Nermine El-Horr

 

• American university of Beirut
• MA in Arabic Language and Literature, under the supervision of Dr. Maher Jarrar, at the American University of Beirut.
• E-mail: ne70(at)aub.edu.lb

 

Statement on Research

My research is in Modern Arabic Literature with a focus on modern and contemporary Arabic novels. It extends to trauma studies, gender studies and their role in shaping narrated identity and memory. My research interests include Arabic autobiographies, history of the Arabic novel and history of the Arabic film.

I have recently, in fall 2015, completed my thesis which proposes an integrative approach to explore the configuration of trauma in two autobiographies in modern Arabic literature, The Search: Personal Papers by Latifa Zayyat (1992) and I saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti (1998). I traced the structure of the autobiographical identity in relation to the narrators’ experience of trauma and the latter’s repercussions on memory and the representations of the self. I argue that both narrators use narration to heal from traumatic experiences; however Zayyat manages to work through her trauma while the other narrator Barghouti is gone astray in a temporal traumatic limbo.