UC Berkeley

Through the lens of Syrian fiction published with the advent of the new millennium, this dissertation reflects on the crisis of nationhood in the Arab world and on the ways in which the novel as a genre created the conditions of possibility for the 2011 Syrian uprising. Tracing an aesthetic of destabilization, I explore the artistically performed emerging consciousness that carves out new spaces of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry for Syrian writers. These new spaces establish a new era because although the twentieth-century Syrian novel that proceeded them professed disenchantment with authoritarianism, it continued to function within a dominant modernist, nationalist epistemological and political discourse that emphasized the nation’s homogeneity and associated the project of modernity with humanism and secularism, conceiving of it as an opposition to tradition. In contrast, this dissertation argues, with the unfolding of the new millennium, as the country was going through an intense period of vocal opposition known as the Damascus Spring, a young generation of Syrian novelists turned their attention to investigating the paradigms that had hitherto governed the country’s political and intellectual fields and its literary production, both reflecting and contributing to the general atmosphere that engendered the 2011 uprising in Syria. Their creative endeavors, which embodied demands for reform, freedom of speech, and an open civil society, manifested in new modes of literary expression through daring and controversial texts that openly explored what had long been treated as risky territories and taboo themes.

This investigation uncovers the remarkable and complex involvement of women novelists, who further interrogate both the nation and the novel as male-constructed spaces. My interviews with a diverse group of young writers who fled Syria in fear for their lives allow me to outline the emergence of a dialogical intellectual who aims to remap the nation’s ethos, reconnect with a repressed cultural past, and reposition the role of literature in society. Crucially, I investigate the ways in which this emerging consciousness manifests itself in these avant-garde works and underscore how these reformulations transpire through the re-gendering of multilingual and multicultural spaces within the Syrian collective. Guided by close readings, I focus on two pre-uprising novels written by women authors: Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a River Should, 2007) by Manhal al-Sarrāj and Brūvā (First Draft, 2011) by Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan. I tarry with these author's use of intertextuality, narrative fragmentation, metafiction, and temporal distortion. It is these innovative literary practices, I argue, that enable the new generation of Syrian writers to contest history, unearth repressed memory, undermine the notion of an unquestionable author(ity), and highlight the embodied practices rooted in multiplicity.