is the way of life. You give up your pleasures one by one until there is nothing left, and then you know it is time to go."

Think of the elements of THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED, describing the time when Mohammad Atta lived in Egypt: the decline of the Egyptian system, the emergence of an authoritarian state, a middle-class urban family torn apart by economic stagnation and uncertainty, the sexual tensions of a young couple in a society in which men and women are kept strictly apart, the rise of corruption, and of militant Islam, as the almost inevitable result of a system that seems to be spiraling out of control.

Elwan could be like many of the cafe drifters, unable to find a job or buy or furnish an apartment, unable therefore, to marry Randa the woman he loves, and forced to share that dingy, cramped room with his grandfather. Think of what he says in that coffeehouse, a coffeehouse where Mafouz probably did most of his writing: "We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us--no more, no less. Where are the good old days?...My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this cafe as a refuge from the pain of loneliness....How many nations live side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis?--stories far better than A Thousand and One Nights What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet, as the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs on Pyramid Road are showered with banknotes and gratuities. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Security Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood...[Sada] He's a failure--"my friend [Menachem]Begin, my friend Kissinger," is all he can say; his uniform is Hitler's; his act, the act of Charlie Chaplin. He's rented our entire country--furnished--to the United States..."

There are many Saudi extremists who feel that Saudi Arabia has been rented, furnished, to the US as well. While Mafouz chronicles Eyptian urban life in Cairo, el Saadawi and al Qa'id describe the corruption of the authorities, usually the Imam, in the rural outskirts.

Nawal el Saadawi in "BREEDING TERROR or AN UNCIVILISED CLASH OF CIVILIZATONS": "Once again we are facing the fundamentalist, absolutist dichotomy of God versus the Devil, and of Good versus Evil used to mystify people, to confuse them, to veil their minds. The language which George W. Bush uses is no different from that of the pope, or that of bin Laden. All three speak in the name of God against the enemy, against the Devil. The church and the mosque are not just spiritual bodies with a spiritual agenda, but also geopolitical, economic and even military bodies, but their agendas here are clothed in spiritual robes....This war on terrorism is being used to halt the rising wave of opposition to unbridled transnational exploitation of nature, human resources and human life. In the global patriarchal capitalist system war ahas been and remians the economic stimulus required to stave off recession and protect accumulation of profits. But I wonder how many bombs will be needed, and how many innocent people must die in order to ensure that the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq will begin to climb once more....State terrorism is the elder brother of individual terrorism except that it claims the legitimacy of laws upheld by a powerful few."

Like American and Israeli leaders, she feels that fear is the great enemy, not because we can't shop till we drop, but because it will make us accept anything in the name of security or the war against terrorism. "Fear can help the Big Brother to drive us with a big stick into an Orwellian world." El Saadawi believes we should eradicate the original roots of all kinds of terrorism by restoring religion to the personal realm and developing secular huimanist societies that are able to abolish colonial and neo-colonial principles as well as the hegemony of the multinational corporations of the World Economic Forum. She speaks at the World Social Forum, advocating peace, love and justice from the grassroots up, abolishing all patriarchal systems that breed double standards and binary thinking. What do YOU think?

El Saadawi was born into a well educated family in 1931 in the village of Kafr Tahal, Egypt. Along with Shakespeare, Aristotle, Sartre, DeLillo, Lightman, she is one of my heros because of the energy, curiosity, intelligence and strength which with she has embraced and attacked so many areas of human knowledge and discourse: medicine, literature, politics, religion. She even has a great website. www.nawalsaadawi.net. After her imposed clitorectomy, she has been a strong advocate for feminist rights, criticizing the sexism of the American cosmetics industry as well as Islamic fundamentalism. In 1955 she became Egypt's Director of Public Health, but her book WOMEN AND SEX (1972), condemning clitorectomies and the veiling of the female mind even more than her body, aroused the anger of male authorities who put her in prison because of her continued research and writings in this area. After his assassination in l981 (read Mahfouz) she was freed and continued her political, medical and literary fight for the rights of oppressed peoples, particularly women. She claims that Westerners are particularly oppressed by their governments because they believe they are free even though they are the greatest true believers of them all and their democracy an illusion of freedom and equal rights.

