Arabic Literature As a Site for Engagement with Alterity an Ethnographic Study of Arabic Literature Collegiate Classroom

Home , Qassim Haddad

“Reading With My Eyes Closed” Arabic Literature as a Site for Engagement with Alterity An Ethnographic Study of Arabic Literature Collegiate Classroom

by Ebtissam Oraby

B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature, September 2000, Ain Shams University M.A. in TAFL, June 2008, The American University in Cairo

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Graduate School of Education and Human Development of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education

January 8, 2021

Dissertation directed by

Arshad I. Ali Associate Professor of Education Research

Brian Casemore Associate Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy

The Graduate School of Education and Human Development of The George Washington

University certifies that Ebtissam Oraby has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of date of dissertation defense. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

“Reading With My Eyes Closed” Arabic Literature as a Site for Engagement with Alterity An Ethnographic Study of Arabic Literature Collegiate Classroom

Ebtissam Oraby

Dissertation Research Committee:

Arshad I. Ali, Associate Professor of Education Research, Dissertation Co- Director

Brian Casemore, Associate Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Dissertation Co-Director

Derek Attridge, Emeritus Professor of English, University of York, Committee Member

Aparna Mishra Tarc, Associate Professor of Education, York University, Committee Member

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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to the young men and women who participated in this study and to all my students who continue to inspire my scholarly work.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my committee members, my professors, my writing group, my colleagues, my students, and my family whose support made this project as well as my journey of doctoral studies possible.

To my advisors and mentors Dr. Arshad Ali and Dr. Brian Casemore, I am truly grateful for your constant support and guidance throughout my doctoral studies and my dissertation project. Your teaching shaped me as a researcher, a scholar, a teacher, and as a person. Your support opened a welcoming space for my passion to learn and guided me in navigating the academic world. Your questions challenged my writing to evolve and guided my thinking process, and you have always been available for me; for this, I am truly grateful. Without your dedicated involvement throughout the process, this project would never have been possible. I am incredibly thankful for your continued support.

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee members Dr.

Derek Attridge and Dr. Aparna Tarc. To you, I am deeply indebted for your guidance in my theoretical endeavor. Your work has always inspired me and I was honored and delighted when you agreed to participate in my project as a full committee member. Your willingness to invest in my work and offer feedback on the whole project since it started as an idea was invaluable.

I would also like to thank Dr. Colin Green and Dr. František Ondráš who agreed to engage with this project as examiners. Your brilliant comments and questions during my defense enriched the discussion and inspired a confidence in me. Dr. Green, I was privileged to be your student and advisee as I started my doctoral studies, and I am so honored to complete my journey with your support as a committee member for my

dissertation. Dr. Ondráš, your guidance has shaped my career as a teacher. Since you first introduced me to the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign language twenty years ago and until today you have generously given me advice and inspiration.

I cannot begin to express my thanks to Dr. Hosna Abdel Samie-Ondrasova, my mentor since I was an undergraduate student at Ain Shams University. From my undergraduate study and until today you pushed me to find my voice in academia, you nurtured my passion, embraced my failures, and celebrated my successes. You taught me the importance of asking the right question. You introduced me to the beauty of the meaning of words. Since the seminar in which we read Richards’ book “How to Read a

Page”, you have invited me to the magnificent world of reading theories. You have provided me with care, emotional support, and inspiration throughout my adult life.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my writing group partners Alicia Bitler, Kimberly

Sloan, and Elizabeth Alvarado, whom I consider to be my closest friends and without whom I could not have completed this project. Alicia, thank you for being there for me for the past four years. Thank you for your moral and emotional support and the countless hours you read my writing, paused questions, and discussed with me the flux of ideas that

I grappled with. Thank you for sharing your writing and your experience with me, you have always been a role model for me and I have learned a lot from you. Kim, we started our first doctoral course together in 2013, and since then you have showered me with your love and support. I am truly proud to be your writing partner and look forward to learning more and more from you. Elizabeth, thank you for your continuing support, genuine care, and selfless encouragement, and all that you bring to our writing group. To

Alicia, Kim, and Elizabeth, no words can express how thankful I am for you and how important you are in my life.

I’m also extremely grateful to my colleague and friend Nashwa Taher who never wavered in her support since the day I joined GW. Nashwa, you have been there for me in my ups and downs and provided me with encouragement and patience throughout my doctoral studies. To my dear friends, Heidi Morrison, Margaret Holland, Olla Al-Shalchi,

Abeer Hassan, Danny Atherton, Tanvir Ahmed, Timothy Schum, I cannot begin to express my gratitude and appreciation for their friendship.

I furthermore wish to thank Dr. Christopher Rollston, whose advice, encouragement, and guidance continue to support my academic endeavor, as well as Dr.

Mohssen Esseesy who has supported me throughout my doctoral study and allowed me the space, support, and resources to design the curriculum for this study. Dr. Mohssen, I would like to thank you for your constant encouragement and support. I would like to pay my special regards to Dr. Amin Bonnah who allowed me to observe his Arabic literature course for a whole semester as a pilot study for my dissertation project and generously provided his time and advice to me. I am also grateful to my colleague and friend Dr.

Jennifer Tobkin whose advice and support were instrumental in designing and constructing the course on which this study is based. I very much appreciate my colleague and friend Dr. Cory Jorgensen. I am grateful for his insightful advice on finding the time to write, practical suggestions on balancing my teaching and my scholarship, and his continuous support of my doctoral studies. Special thanks to my supportive colleagues Dr. Francesco Sinatora, Dina El-Hefnawy, Dr. Orian Zakai, Dr.

