Breathing sun-drenched horizons: The possibility of poetry in post-Oslo Palestine.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the quietly spectacular, particular moment of an inconspicuous Palestinian publication from 1999 entitled D&dotbelow;uyuf al-nar al-da`imuna [The Eternal Guests of Fire; EGF]. A poetry anthology, EGF sparked an immediate debate among commentators, who quickly announced the emergence of the New Palestinian Poets.;My study explores the New Poets as a literary trend and outlines their poetic and meta-poetic visions. It also examines the poetological and ideological agendas that emerge from the critical reception---or "rewriting" in Andre Lefevere's terms---of EGF. While critics widely perceive the production of the New Poets to signal rupture with a poetic history dominated by overtly political and nationalistic writing, many of the poems themselves resist such depoliticized readings that dove-tail too conveniently with official and semi-official peace process discourses. Destabilizing the common binary opposition between personal-aesthetic and political-national expression, the New Poets produce poetic categories with multiple, ambiguous, and even contradictory valences.;One example of such poetic resistance is found in Ghada al-Shafi`i's work, which interrogates gendered subjectivity and women's marginalization both within Palestinian cultural production and Western feminist discourse. My reading of al-Shafi`i engages a Palestinian woman's experimental poetry as a site of language and politics both. Implicitly it also considers how poetry, in ways unique to it, seeks to address or redress linguistic and political inequities.;Another example of poetic resistance appears in the New Poets' intertextual engagement with Mahmoud Darwish, which suggests an allusive practice where inter-Palestinian affiliation is flaunted. Such a practice may aptly be called a "political intertextuality" that draws attention to the writer and reader as social, nationalized subjects.;I offer my readings of the New Poets---the texts themselves and their rewriting---as an emblematic site for the larger construction of cultural politics in Palestine at the turn of the 21st century. Mapping the stakes of the creation of a new literary trend enhances our understanding of contemporary Palestinian poetry and of those vital negotiations of identity and borders in a post-Oslo, still-colonial context conducted not between political leaderships, but between writers, critics, and their audiences.