In spite of her didacticism, her writing can be beautifully simple and poetic with ancient themes like the rising and setting of the sun in GOD DIES BY THE NILE. While DeLillo begins writing by deconstructing the sentence, by falling in love with words, she distrusts words, because they are weapons manipulated by Machiavellian politicians:"Language should be clear, so we understand each other. No monopoly, no playing, no games, no political games, no linguistic games, because I am really fed up with the linguistic games of the so-called 'postmodern era.'...We find ourselves lost in an avalanche of words which appear very dissident, and which multiplya dn reproduce themselves endlessly....We drown in these words; we are suffocated by them. It is the zero-sum game of words in which you lose your power to understand." For el Saadawi, language is a weapon, at least to those who imprisoned her, a weapon she will not give up even if it means her body would be imprisoned again. Like many great writers of our times, writing is her jihad, and as founder and president of the Arab Women Solidarity Association, her strong stance offers a welcome antidote to many solution to the clash of civilisations.

Like many of the books in this syllabus, WAR IN THE LAND OF EGYPT was banned in its country of origin in the seventies. Unlike much of the Arabic literature, this story is steeped in irony and black humor as it recounts the fiasco that occurs when a village elder persuades a poor night-watchman to send his own son as a stand-in for the elder's son who was drafted into the Egyptian army on the eve of the 1973 October war. Like Mahfouz, Yusuf al-Qa'id makes use of multiple narrators, but Qa'id's characters do not each present the entirety of the plot; in fact, there is eventually no overlap in their narrations, and therefore little or not repetition of events. This permits the plot to unfold as it would in a standard narrative, devoid of multiple voices, which enhances the story's dramatic impact while maintaining the variety of perspectives and giving us a microcosmi catalogue of Egyptian social types. The characters are conscious of their roles, as well as their co-narrators, which leads to more conflict between the characters. The story is embedded in Qa'id's sociology where schisms between rich and poor, city and country, mystery and myth deepen the conflicts between characters. After all my years of reading and writing, al-Qa'id has given me a more pristine understanding of narrative.

Born in 1944, Yusuf Qa'id is one of the most important representatives of the new generation in style and sociological message, even though (or maybe because) he was born in a small village from a long line of poor, illiterate peasants, and received all his education in his native land. His trilogy, THE COMPLAINTS OF THE ELOQUENT EGYPTIAN, involves an author writing a novel, drafts of which are incorporated into the text, along with other documents. Another of his novels, IT IS HAPPENING IN EGYPT NOW foreshadows interactive hyperfiction as it invites the reader to create the novel along with the author, providing documents for that purpose.

Choose short passages from each of the three books that illustrate the unique features of Arabic story telling, the recursive themes and structure, multiple and/or mysterious or flattened climaxes, multiple narrators. Sometimes I like to compare Western ballet to Middle Eastern dance to help students understand the difference between the gravity-defying, competitive discipline of pointe work with the earthbound, undulating, repetitive sensuousness of belly dancing. Or compare the round, voluptuous spaciousness of Mosque architecture to the jagged, stuffed, ambitious and upward bound soaring of a skyscraper. See if you can find the same similarities in the literature. In spite of her didacticism, El Saadawi's writing can be beautifully simple and poetic with ancient themes like the rising and setting of the sun in GOD DIES BY THE NILE. While DeLillo begins writing by deconstructing the sentence, by falling in love with words, she distrusts words, because they are weapons manipulated by Machiavellian politicians:"Language should be clear, so we understand each other. No monopoly, no playing, no games, no political games, no linguistic games, because I am really fed up with the linguistic games of the so-called 'postmodern era.'...We find ourselves lost in an avalanche of words which appear very dissident, and which multiplya dn reproduce themselves endlessly....We drown in these words; we are suffocated by them. It is the zero-sum game of words in which you lose your power to understand." For el Saadawi, language is a weapon, at least to those who imprisoned her, a weapon she will not give up even if it means her body would be imprisoned again. Like many great writers of our times, writing is her jihad, and as founder and president of the Arab Women Solidarity Association, her strong stance offers a welcome antidote to many solution to the clash of civilisations.

Note how the climaxes of WAR IN THE LAND OF EGYPT and THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED seem like seeds embedded in a labyrinth and the narrative objective is to unravel the story within the community. GOD DIES BY THE NILE is multi-climactic, with horrendous evenets occurring in almost every chapter, in a way that leaves the reader exhausted or breathless. But the structure almost comes from the placement of the sun in each of these events and the interface of the Ordinary World of the village with the Special World of the wilderness of Om Saber, Metwalli the necrophiliac, the runaway women and men and the sites of death orgies. How different these structures are from the typical Hollywood movie, which is essentially a cliffhanger!

