Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
French
Advisor
Amr Kamal
Committee Members
Elizabeth Dill
Omnia Khalil
Subject Categories
French and Francophone Literature
Keywords
Literature, Lebanon, Postwar, Poetics, Unreason, Memory
Abstract
This dissertation examines how French and Arabic post-civil war Lebanese novels confront the problem of producing a narrative about a war that refuses closure. While political and historical discourse often frame the Lebanese Civil War as a bounded and concluded event, the literary texts analyzed here challenge this assumption. They also expose the limits of narrative structures through which war is typically rendered intelligible.
Reading Wajdi Mouawad’s Visage retrouvé [A Face Rediscovered], Huda Barakat’s Ahl al-Hawa [Disciples of Passion], Selim Nassim’s Fou de Beyrouth [Madman of Beirut] Rabīʿ Jābir’s Taqrīr Mīlīs [The Mehlis Report], Dominique Eddé’s Pourquoi il fait si sombre [Why Is It So Dark?], and Rashīd al-Ḍaʿīf’s Fusḥa mustahdafa bayna-l-nuʿās wa--l-nawm [Passage to Dusk], I develop the concept of a poetics of unreason to describe a mode of writing in which narrative persists while resisting coherence, resolution, and reconciliation. Unreason does not signal the absence of meaning but challenges the demand that the experience of war, along with its memory and trauma, be rendered intelligible within conventional frameworks of storytelling.
As I argue, these novels deploy the poetics of unreason to provide an impossible account of the war. Through an intentional use of fragmentation, atemporality, and unreliable testimony, they expose the violence of imposing a discourse of reason onto experiences that exceed the bounds of a rational narrative. They do so by incorporating amnesia, ruins, and decomposition both as literary tropes and as a disruptive narrative form. In this context, the poetics of unreason reveals the limits of representation in the face of war's incomprehensibility.
Recommended Citation
Trujillo, Melissa, "Narrative Disorders: 'Poetics of Unreason' and the Limits of the War Story in Lebanese Postwar Fiction" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6729
