Rebuilding a house, reconstructing a world: Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East

Authors

Keywords:

Literature, Exile, Middle East, Memoir, Reconstruction

Abstract

House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East is the story of a returning native son who has in mind what the locals see as an insane project of rebuilding his ancestors’ house in the war-stricken southern Lebanon. In this article I consider Shadid’s project of rebuilding a symbolic house on a land torn apart by political, ethnic, and religious divisions. It is a project that tvranslates a desire to transcend these divisions and unite the “heap of broken images” that the region has become.

Author Biography

Larbi Touaf, Mohammed I University

Larbi Touaf is Associate Professor and former chair of the English Department at Mohammed I University, Oujda, Morocco. He has studied in Morocco, France and the USA. Touaf is a Fellow of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, NY, and a Fulbright visiting Scholar at SUNY Cortland in 2013-14. He founded and coordinates The Identity and Difference Research Group at his university and has co-edited with Soumia Boutkhil a number of books among whichMinority Matters: Literature, Theory, Society (2005), Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Ciriticism (2006), and The World as A Global Agora: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (2008). Dr. Touaf is also a translator; his latest work in this field is Lucy Melbourne’s An American In Morocco/Une Americaine au Maroc (2008). A new edited book is due to appear in 2016 under the title: The Spring of Discontent: Women’s Rights after the Uprisings in North Africa. Newcastle, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Leaves n°1 : Après la terreur : Ondes de choc et reconstructions, XXe-XXIe siècles / After Terror: The shock effect and rebuilding, 20th-21st centuries

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Published

2015-11-30

How to Cite

Touaf, L. (2015). Rebuilding a house, reconstructing a world: Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East. Leaves, (1), 270–277. Retrieved from https://revues.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/leaves/article/view/200

Issue

No. 1 (2015): After Terror: The shock effect and rebuilding, 20th-21st centuries

Section

II.2. Reconstructions : Réhabiter

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Larbi Touaf

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.