When I was in Egypt, I got the worst sunburn of my life, so I am particularly aware of the influence of the sun on the writings. In the desert, sunrise and sunset are the big events, the only changes in that eternal landscape. For your close textual analysis, pay particular attention to the relationship of geography to spirituality, dreams, symbols, and the role of women in this fiercely patriarchal world. Arabic languages are written from right to left; metaphors, similes, long arrays of adjectives and repetition of words are frequently used by Arabs in communicating all ideas, witness the political rhetoric of Osama bin Laden. Again, there are some wonderful characters to play in these books as well as great places to take your character. Don't forget your alter ego can change the story, fall in love with the oppressed women, take people out of jail, or change the plot any way you so desire. Have fun!

Cluster Four: MARTYR'S CROSSING, WILD THORNS and SATANIC VERSES were chosen to bring light to the middle eastern conflicts and to help us understand role criticism, an outgrowth of theories of multiple selves, developed by Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Sherry Turkel and other thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. Do a novelists' characters reflect their thoughts? Which role are YOU playing now? Do we have one integrated self, or are we made up of a kaleidoscope of selves? Are you starting to integrate your alter ego in your own life? Is he helping you or wrecking havoc?

Salman Rushdie still cannot fly Air Canada because the airline is afraid some Islamic extremist will bring down the plane in an effort to fulfill the fatwa issued by Iran after publication of SATANIC VERSES. Yet this is a book of fiction. Islamic rebuttal to Western condemnation of Fatwa against SATANIC VERSES: Semseddin Turk , the President of the MIT Islamic Society writes "Because of the unequivocal attempt at associating itself with real events, THE SATANIC VERSES is dangerously, even criminally, misleading for a Western audience that knows little about Islam and Muslims. Rushdie's metaphors and symbols are strongly reminiscent of and reinforce traditional Western prejudices and myths about Islam. THE SATANIC VERSES is one of the most slanted works in a regular cycle of intentional or unintentional misrepresentations of Islam and Muslims in media sources and textbooks. Because of its wild implications and virulent language, the novel constitutes an unprecedented assault on Islam, and indirectly, on the Abrahamic religions preceding it."

The novel aptly begins with Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta falling from an expoding airplane, hijacked by Shiite terrorists, to the shores of Britain. Chamcha is an anglicized Indian who has lived in England since youth, while Gibreel, a religious movie star, recently recovered from an illness where he lost faith in Islam, comes to England to pursue Alleluia Cone who he fell in love with in India. Upon arrival, Saladin grows horns and hooves and thick hair develops all over his body, while Gibreel acquires a halo, metamorphosing into forces of good and evil which Rushdie then blurs by making Saladin embrace his Indian heritage while Gibreel begins to doubt his pro-Western choices. At the end Saladin is bettered by his transformation while Gibreel, who was the "angel," commits suicide to escape from his dilemmas. What Muslims most object to are the dreams of Gibreel, the story of Jahilia and Mahound, the latter referring to the prophet Mohammed and the former referring to the city of "ignorance," or Mecca. He then refers to the great personalities of Islam as "fucking clowns," "riff-raff," and "goons." The verses of the Koran are "revelations of convenience." They particularly hate his discussion of sex where "sodomy and the missionary position were apporved by the archangel, whereas the forbidden positions included all those in which the female was on top." Mahound is guilty of "fucking as many women as he liked," including mothers and daughters.

Westerners rebut that Muslims are being too literal and unimaginative, confusing postmodern, deconstructionist fictional techniques, irony, and suspension of disbelief with deliberately malicious anti-Islamic propaganda, thereby repressing freedom of speech. Muslims protest against the use of obscene, violent language when dealing with respected Muslim religious leaders. Nikos Kazantzakis also received similar criticism, without eternal death threats, for THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.

In an open letter to Rajiv Ghandhi, Rushdie states: "The section of the book in question (and let's remember the book isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet who is snot called Muhammed living in a highly fantastical city...in which he is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind at that. How much further from history could one get?