Mohammed Kassab, Dr. Nazih Daher, and Dr. Amaya Martin who continue to inspire

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me. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Michael weeks who encouraged me to design and offer a course for this project and offered invaluable help with the administrative aspect of the course. I also wish to acknowledge the help provided by

CNELC staff, Samuel Nohra, and Lillian Chen.

Nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of this project than the members of my family. I would like to thank my mother, whose love and guidance are with me in whatever I pursue, and my sisters Amani, Inas, Amira, Esraa, Ashraqat, and my brother Ahmed. This dissertation stands as a testament to your unconditional love and encouragement. Most importantly, I wish to thank my loving and supportive husband,

Ayman, and my four wonderful children, Mohamed, Nour, Omar, and Salma, who provide unending inspiration. This journey would not have been possible if not for them, and I dedicate this milestone to them.

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Abstract of Dissertation

“Reading With My Eyes Closed” Arabic Literature as a Site for Engagement with Alterity An Ethnographic Study of Arabic Literature Collegiate Classroom

This study investigates the reading and studying of Arabic literature in U.S. collegiate education as a site for engagement with alterity. The purpose is to explore how students in foreign language (FL) literature courses encounter alterity, how they construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern Arabic literary texts, and how the political, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which students read shape their reading. Using ethnographic methods, I examine an Arabic literature U.S. collegiate class that I created and taught. Data sources include audio recordings of class discussions, audio recording of out-of-class discussion groups with students, researcher’s memos after classes and out-of-class discussion sessions, in-depth interviews of students, qualitative analysis of students’ written work.

Witnessing the growing movement of literacy-based approaches to foreign language education, I use theories of alterity as a framework to illuminate understanding of literacy in foreign language contexts and possibly engender an other-oriented literacy.

Notions of alterity that constitutes my theoretical framework are synthesized through analyses of Levinas’s ethics of alterity and post-colonial conceptualization of alterity, supporting my investigation of the consumption of Arabic literature in the Western

Academy (Huggan, 2002). The post-colonial lens enables me to interpret the construction of the self and the other through the act of reading within its specific historical, cultural and political contexts (Drabinski, 2011). Building on the works of

scholars using Levinas’s ethics to theorize an ethical reading (Attridge, 2004a; Cohen,

2004; Davis, 2010; Tarc, 2015), my theoretical framework envisions an ethical textual engagement with the literary work.

Participants of the study encountered different aspects of alterity when reading and studying Arabic literary works, and each aspect posed a different challenge to them.

Through the encounter with the alterity of the literary works, the Arabic language and their peers, participants were challenged to rethink their habitual modes of thinking,

(Attridge, 2004a), to be open to different interpretation and be uncertain about their own, to embrace their differences (Biesta, 2004), to rely on and be responsible for each other, and learn from each other (Todd, 2003) and to produce knowledge in conversation with an other (Katz, 2013). In their reading, participants encountered cultural distance with the literary works (Attridge, 2011) both close and far and made efforts to account for it. The study demonstrates how alterity as a framework in FL literature class can create opportunities for students to ethically respond to literary works and to each other and engage in learning as a transformative experience of encountering otherness.

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Abstract of Dissertation ...... ix Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Purpose of the Study ...... 2 Research Questions ...... 3 Statement of Potential Significance ...... 3 Theoretical Foundation and Conceptual Framework ...... 5 Summary of Methodology ...... 6 Limitations and Delimitations...... 6 Chapter 2: Literature Review ...... 7 Theoretical Perspectives of the Role of Literature in FL Education ...... 7 Literature as the Canon ...... 7 Literature as Language ...... 12 Literature as Experience ...... 17 Literature as Culture ...... 20 Literature as Literacy ...... 22 A Glimpse into the Empirical Research on the Role of Literature in FL Education .... 31 Arabic Foreign Literature in U.S. Higher Education ...... 38 Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework ...... 41 Alterity and Ethics ...... 41 Levinas’s Ethics of Alterity and the Study of Literature ...... 52 Levinas’s Stance Towards Literature...... 52 Levinas’s Exegesis as Ethical Textual Engagement ...... 54 Levinas’s Ethics of Alterity and Education ...... 57 The Pedagogical Encounter as an Ethical Encounter with the Other ...... 58 Teaching as Dialog not Miaeutics...... 60 Ethical Educative Community ...... 61 Post-colonial Critique of Levinas ...... 63 Judeo-Christian Centrism...... 63 Jewish Centrism ...... 64 Inability to Understand Colonization ...... 65

Contextualizing Levinas’s Eurocentrism ...... 66 Decolonizing Levinas ...... 67 Levinas Against Levinas ...... 69 Post-colonial Alterity ...... 70 The Exotic Other ...... 72 Alterity and Reading Literature ...... 73 Literature as an Event: Derek Attridge ...... 74 Literacy of the Other: Aparna Mishra Tarc ...... 79 Chapter 4: Methods ...... 83 Research Questions ...... 83 Research Epistemology ...... 84 Writing the Ethnographic Text ...... 84 Doing Ethnographic Fieldwork...... 88 Being “Marked by the Other” ...... 88 How Levinas’s Ethics Informs My Study ...... 90 Research Design...... 93 Research Methods ...... 93 Recruitment ...... 95 Data Collection ...... 96 Data Organization ...... 97 Data Analysis ...... 98 Memos...... 99 Ethical Considerations ...... 99 Chapter 5: Course Design and Participants ...... 102 Course Design ...... 102 Readings ...... 102 Course Activities ...... 103 Learning Outcomes ...... 106 Translanguaging ...... 107 Participants ...... 108 Rania ...... 109 Gwen ...... 110 Majid ...... 112 Nadia ...... 115

