Despite the health crisis facing researcher Nadia Hanaoui, her determination to confront illness through the gateway of creativity remains the fuel that feeds her continuous critical output. Recently, she published two new books through the "Abjad" Institution for Distribution and Publishing. The first, a work on post-classical narratology, is titled "Narratives of History Novelization: Historiography, Meta-History, and Feminist History." The second book is titled "The Palestine Flood." These two books represent a qualitative addition to the researcher’s body of critical work, which now totals 42 printed volumes.
اضافة اعلان
Narratives of History Novelization
The first book, spanning over 350 pages, consists of a theoretical introduction followed by four chapters. It explores the artistic requirements of this literary genre and defines its various conditions through several studies—some purely theoretical and others theoretical-procedural. In this work, Hanaoui completes the theoretical efforts she established years ago in her 2018 book, "The Narrative Grasping History."
The chapters of the new book focus on the dialectical relationship between the concepts of History, Reality, and Fiction as an interconnected creative and cognitive triad. The author argues that the relationship between writing and history is as old as philosophy itself. Regarding this, she states:
"The origin of this relationship began with Herodotus, who wrote the first book of history and became its legitimate father. Despite the developments witnessed by humanity throughout its history, that relationship has remained standing on vital pillars that make any attempt to describe or define it lean toward symmetry. Through this symmetry, the 'narrativization of history' or the 'historicization of narrative' become one; the novelist becomes a historian and the historian a novelist, with a philosophical awareness of both Man and Time."
The book's thesis revolves around the concept of "The History Novel" (as opposed to the traditional historical novel). It is based on the hypothesis that while the "Historical Novel" utilizes history in its classical sense—restoration and documentation—in a way where storytelling mimics official or unofficial documented history, the "History Novel" possesses a postmodernist tendency. In this form, history becomes a narrative shape that artistically dismantles centers and undermines structures to emphasize aesthetics and expose the hidden aspects of history, without bias toward form or dominance of content.
The Palestine Flood
The thesis of the second book, as evident from the title, centers on the Palestinian cause in its current stage and the challenges it faces on various levels. The goal is to present readers with the nature of the developments in the "Al-Aqsa Flood" battle, along with the subsequent updates, repercussions, and echoes across the Arab world and global public opinion.
The book asks:
"Where is the refuge for Arabs when they face imperialist and Zionist brutality in front of them, and the fires of fundamentalism behind them? How long will they remain beings imprisoned within themselves and lost? Why do we not invest the 'soft freedom' available to us virtually to possess free and conscious thinking? Can we liberate ourselves from our slumber by harnessing our thought—which counter-culture and media circles have blurred for decades—to serve us, rising against all the restrictions that have shackled and terrified us until we became prisoners of illusion, deception, despair, and disappointment? When will our Arab peoples take the helm of history? Where is the courage, steadfastness, and heroism of previous generations? And what disappointments and concessions will be stored and saved for the generations to come?"