Rushdie was born to liberal, prosperous Muslim parents in Bombay June 19, 1947. In August 14 of that year, Pakistan divided itself from India as part of an agreement ending the period of British colonialism in South Asia. The result was a chaotic and extremely violent period as 6 million Muslims moved north to the newly-established Islamic state and 8 million Hindus and Sikhs moved south fleeing it. In 1961 he moved to England to study at Rugby School and then Kings College, Cambridge. In 1980 he published MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN which won the Booker Prize but gained a law suit from Indira Gandhi who won her libel case before she was assassinated. In 1983 he published SHAME and in 1988 SATANIC VERSES. Like India, SATANIC VERSES is dense, multicultural, creative, rich, magical, chaotic, a complex "chutneyfication" of echoes and allusions that Rushdie infuses with biting satire. Like Wittgenstein, Rushdie seeks to attack questions ather than provide pat answers and paradigms, to break down the rigid, self-righteous orthodoxy of extemist Islam.

The theme is a search for identity in a post-colonial, pre-colonial vein. People of Anglo-saxon stock are almost entirely absent form the London of THE SATANIC VERSES. Instead the city swarms with immigrants: Indians, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Jamaicans, German Jews, etc. He reminds the English that they too were colonized, by the Romans and the Normans. Interestingly, he rejects both martyrdom and triumphant nationalism as inadequate foundations for a satisfactory self-identity, questioning the credibility and beneficence of orthodox, traditional Islam. Gibreel's dreams challenge the Koran's claims to infallibility, accuse Islam of the repression of women, call into question the probity and honesty of the Prophet himself. He spares no institution or person in his quest to answer the question, what kind of idea are we? Underneath its complex structure Rushdie reaffirms beliefs in individual liberty and tolerance, freedom of expression, skepticism about dogma, and belief in the redemptive power of love. Again Rushdie voices some of the issues developed by Sartre in his affirmation of human freedom and responsibility in a world devoid of absolutes. Rusdie writes about the novel in his essay, "Is Nothing Sacred?" "Because whereas religion seeks to privileg one language above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them, which are relations of power. The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language, but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges. (420) ...while the novel anaswers our need for wonderment and understanding, it brings us harsh and unpalatable news as well. It tells us there are no rules. It hands down no commandments....And it tells us there are no answers; or rather, it tells us that answers are easier to come by, and less reliable, than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds. (423) "In the twentieth century, the novel came to be viewed as primarily oppositional, critical of the culture which produced it. Rather than providing values, it challenges them. Modern novels are praised for their courage in exposing hypocrisy, challenging tradition, exploring forbidden themes. If blasphemy is not the most common of techniques in western fiction it is because so few writers take religion seriously enough to feel it worth attacking. "(Rushdie:"In God We Trust"376-377)

In 1988 VikingPenguin published SATANIC VERSES at which point a Saudi newspaper in London denounced him. Threats and complaints followed and in 1989 the book was burned before TV cameras in England, 5 members of an extremist group attacked the American Culture Center in Islamabad, and in Kashmir, sixty were injured and one died in a protest. For these questions and his plIn an age of terror, how does literature help us transcend our reality, lend perspective to our confusion by pulling us into the past and other cultures, and give expression to our anguish and fear through catharsis? They survived it; so can we. In this course we will define terrorism the way the Arabs define it, as any organized violence, by an individual, group or state, legitimate or illegitimate, against a civilian population, either intentional or unintentional. Because this is about twentieth and twenty first century literature, we will include the two World Wars with All Quiet on the Western Front, Night, No Exit, The Plague about Algerian terror as well as the German occupation and natural scourges, to Islamic militant terrorism in Egypt in The Day The Leader Was Killed, Satanic Verses, God Dies by the Nile and War in the Land of Egypt, to Israeli/Palestinian terror in Martyr's Crossing and Wild Thorns, to the terror of hostage-taking and kidnapping in Mao II, News of a Kidnapping, and The Hostage, to the terror of totalitarian regimes such as China in Red Azalea and Soul Mountain. Black Water is both a personal and stylistic meditation on terror as well as an indirect indictment of the terror a powerful political leader has over an innocent civilian. Because one objective of fiction/drama is to create a combustive drama for the reader's catharsis, literature and terrorism are really competing with each other. Sometimes real life provides so much terror that the reader hides in literature for escape, seeking fantasy, happy endings, funny, harmless stories that eschew the turmoil of an unlivable situation. Often cultures will move through a transformation like New York did after 9/11, moving from the transformation of reality into tragedy with heroic stories, to silly, innocuous escapes, to some social comedy, and finally to stories that deal with fictional terror. No one can take too much of one thing. When New Yorkers were coughing from the smoke and toxins downtown, they did not go to the movies to see sci fi representations of Manhattan blowing up. Enough is enough. ayful satire, Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran in the following fatwa: "I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled SATANTIC VERSES--which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran--and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."