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Ahlam ...... 117 Danny ...... 118 Madeline ...... 120 Amal ...... 121 Xiao ...... 122 Chapter 6: Encounters of Alterity in Arabic Literature Class ...... 124 Moment of Initiation: Reading the novel, Handsome Jew ...... 125 The Novel as a Moment of Initiation ...... 126 Encountering Alterity...... 140 Reconceptualizing the Self in the Encounter of the Other ...... 147 The Context of Production and Reception ...... 157 Conclusion ...... 161 Moment of Discomfort: Reading flash fiction The Astonishment of Storytelling ...... 162 Introduction ...... 162 Moment of Discomfort ...... 163 The Cultural Distance ...... 171 Ethical Moments ...... 180 Conclusion ...... 183 Possibilities of Meaning: The Return of Lilith ...... 185 Introduction ...... 185 The Poem ...... 186 Encountering Alterity...... 187 The Biblical Reference ...... 187 A Biblical Reading ...... 187 Welcoming Lilith, an Allegorical Reading ...... 189 The Poem’s Language...... 191 Encountering Gender ...... 193 Encountering Aggression ...... 196 Encountering Eve ...... 197 Reconceptualizing the Self in the Encounter of the Other ...... 199 Uncomfortable Encounter with an Inner Alterity ...... 199 The Context of Production and Reception ...... 205 Conclusion ...... 207 Chapter 7: Conditions of Alterity in Arabic Literature Classroom...... 210

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The Literary Work as Other ...... 211 Changed by the Literary Work ...... 212 Arabic Language as Other: “Reading with my eyes closed” ...... 217 Heritage Learner Encountering Arabic Anew ...... 218 Foreign Language Learners Encountering Arabic ...... 220 Affective Reading ...... 224 Peers as Other ...... 227 The Context of FL Classroom...... 228 Language Proficiency Level ...... 229 Opening a Space for Difference ...... 233 Students Perceptions of Translanguaging in Class Discussion...... 234 Embracing Multiplicity of Meaning ...... 235 Heritage/FL Learner Binary ...... 238 Conclusion ...... 241 Chapter 8: Conclusion ...... 243 Failing as a Teacher ...... 243 The Research Questions ...... 245 Research Sub-Question 1 ...... 245 Research Sub-Question 2 ...... 247 Research Sub-Question 3 ...... 249 Research Question ...... 252 Ethical Possibilities in Foreign Language Education ...... 252 The FL Classroom as a Community Open to Difference ...... 252 Translanguaging ...... 254 Pedagogical Implications ...... 256 Working with Unpredictability ...... 256 Compromise ...... 257 Teaching as Conversation ...... 259 Recommendations for Further Research ...... 261 References ...... 264 Appendix ...... 276

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Chapter 1: Introduction

أنا العتمة األنثى ال األنثى الضوء. لن يحصيني تفسير ولن أرضخ لمعنى “I am the female darkness not the female-light. No interpretation will account for me and no meaning will wrestle me down” (Haddad, 2008) This study is situated within the current ‘literacy turn’ in the field of foreign language (FL) collegiate education. The literacy turn is a scholarly movement that addresses the well-documented historical division of FL collegiate programs between lower-level language classes and advanced-level classes, which represents a methodological, theoretical and political split (Allen & Paesani, 2010; Byrnes, 2004;

Kern, 2000, 2002; Kramsch & Nolden 1994; Maxim, 2004; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy,

2016; Urlaub, 2012). Upper level courses tend to be taught by tenure or tenure track faculty, while lower level courses tend to be taught by part time faculty (Allen & Paesani,

2010) and the contribution of language teachers to the university humanistic goals is treated with indifference (Maxim, 2004).

Despite the emergence and increasing recognition of the “literacy turn,” the cultural turn that started in the late 1980s and early 1990s in FL departments is still at play (Byrnes, 2002). Within the context of the “cultural turn” literature has been considered broadly as a representation of culture (Paesani & Allen, 2012) as the emphasis in teaching FL literature shifted from focusing on the text to the understanding of the sub- text: the social and historical environment that produced the text and the underlying values, beliefs and world views that formed the text considering both content and stylistic features, moving students from simple cross-cultural comparisons to transcultural reflections (Urlaub, 2012). Reading Foreign Language literature is understood more as a mediated cultural learning experience and literature is seen a window to other cultures

(Hall, 2015). This view of literature may raise tension between literature as a cultural product and literature as a work of art. Furthermore, in the context of FL literature, the cultural and anthropological approach to literature may risk reducing literature to a social and cultural document, thus minimizing its creative and inventive nature.

In the context of Arabic Foreign Language (AFL) programs in U.S. universities, the situation is not different from other FL programs. The Arabic programs suffer from the language-literature dichotomy (Ben Amor, 2017). Students and teachers have to navigate a big gap between lower-level language classes and upper-level literature classes. Additionally, the literary curricula represent a neo-Orientalist vision of the

Middle East (Gomaa & Raymond, 2014) that shows what Ben Amor (2017) calls “the diaspora bias” or the “bent towards the exotic, controversial or that which depicts encounters of the so-called East and West” (p. 98). In addition, the politicized environment of teaching Arabic in the United States has intensified to the point where teachers avoid teaching certain literary texts, such as Palestinian literature, despite their centrality in the modern Arabic literary culture (Ben Amor, 2017).

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to explore the ethical possibilities of FL education by investigating a U.S. college-level modern Arabic literature classroom as a site for engagement with alterity. My goal is to understand how students in FL literature courses encounter alterity when studying and reading modern literary Arabic texts and how the political, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which they read shape their reading.

Research Questions

The research question guiding my study is: How does engagement with alterity in modern Arabic literature U.S. collegiate-level class inform or contribute to the understanding of ethical reading?

Sub-questions include:

• How do students in foreign language literature courses encounter alterity when studying modern literary Arabic texts?

• How do students in foreign language literature courses construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern literary Arabic texts?

