There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings. However, just as monuments mark their territory by attempting to ensure the existence of boundaries, sothese discourses set a boundary between their authority as platforms on which the interpretation of monumental space occurs and, in this respect, the different authority of the novel. This study crosses this boundary by means of dynamic interdisciplinary movements between selected novels by James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Rashid al-Daif, and Orhan Pamuk, on the one hand, and various theoretical perspectives,history, and cultural geography, on the other. Through the specific choice of literary texts that represent monumental space in a typical post-imperial geopolitical contexts, Monumental Space and the Post-Imperial Novel brings into question many postcolonial paradigms. Sakr establishes a two-way interpretive methodology between theory, history,and cultural geography and the novel that serves as the groundwork for innovative interdisciplinary readings of monumental space.
Rita Sakr is a Visiting Lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published on Middle-Eastern studies, migrant writings, post-conflict literatures, and James Joyce. She is co-editor of James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (2011) and is co-editing The (1982) Siege of Beirut and the Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism (forthcoming).
AbbreviationsList of Illustrations1. Reading Monumental Space at the Crossroads of Disciplines2. "broken pillars": Counter-Monumental Tactics in James Joyce's Ulysses3. Burning Temples and Falling Empires: Unraveling Arsonists' Dreams in Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion4. A History of Violence: Martyrs' Square and the Fractured Space of Memory in Rashid al-Daif's Dear Mr Kawabata5. Tabooed Spaces of Greatness and Shame: Monumentalization and the Representation of Terror and Trauma in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book and SnowPostscript Post-2011: Monumental Space and the Collapse of Arab Dictatorships Selected BibliographyIndex
This highly engrossing study explores our paradoxical relation to monumental space as mediated by the post-imperial novel. It demonstrates the interplay between memorialisation and erasure, sacralisation and desecration, subservience and rebellious subversion, animism and petrification, combining fascinatingly detailed cultural and historical knowledge with illuminating and nuanced theoretical reflection. Rita Sakr not only reveals the transformative potential of monumental space but transforms our understanding of it through the original and timely ways in which she co-inflects the monumental with the post-imperial and brings a thought-provoking literary articulation to bear on the field of cultural geography.