He elaborates: "I call on zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may be found, so that no one else will dare to insult the Muslim sanctities. God Willing, whoever is killed on this path is a martyr." Rushdie defended himself as follows: "Nowadays...a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which THE SATANIC VERSES has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for the breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, ...THE SATANIC VERSES is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it's about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world." (The Book Burning 25) Even though his book was fiction, Rushdie was personally blamed for its ideas. The extremists lack humor and suspension of disbelief as well as tolerance. But the book itself as well as the political controversy are good examples of the dilemmas of role criticism, which we will examine in the American Jewish and Palestinian interpretations of occupations and Israeli checkpoints.The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned either in the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. As a magical realist, Rushdie chooses to focus all his attention on these figments, instead of writing a more accurate, comprehensive version of Islam. But he is a novelist, not a scholar.

One of my students was recently reprimanded in the New York subway in July 2002 for reading SATANIC VERSES. Accosted by a Muslim woman, she was told "not to believe anything in that book." Is that the point of novels, to make us believe, or is suspension of disbelief just the willingness to enter a FANTASY world created by the author? Why do so many cultures, American included, expect fiction to be naturalistic, true to life? Why do some of us take irony, humor, satire, fantasy so literally?

Ever since I spent the night in a Greek freighter in the harbor of Alexandria, listening to Egyptians throwing grenades into the sea in the hopes of bursting the eardrums of Israeli frogmen who were planting bombs in their ships, I have been unable to take sides in the middle eastern conflicts. I see humans on both sides; rights and wrongs committed by all states. In MARTYR'S CROSSING and WILD THORNS we will explore the humanity on all sides, the longing, frustration, guilt, despair and rage that has caused the holy land to be so unholy for so many years.

Sahar Khalifeh was born in 1941 during the British mandate in Palestine in Nablus. She left a frustrating marriage to study literature and feminism in America. Her first novel was confiscated by the Israelis, which shows that militant Iran is not the only country guilty of censorship. Her second novel was first published in Cairo. She has taught at Iowa and Bir Zeit University and probably knew some of the suicide bombers, maybe even the women. She founded the Women's Affairs Center in Nablus. In WILD THORNS we see militancy as a necessary venue of resistance to Israeli occupation. But Khalifeh does not let didacticism make her prose laborious and heavy; the novel is rich and succulent like ripe olives and we see, hear and feel the characters-- the underground, militant high schoolers we have recently seen so often in the news, the shopkeeper who sells groceries to Israeli soldiers, or the village mothers who ululate in solidarity as their homes are bulldozed. Although it was written in 1975, the novel offers us a deeper understanding of what is going on in 2002 with the seige of the Church of Nativity, the bulldozing of homes in Jenin, and the terrors of the suicide/homicide bombers/martyrs.

Khalifeh's characters are not drawn with the same good vs evil morality we saw in GOD DIES BY THE NILE. After Usama assasinates the Israeli officer, "sombre images fill Adil's mind. The dead officer, his grieving widow, the little girl stretched out on the ground, her pale, bare legs partly covered by Um Sabir's veil. People running through the streets, someone yelling, 'Leave a pig alone!' Bitterness flooded his heat. My cousin kills a man and I carry off his daughter. Tragedy or farce? Still, the memory of the Israeli woman's head on his shoulder, despite all the boundaries that divided people, seemed top opne the horizons of this narrow world." (172)