• How does the political, historical, geographical, and cultural context in which students read modern literary Arabic texts shape their reading?

Statement of Potential Significance

The current historical moment characterized by global migration has made it so

“visible otherness” (Young, 2012) (i.e., cultural and ethnic otherness) became an everyday encounter. Additionally, foreign language education is a field that engages with foreign/other languages and cultures. This study situates itself within the context of FL education in the U.S. and in the current historical moment characterized by ideological turmoil and political polarization. The stance of this study is to challenge an anthropological understanding of otherness as exclusion and create a space within FL education to rethink the other according to Levinas’s ethics. For the past two decades,

Levinasian ethics provided conceptual tools for different scholars of education to rethink educational theory in face of the dominating instrumentalist discourse (Strhan, 2012) and the quest for accountability (Zhao, 2014). This study aims at rethinking FL education in general and FL literature education in specific in light of Levinasian ethics. Its goal is to challenge the FL education as a field of learning about other language and cultures, in

which otherness refer to “the category of whole cultural or ethnic groups as “other” which has been the product, as well as the object of, anthropological inquiry” (Young,

2012, p. 37). It explores the possibility of FL education as a field aiming to learn from the other (Todd, 2003), a philosophical other who addresses and challenges the subject to become (Biesta, 2005). As such, this study aims to examine how FL literature class may serve as a site for ethical engagement with alterity as well as explore ethical possibilities within the FL education.

Through exploring ethical possibilities in FL literature education, this study also investigates creative reading as an act-event of doing justice to the literary work

(Attridge, 2004a). Creative reading presents a different conceptualization of literature in

FL education. This is opposed to the canonical approach that perceived literature as a carrier of high cultural heritage and values (Carroli, 2008), or the Communicative

Language Teaching approach in which literature serves as a resource for authentic language supporting vocabulary acquisition and reading strategies (Carter, 2007;

Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000). It also differs from the “cultural turn” in which literature serves as an authentic window on a foreign culture and society (Kramsch & Kramsch,

2000), or the Reader-Response approach that dissolves otherness into sameness through literary criticism and subordinates the text to students’ subjective interpretations (Kern &

Schults, 2005). This study examines a new conceptualization of literature in FL programs; literature as an event, an encounter with otherness and explores the possibility of Creative reading as an engagement with the literary work as literature (Attridge, 2004).

The study utilizes translanguaging (Baker, 2011) in FL classroom as a tool to bridge the gap between lower-level and higher-level language classes. Utilizing

translanguaging in the classroom means that “students may deploy their full linguistic repertoires and not just the particular language(s) that are officially used for instructional purposes in that space” (García, Johnson & Seltzer, 2017, p.1). Translanguaging allowed students to have a deeper engagement with literary texts and with each other in class discussion.

This study contributes to the current ‘literacy turn’ in the field of foreign language

(FL) collegiate education. The literacy turn as a scholarly movement addresses the well- documented historical division of Foreign Language collegiate programs between scholarly approaches emphasizing literature study and pragmatic approaches emphasizing language communicative skills. This bifurcation resulted in a ‘curricular gap’ between lower-level language classes and advanced-level classes (Kern, 2002). The language- literature split is methodological (Kern, 2002), political (Kern, 2002), and theoretical

(Kramsch & Nolden, 1994). Witnessing the “literacy turn” as a framework to reform FL departments, establish their legitimacy in higher education, and provide a unified framework for lower and higher level language classrooms (Keneman, 2016; Kumagai,

Lopez-Sanchez, & Wu, 2016), this study proposes theories of alterity as a framework to illuminate our understanding of literacy in foreign language contexts and possibly our understanding of learning foreign languages.

Theoretical Foundation and Conceptual Framework

To investigate how AFL students read AFL literature, this study aims at raising questions of alterity while working within the emerging literacy-based approaches to FL.

My overarching framework addresses the concept alterity, synthesizing ideas of the

French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and post-colonial notions of alterity. I draw on the works of scholars who have utilized Levinas’s notions of alterity to theorize an ethical 5

reading (Attridge, 2004a; Cohen, 2004; Davis, 2010; Tarc, 2015), to envision an ethical textual engagement with Modern Arabic literary works. Further, I am attempting to place

Levinas’s notions of alterity and its implication for the theory of reading in conversation with post-colonial understandings of alterity to investigate the consumption of Arabic literature in the Western Academy (Huggan, 2002). By utilizing a post-colonial perspective, I seek understanding of the construction of the self and the other through the act of reading within its specific historical, cultural and political context (Drabinski,

2011), and I examine manifestations of power in the process of meaning making.

Summary of Methodology

The study employs an ethnographic approach to investigate the reading of Arabic literature in a naturalistic setting focusing on an AFL reading community represented in the literature classroom. As a teacher, I designed a literary curriculum for a class to teach contemporary Arabic literature. Class activities were developed to encourage elements of ethical reading. I carried out the study through participant observation of the class. Data sources include audio recordings of class discussions, audio-recording of out-of-class discussion groups with students, researcher’s memos after classes and out-of-class discussion sessions, in-depth interviews of students, qualitative analysis of students’ written work.

Limitations and Delimitations

The study takes place at one classroom at one university and embraces an ethnographic methodology with its recognized limitations of generalizability. The goal of the study is to give an in-depth understanding of reading as a social and individual act- event while understanding of the importance of the context of reading at a specific historical moment. This study is conducted in the contemporary Arabic literature class. 6

Chapter 2: Literature Review

In the following section I will present an overview of research into the study of literature in FL collegiate contexts from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Theoretical Perspectives of the Role of Literature in FL Education

Literature has played a significant role in foreign language (FL) education since the field of modern languages inherited classical studies (Olsbu, 2014). However, as

Olsbu explains, the role of literature has varied throughout the history of the field as the views on the nature of both literary texts and language learning changed and as different theories contributed to the understanding of foreign languages as a discipline.

