RT Article
T1 Emile Habiby and the Reinvention of the Palestinian Novel: The Pessoptimist in a Post-Realist Context
JF Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies
VO 22
IS 1
SP 1
OP 20
A1 Al-Khadra, Wafa Awni
A1 Hawatmeh, Christina Zacharia
A1 Majdoubeh, Ahmad Yacoub
LA English
PB Edinburgh Univ. Press
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1851207678
AB This article argues that Emile Habiby’s The Pessoptimist (1974) reinvented the Palestinian novel within a new literary genre, post-realism. Habiby’s masterpiece employs a complex, noncommittal narrative that in many ways defies, even eludes understanding, and this is its strength. In order to make the narrative more approachable, this paper attempts to contextualise the novel within a postmodern sub-genre, post-realism, making its more subtle and hidden meanings and dimensions reveal themselves. To this end, the article begins by defining realism and post-realism as literary terms and then pinpoints several key post-realist moments in this highly elusive novel. To deepen the analysis, narrative strategies employed in the novel are compared and contrasted to a similar postmodernist novel, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Ultimately, the article contributes to developing a new sub-genre, post-realism, within the main, mother genre of postmodernism, which can not only be seen as a reinvention of the Palestinian novel, but also be used widely in literary studies.
K1 Departure
K1 Emile Habiby
K1 Israeli Communist Party
K1 Literary Realism
K1 Palestinian Novel
K1 Palestinian Resistance Literature
K1 Post-Realism
K1 Postmodernism
K1 The Pessoptimist
K1 Zionism
DO 10.3366/hlps.2023.0302