The Politics and Poetics of Madness in Ḥasan Blāsim’s The Madman of Freedom Square.
Iraqi writer Ḥasan Blāsim’s debut collection of short stories, Majnūn sāḥat al-ḥurriyyah (The Madman of Freedom Square), is centrally concerned with states and expressions of madness arising from the traumatic violence that consumed Iraq during, between, and after the first and second Gulf wars. The...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Arabic Literature Vol. 49; no. 3; pp. 271 - 296 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Brill Academic Publishers
2018
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=131689056&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 131689056 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00852376 C3H jtl: Journal of Arabic Literature issn: 00852376 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: 2018 vid: 49 iid: 3 pid: 639 pub: Brill Academic Publishers artinfo: ui: 131689056 10.1163/1570064x-12341365 ppf: 271 ppct: 25 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 587KB tig: atl: The Politics and Poetics of Madness in Ḥasan Blāsim’s The Madman of Freedom Square. aug: au: Al-Masri, Khaled affil: Swarthmore College su: Refugees Violence in literature Social problems Felman, Shoshana Iraq sug: subj: Iraq Refugees Violence in literature Social problems Felman, Shoshana keyword: Ḥasan Blāsim animality asylum cannibalism Iraqi literature literary madness nested narratives patriarchy refugee sexual repression trauma violence war ab: Iraqi writer Ḥasan Blāsim’s debut collection of short stories, Majnūn sāḥat al-ḥurriyyah (The Madman of Freedom Square), is centrally concerned with states and expressions of madness arising from the traumatic violence that consumed Iraq during, between, and after the first and second Gulf wars. The experiences of refugees and their search for asylum are frequently highlighted. Focusing on select stories, this article identifies and explores four types of madness in Blāsim’s fiction: contained madness, a structural dichotomy between madness and sanity that is established through a nested narrative structure in which a fantastical inner story is framed and retold by an apparently reliable external narrator; madness of the body, in which a traumatized character experiences a transformation, or disintegration, of his human form; gendered madness, in which madness is a response to patriarchal violence and oppression; and destabilizing madness, a subversion of contained madness in which the boundaries between sanity and madness, reality and fantasy, become indistinguishable. Drawing on theories of literary madness advanced by Shoshana Felman and others, the article argues that Blāsim’s iterations of madness and trauma serve to expand reality, rather than distort it, ultimately depicting the horror of wartime Iraq and the lives of its refugees in a way that rational storytelling simply cannot capture. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Journal of Arabic Literature is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Journal of Arabic Literature holder: Brill Academic Publishers dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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