Additionally, Kramsch and Kramsch (2000) explain how different approaches to literature in FL were founded on different instrumental approaches to reading: reading through translation, which produced the cannonical approach during the grammar- tranlation period; reading through speaking, adopted by phonetics experts and

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT); and reading through reading strategies, which is promoted by educational psychology. While researchers offered different frameworks to understand the different theoretical perspectives on FL literature and how it shaped the pedagogical approaches to literature in FL education, The following framework is informed by the former literature reviews conducted by Kramsch and

Kramsch (2000), Carter (2007), Paran (2008), Carroli (2008), Paesani and Allen (2012),

Olsbu (2014), Bobkina and Dominguez (2014), and Hall (2015).

Literature as the Canon

The canonical approach to literature is rooted in the classical studies period

(Carroli, 2008). Canonical reading has been the traditional approach to teach literature

since the grammar-translation method in FL education where literature study was viewed as the purpose and center of language teaching (Hall, 2015), and literary works were believed to carry universal value and to transmit a high cultural heritage (Carroli, 2008).

The end goal of language study was to access the great works of literature of the foreign culture (Davis, 1989) to the point that “the study of language in those days meant the study of literature” (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000, p. 554).

Grounded in the nineteenth-century notions of the cannon, dominant in the early part of the twentieth century and debated over the history of language departments, the canonical literature in FL classrooms and textbooks has never completely disappeared, as

Olsbu (2014) affirms. Olsbu also argues for some usefulness in the canonical approach to FL literature since it implies viewing the canon as a “historical archive of culturally influential texts” (p. 7). While the canonical approach to literature started as an “elitist commerce” providing aesthetic education for the few, the beginning of the twentieth century marked “the end of the supremacy of literature in language studies and the beginning of emphasis on literacy in language education” as the canonical works of

French and German literature were used as a tool to develop basic reading skills of the

“masses of immigrants” (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000, p. 554).

Against Literature

With the fall of the grammar translation approach where literature was the main source of input, “a constant rejection to the use of literature in language classroom became the rule” and literature disappeared from language curriculums in the 1940s and until the 1960s (Bobkina & Dominguez, 2014, p. 249). With the emergence of the audiolingual method, and later Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), dialogue was

prominent as a method to teach practical language while literature was “dropped down the pedestal” and “discarded to the periphery” (Khatib, Rezaei, & Derakhshan, 2011, p.

201). Moreover, with the “cognitive turn” as Kramsch and Kramsch (2000) explain, linguistics became the center of language programs:

The universal cognitive turn in second language acquisition research, born out of the Chomskyian revolution in linguistics (1957), and the multicultural turn in education further drove the study of foreign literatures, perceived as an elitist pursuit and extraneous to everyday communicative needs, virtually out of the picture in the study of modern languages. (p. 566)

Kramsch and Kramsch add that the professionalization of language teachers and the creation of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) institutes in 1958 and of the

American Council on the teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in 1966 officially declared the separation of the teaching of foreign languages and the scholarship of in foreign literatures.

The following is a summary of the argument against literature made by three prominent opponents of literature in FL curriculum; Topping (1968), Horowitz (1990), and Edmondson (1997). The starting point of their argument is to deny any difference between literature and other type of texts. Horowitz (1990) argues that the humanistic values claimed by its proponents can be promoted through other humanistic subjects like

Philosophy or art. Edmondson (1997) argues that the special status of literature in FL originated from the desire to justify the study of FL by making it comparable to Latin and

Greek. The second point in their argument denies the positive effect of the study of literature on language learning due to the structural complexity of literary language, and its non-conformity to standard grammar rules (Topping, 1968). In addition, Edmondson argues against the assumption that literature allows FL students access to the FL culture.

Edmondson downplays the importance of literary references in language and states that they are of equal importance to advertisement slogans.

Similarly, Horowitz (1990) argues against the claim of “interpretive richness” of literature, stating that nonfiction texts contain literary features as much as fiction contains conventional language, and that “metaphor and imagery are no the exclusive property of literature” (Horowitz, 1990, p. 164). Finally, opponents of literature in language education argue against the belief that the study of literature increases students’ motivation to learn for which. As Edmondson (1997) also maintains, there is no way of knowing whether positive motivation could be due to the text or the pedagogic presentation. Edmondson explains that the beliefs about the advantages of using literature in FL education are not based on empirical research. He further claims that the anecdotes of success shared by teachers do not specify whether the positive effects of studying literature are due to the special characteristics of the literary texts, or due to the pedagogic treatment.

These arguments against the engagement of literature in language education were disputed by many proponents of literature. For example, Olsbu (2014) characterizes

Edmondson’s view of FL teaching and learning as reductive since it conceptualizes the final purpose of FL learning as acquiring language mastery. In addition, Paran (2008) describes Edmondson’s stance as an “isolationist position” (p. 468) and explains that this

“market driven” paradigm viewing learners as “educational customers,” compartmentalizes language learning and justifies it only as it contributes to learners’ careers. In favor of a holistic perspective of education, Paran (2008) asserts that “literary texts are suitable because language is learned by human beings, and the interest and love

of literature for its various qualities is a human characteristic” (p. 469). Thus Paran criticizes the view of the learner “as a language learning machine,” and affirms the unique importance of literature above other humanistic academic subjects.

On the other hand, Maley (2001) points out that driving the stance against literature is the scarcity of empirical research giving evidence to its significance.

