Overview

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim that these writers express a Francophile or """"colonized"""" consciousness, this book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities, and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors """"write Arabic in French"""" to invent new literary languages.

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9780815633563

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The book is a tour-de-force about the creative modalities by which the works under study mount resistances to the colonial language through textured languages, producing new forms of understanding the so-called and heatedly contested title of Francophone novel outside of its normative colonial gaze.--Yasmine Khayyat Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World

The book is a tour-de-force about the creative modalities by which the works under study mount resistances to the colonial language through textured languages, producing new forms of understanding the so-called and heatedly contested title of Francophone novel outside of its normative colonial gaze.--Yasmine Khayyat Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World

For students and scholars of Francophone Lebanese literature, the primary strength of this book lies in the excellent footnotes and comprehensive bibliography that include sources in Arabic, French, and English.-- Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Introduces several little-known but intriguing novelists to English-language readers, and it supplies helpful historical contexts for their work.-- International Journal of Middle East Studies Native Tongue, Stranger Talk challenges the dichotomy of native and foreign, and serves as a resource for scholars of Lebanon, literature, and language.-- Middle East Journal The book is a tour-de-force about the creative modalities by which the works under study mount resistances to the colonial language through textured languages, producing new forms of understanding the so-called and heatedly contested title of 'Francophone novel' outside of its normative colonial gaze. --Yasmine Khayyat Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World

Author Information

Michelle Hartman is associate professor of Arabic literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Canada. She is the author of Jesus, Joseph and Job: Reading Rescriptings of Religious Figures in Lebanese Women's Fiction.

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