Narratology at the checkpoint: The politics and poetics of entanglement

Abstract

Tis essay explores literature signifcantly diferent from the corpus on which classical narratology is based: an international set of narratives focused on Israel's occupation of Palestine. Drawing on traditional narratological concepts, we seek both to identify recurrent narrative patterns-of event, time, space, narration, focalization, and character-and to interrogate assumptions, refne concepts, and fll gaps in conventional narratological frames of thought. Our approach relies on a shif from the traditional comparative model of reading "side by side" to a methodology of "entanglement" or "histoire croisée" that emphasizes connections, hybridities, and asymmetries within the space of the Israeli-Palestinian confict as constituted in an array of fctional and autobiographical narratives. In focusing on checkpoints and border-crossings, we also aim to contrast Bakhtin's view of the road as the Urchronotope of the novel with the narrative impasses that, we argue, evoke the literal roadblocks of occupation. In investigating the mutually constitutive relationship between a political situation and the narrative practices that represent it, we also suggest new directions for a situated narratology. In the end, then, we hope not only that narratology will help to illuminate representations of the occupation, but that narratives of the occupation will modify and enrich narratology.