However, Shanahan (1997) argues that the debate about the legitimacy of literature in FL classroom is founded on an understanding of data-based research as a valid basis for language teaching. Shanahan explains that there are two camps in the the pedagogical environment of FL university teachers, language teachers who emphasize communicative competence and rely on empirical studies, and those who believe in the importance of exposure to FL culture and literature based on their intuitive knowledge and personal histories and feel alienated by and the data-driven camp. In addition to emphasizing the affective aspect of literarure, Shanahan pointed out the gap in the field of Second

Language Acquisition with regards to the role of affect in language learning.

Despite the eventual turn in the FL field to teaching litearature, the rhetoric against literature persisits. Henning (1993) criticizes the hostility toward foreign literature in higher education and American culture's “anti-literature bias.” She explained how as a chair of a department of foreign language and literature, she repeatedly had

“been obliged to justify to a hostile audience of students, administrators, and colleagues the teaching of foreign languages and literature” (p. 25). More recently, Iida (2013) summerizes the reasons for the unpopularity of literature in FL and L2, being seen by teachers as time consuming, demotivate students, not supporting students’ academic writing, and language production.

Literature as Language

The view of literature as a language is rooted in field of stylistics studies and

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach (Carroli, 2008, p. 8).

Stylistics. The field of stylistic studies concerns itself with the language of the literary text with the goal of understanding how the text works (Wales, 2014). It focuses on the “textual properties of literary texts and readers’ interaction with these to produce literary meaning (Hall, 2015, p. 165). Stylistic as a pedagogy in FL education has focused on the reader’s interaction with the linguistic organization of the text and provides analytical tools to construct meanings of literary texts (Carter, 2010). While some language teachers and researchers feel that stylistics is only appropriate for advanced levels (Carter, 2010), others advocate it as a way to bridge the gap between language and literature classes at university level (Olsbu, 2014).

Carter discusses methodologies that stylistics developed in the field of FL like

Practical Stylistics which involves “close reading of verbal texture of texts” (p. 57) with its basic assumption that “literature is made from and with language” and that interpreting the text must start and be founded in its very textuality. According to Carter

(2010), Practical Stylistics is a type of close reading that seeks linking the linguistic features of the text to its literary meaning. Carter notes the down side of Practical

Stylistics with the tendency of close reading to be a “passive reception of the text,” and discusses another methodology for stylistics analysis, Transformative Text Analysis.

Transformative Text Analysis employs a methodology of “active reading” by pushing readers to transform the text by either re-writing it or re-registering it through transforming it to a different genre. Another important Stylistic analysis is Corpus

Stylistics, which focuses on identifying significant stylistics features of the text through 12

computer driven searches. In addition, more recent stylistics analysis has become embedded in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, which explores ideology and social power in addition to textual analysis (Carter, 2010).

Carter (2010) summarizes the main critique of stylistics as an approach to FL literature:

Stylistics is too mechanistic and too reductive, saying nothing significant about the historical context or aesthetic theory, eschewing evaluation for the most part in the interests of the naïve “objectivity” and claiming too much for interpretations that are at best merely text-immanent (p. 56).

In addition to this critique, stylistics lacks empirical research to support its claims (Carter,

2010). Moreover, its focus on the linguistic dimension of the literary text comes at the expense of the cultural and affective dimensions (Olsbu, 2014). Stylistics emphasis on interpretation is at the expense of the reader’s experience which—as Miall (2006) claims—is the goals of ordinary readers of literature.

Gramling and Warner (2012) use Pragmatic Stylistics to advocate for a Contact

Pragmatics approach to FL literature which recognizes literature as a social situated practice and thus focuses on the relationship between literary language and its users.

This approach breaks with historicist approaches and denies the concept of “authorial intention” and declare that the historical and biographical situation compose only one aspect of the text’s context. While Gramling and Warner argue that neither native nor non-native readings are more analytically correct than the other, their approach aims at promoting learners’ inquiry into the symbolic actions of language use and focus not on what the text is, but rather its social embeddedness.

Communicative Language Teaching CLT. From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, literature was treated as an “old-fashion tool,” and was ignored for lacking a

communicative function. The mid-1980s marked the “rehabilitation and the reintegration of literature as an integral part of the communicative language programs” as literature was perceived as offering a reading experience that informational texts cannot provide

(Bobkina & Dominguez, 2014, p. 249). With the “the proficiency movement” (Kramsch

& Kramsch, 2000, p. 567) and the growth of the Communicative Language Teaching

(CLT) approach, literature was viewed as “a resource for language, an authentic text and context to increase language proficiency” (Carroli, 2008, p. 7). Consequently, literature was mainly used to support vocabulary acquisition and reading strategies. The literary texts were treated using the same pedagogic procedures as non-literary texts to promote the use of reading skills and strategies to make meaning of literary texts, like skimming and scanning techniques and advanced organizers (Carter, 2007; Kramsch & Kramsch,

2000).

In addition to bringing literature back to the field of language education, CLT opened the possibility to teach literature as an authentic text in introductory levels of language classroom, by focusing on active learners, and creative language production and with applicability to all language levels (Olbsu, 2014). Moreover, CLT established the potentiality of literary works as sources of cultural learning, a point that I discuss in the following section.

On the other hand, it is apparent that after more than three decades CLT is losing its popularity and new paradigms for language education are emerging. Among the many limitations of CLT is its very perception of what language is. With functional orientation towards the language, CLT lead to concentration on oral language use and practical language skills for social and occupational purposes and superficial treatment of cultural

and textual content (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2015). As Paesani et al. (2015) emphasize, CLT resulted in using the language in “generic contexts to achieve instrumental goals” (p. 7). This functional orientation towards language is grounded in the notion of communicative competence which when operationalized in FL programs tended to focus on oral communication. Kern (2003) critiques the “strictly functional and performance-based” nature of communicative competence, and the inattention to the interpretation process and its cultural bases within communication practices (p. 41).