Those who compromise, however, are usually the ones to survive, so Adil must suffer to see his family home blown up by the Israelis: "Take a deep breath, Adil told himself. Tears. Dust. Fog. He could smell lemonwood through the acrid aroma of dust and crumbling stone. The lemon tree was burning in the rubble of the courtyard. The soldiers looked so arrogant in their dark cars. A thirst for reenge, for rebellion, stirred deep within him. I'm not cruel, but I'm filled with rage and bitterness, filled up to here. And these cowering crowds. And you yourself, Adil, a god of patience, that's what they say. What could be worse than admitting you're an impotent god, unable to assert your own rights or anyone else's? The process of ascent and fall goes on. A god-like ascent to the heights of Mount AIbal. And descent through seaweed into the gutters and decaying refuse. You search for yourself in other people's eyes, Adil. You find yourself mirrored in the eyes of the hungry, the nake, the homeless, those who live in tents. The winds and storms toss you in all directions. But the will to live still beats within you, defiant and instinctive. What can you do? Your spirit is bottled up; it can't find a way out. You experience sorrow, repress your emotions, and wait. Nevertheless! This mind of yours at least keeps you awake, wards off the drunkenness of indifference. Your heart rages and storms, yet the energy's suppressed by the machinery of oppression." (206)

But unlike the suicide bombers, Adil only thinks the thoughts and then goes back to his job working for the Israelis: "If only you were more cruel or harder of heart, you'd blow up everything you could lay hands on, from the Atlantic to the Gulf and on to the world's furthest reaches. You'd leave no two stones standing. You'd uproot the trees, exposing the infections beneath the earth's surface to the light of the sun, to the breezes of spring. You'd turn everything upside-down. And begin again. Slowly, very slowly. Here a seedling. There a tree. Here a flower. And you, young Sabir, a tall, broad-shouldered palm. Your hands would bring rocks from the depths of the earth and from the mountains. Those stones would shine like raw diamonds. We could colour them, decorate them, and build them into rows of beautiful houses that would stretch as far as the eye could see and stand for all eternity. The soldiers' metal detectors could ring all they liked, we wouldn't hear them." (207)

These are the thoughts Adil has as his enormous, ancient family house lays in ruins, the house that Khalifeh first described as "...a real, old-style mansion. There were marble pillars, high valuted ceilings and an open courtyard paved with huge stones. In the middle of the courtyard was a pool, surrounded by lemon trees and sweet-smelling jasmine. Arabesque plasterwork decorated the walls, stained glass lanterns reflected the light and the anitque chests in every room were inlaid with mother-of-pearl." (33)

As his world crumbles, Adil meditates on the poetry of nuclear terrorism-- to destroy all and begin again. Yet for Adil, he sees it only as a wish-fulfillment, a dream upon which he would never act. The novel closes as people go about their business, selling newspapers and other goods, buying vegetables, fruit and bread, surrendering to the same sad survival that Wiesel's holocaust victims did. Does Khalifeh give you insights into the souls of these men, that you don't see in the other two novels?

MARTYR'S CROSSING is Amy Wilentz' first novel. She is a journalist, a chronicler of Haitian life and politics and an essayist for The New Yorker. She said in an interview with Kate Manning that the key to writing a novel is to create at least one character whom everyone will love, so that when he is not there, you want him back. Now that she has finished the novel, she feels lost without Doron, George, Marina and Ahmed. She says that she likes Ahmed the best because he is self-centered, self-important, and based loosely on a former PLO fighter and Bethlehem politician, who lived in a tent on a mountain until he was forced to move into an Israeli settlement. Wilentz said that Marina was the most difficult character to write because she is the closest to herself. Even though she is a journalist, she tried to put the politics around the characters' situations so that we never lose our emotional grip on the story. She says that Doron is not crazy when he dresses up in Palestinian clothes to search for Marina in Ramallah; it is because he sees the other side as human that he succumbs to his suicidal situation at the end. Many of the scenes between George and Marina were similar to those between Amy and her father. When asked about gender and fiction, Wilentz said: "MARTYR'S CROSSING is very much a guy's novel. It's full of history and politics and explosions and what, I'm told, is a rather ripping plot, amazingly enough, since plot is something I hate thinking about." (Appendix)

In this cluster we are focusing on character. Note how Wilentz goes against type and makes Ari Doron, the Israeli border guard, an almost psychotic, but highly empathic, sensitive, wandering Jew-- wandering into enemy territory in his Palestinian disguise to get himself killed. See how puny, skinny and almost wimpy the jailed Hamas leader Hajimi Hassan is. Only Ahmed Amr, and Yizhar, the Israeli boss, and George Raad, the American/Palestinian writer/intellectual seem truer to type. When does stereotype work and when does it become shallow? Can going against type create unbelievable characters or just reflections of the author? In her effort to go against type has Wilentz just created mirrors of herself? Doe