Similarly, Blyth (2003) criticizes the beliefs CLT teachers hold on the nature of communication as reductionist since they tend to overemphasize the referential function of communication while neglecting the poetic function. Blyth calls for “the resurrection of the poetic function” (p. 62) especially in lower-level language classes. Blyth asserts that the poetic function is a characteristic of all forms of communication and not only literature and calls for curricular and pedagogical reform by re-introducing all forms of language play to the foreign language class including literature and songs. Furthermore, the operationalization of communicative competence lead to the pedagogical separation of skills and perceiving skill development as linearly developing from reading to writing and from listening to speaking where reading and writing are limited to acts of informational transfer and viewed as individual skills usually done outside of class to give more space for oral language use in class (Kern, 2003).

Among the major limitations of CLT approach is its treatment of the text.

Kramsch and Nolden (1994) criticize textbooks used in FL literature courses which leave the learner with impression that the text is “consisted of vocabulary items only. Once students have attained a sufficient linguistic proficiency, they are expected to

“understand” the literary selections read in foreign literature classes as would native readers, or at least appropriately educated native readers” (p. 29). With the dominance of

CLT approach, the goal of reading texts is vocabulary and grammar practice rather than interpretation. Especially in lower-level language classes, “meaning tends to be treated as a property of the text and therefore to be deemed unproblematic once the reader has mastered the linguistic elements of the text” (Kern, 2003, p. 45). Olsbu (2014) echoes this critique and emphasizes the need for more focus on the process of text interpretation.

Likewise, Sagnier (2016) draws attention on the consequences of CLT approach to text on FL curricula, and asserts that “the lack of metacognitive and metalinguistic activities around textual materials and writing practices in CLT has led to an impoverished curriculum that does not help foster the kind of intellectually driven approach that should define higher education programs” (p. 81).

Maxim (2004) criticizes one of the major tenets of CLT, the student-centered approach, and questions its claim for promoting self-expression and creativity basing her argument on functional grammar and genre-based approaches to language learning. He asserts, “Students expressions only become meaningful if they are situated in a social context and accepted by a discourse community that uses that language” (p. 183). Maxim argues that the learner-centered approach represents a strongly individualistic understanding of language that may lead students to have a static perspective of language use ignoring its socially situated nature.

In addition, researchers are questioning the very goal of CLT which is developing learners competence toward native speaker competence (Kramsch & Nolden, 1994).

Keneman (2016) criticizes the notion of native speaker with a well-defined culture as an

“imaginary archetype” which “undermines the realties about linguistic diversity within languages” (p. 86). In addition to the unrealistic and reductionist understanding of both language and culture, the native-speaker model, Keneman asserts, is an “authoritative source of knowledge” (p. 90) which leads students to accept information/facts about target culture without being critical.

Finally, on a departmental level CLT leads to the bifurcation of language departments through the strict separation of language courses and literature courses.

While linguistic theories support language teachers, literary theories support literary scholars. While norm of language classes was represented by the notion of native speaker, the literary critic represented the norm in literature classes (Kramsch & Nolden,

1994). This separation, famously known as the language-literature split, has attracted a growing number of scholarship since the 1990s in an attempt to bridge the gap in FL departments.

Literature as Experience

The experiential approach to literature focuses on the encounter between the literary text and the reader and how the reader experiences the world from new perspectives through the literary work (Olsbu, 2014). Viewing literature as experience emphasizes the affective aspect of reading, offers a more holistic approach to literature and interrogates the primacy of interpretation in the study of literature, since as Miall

(2006) argues, the goal of ordinary readers is to experience literature rather than interpreting it (p. 35).

Reader-response. One of the main theoretical foundations for the experiential approach is the reader-response theory (Olsbu, 2014). The reader-response theory emerged in the field of first language literature and was adopted by FL scholars. Iser’s 17

reader response criticism focuses on conceptualizing “literature as an experience rather than as an object and readers as active parcitipants rather than passive consumers”

(Davis, 1989. p. 421). Iser focuses on the interaction between the reader and the text as the reader, guided by textual signals, fills the blanks in the text based on personal expeience (Davis, 1989). Iser utilizes of the concept of “implied reader” who is invited by the author to participace in the production of the literary work and who perfectly

“mirrors authoial intentions” (p. 421). Using the concept of implied reader, Davis (1989) discusses the linguistic, historical-culutral, and literary knowledge that FL students lack when encountering FL literary texts. Davis suggests that the role of the language intructor is a “mediating reader” (p. 426) who through direct instruction supports students’ understanding of the instructions given in the literary text and help them link their own experiences with the information from the text. Davis (1989) translates aspects of Iser’s reader-reponse theory to a pedagogical framework to teach foreign language.

Depending on the reader’s purpose of reading, Rosenblatt (1988) places reading on an efferent/aesthetic continuum. In the “efferent” stance, the reader is concerned mainly with what can be carried away from the text and thus attention is focused on the public aspect of meaning. On the other hand, in the “aesthetic” stance—favored in literary reading—attention is focused on “what is being lived through during the reading event” (Rosenblatt, 1988, p. 8) and includes more of the experiential, private aspect of meaning. Aesthetic reading, as Rosenblatt (1995) explains, involves a transaction between the reader and the text as the reader is actively creating the literary work out of the text. The transaction is a dialogue between the reader and the text where the text provides guidance through its verbal symbols and the reader brings his/her experiences to

the text and selects what in the text is important. In this sense, the reader is an active constructor of meaning and the literary work is created through the reader’s experience which involves both cognition and affect.

In addition to theorizing for reader-response in FL education, Bredella (1996) connects aesthetic reading to intercultural understanding. Since “aesthetic reading is responding to the text and becoming aware of one’s responses” (p. 26), it comprises a reflective element which has consequences for reading FL literature. As the literary text provides the reader with an insider perspective of the foreign culture’s worldview, values, and beliefs, the reader distances himself/herself from the aesthetic reading experience and evaluates his/her understanding within the context of his/her own values. Within the dialectic of insider and outsider’s view—including the reader’s tension between involvement and the detachment—lies the opportunity for deeper intercultural understanding according to Bredella.

Among the strengths of the experiential approach to literature is its holistic view of language learning, a view to the literary text as open and multilayered, a belief in literature’s humanistic value and its nurturing of personal growth and a view of meaning making as a process of interaction between the reader and the text (Olsbu, 2014).

On the other hand, Kern and Schults (2005) perceive the “primacy of the personal” in the reader-response approach to literature as a confirmation of predominant contemporary classroom practices of CLT and its focus on oral proficiency (p. 348).

They question the appropriateness of Reader-response approach to FL education, and discuss the major shortcoming—its perception of otherness—since this approach fails to recognize the essential otherness of FL literary texts and perceive these texts as

“extensions of the analyzing self” (p. 348). Kern and Schults emphasize that the reader- response approach dissolves otherness into sameness through the literary criticism and subordinates the text to students’ subjective interpretations. Consequently, “students risk coming to the misguided conclusion that other people and other cultures are in essence no different from themselves and their own cultures” (p. 348).

Literature as Culture

The paradigm of literature as culture which emerged in the late 80s and expanded throughout the 1990s (Bobkina & Dominguez, 2014) was linked to goals of “cultural competence” and the need to promote cultural understanding of the foreign culture

(Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000, p. 567). This approach which represents the “cultural turn” in the history of the FL education field emerged from the CLT view of literature as an authentic text and more broadly as one representation of culture (Paesani & Allen, 2012).

As Kramsch and Kramsch point out, “At the end of the 20th century, literature in language teaching served many causes but it was used mostly as an authentic window on a foreign culture and society, not as the unique expression of an artist's vision of the world” (p.

568). Subsequently, Tang (2006) asserts that the emphasis in teaching FL literature shifted from focusing on the text to the understanding of the sub-text, i.e., the social and historical environment that produced the text and the underlying values, beliefs and world views that formed the text. According to Olsbu (2014), the use of literature in FL education for cultural learning is based on the belief that literature enables the reader to see the world from a different perspective, and its theoretical foundations include intercultural theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies in addition to notions of interaction between the reader and the text inherited from the experiential approach and reader-response theory. 20

In the cultural turn in FL education, the notion of Intercultural Communicative

Competence (ICC) emerged from bringing to the field the notion on Intercultural

Competence(IC) and utilizing the FL concept of Communicative Competence to emphasize the ability to use of FL in culturally and socially appropriate ways (Byram,

Golubeva, Hui, & Wagner, 2017). Byram (1997) defines five components of

Intercultural Communicative Competence: political education, knowledge, attitudes, skills of interpretation, and skills of interaction. In their recent publication, Byram et al.

(2017) proposed a new conceptualization of Intercultural Citizenship Education, which combines elements of ICC in FL education with a focus on community or teaching leading to community service which are components of Citizenship Education. The entrance of ICC into the FL field has resulted in shifting the focus of literature teaching to developing students ICC.

Kramsch (1993) highlights the symbolic dimension of Intercultural

Communicative Competence and develops her notion of Symbolic Competence—which represents her redefinition of the notion of Third Place in FL education. Kramsch (2008) defines Symbolic Competence (SC) as “the ability not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but to shape the very context in which the language is learned and used” (p. 400) and explains that SC consists of three components; production of complexity, tolerance of ambiguity, and an appreciation of form as meaning (Kramsch, 2011, p. 359). Kramsch founds her notion of Symbolic Competence in FL literature teaching, and emphasizes that the study of literature can foster Symbolic

Competence through offering a better understanding of the complexities of human

communication, and a sensitivity to the meaning that form and sounds of the language carry. Kramsch (2006) asserts:

Symbolic competence has to be nourished by literary imagination at all levels of the language curriculum. For it is through literature that learners can communicate not only with living others, but also with imagined others and with the other selves they might want to become. (p. 251)

Through the concept of Symbolic Competence as “a process of positioning the self both inside and outside the discourse of others” (Kramsch, 2011, p. 359), Kramsch brings

Intercultural Communicative Competence to multilingual settings, asserts the symbolic nature of language, and emphasizes the goal of FL learners use different symbolic systems operate between languages. At the core of all this is making meaning of FL literary texts.

Keneman (2016) following the notion of symbolic competence while advocating for a critical literacies approach to FL, criticizes the power structure in FL classrooms and the dominant notion of native-speaker as “an authoritative source of knowledge” (p.

90). She argues against the view of FL learners as failed native speakers. Following

Kramsch (2009), Keneman asserts that the goal of FL education is not for students to communicate like native speakers but to cultivate their own voice and become multilingual speakers.

Literature as Literacy

The current crisis in FL programs (The language-literature split). Kern

(2002) describes the “curricular gap” in FL departments where language teaching has historically divided between scholarly approaches emphasizing literature study and grammatical analysis and pragmatic approaches emphasizing communicative skills. The methodological divide between lower-level language classes and upper-level classes is

well recognized (Maxim, 2004). While the lower-level language classes in the first two years emphasize spoken language use in familiar settings with no particular content focus following a learner-centered approach and small group interactions, advanced-level classes assume students have already mastered language and thus focus on specific content areas and formal and literary texts using lectures, whole class discussions and presentations without attention to language acquisition (Kern, 2002; Maxim, 2004;

Urlaub, 2012). The language-literature dichotomy is also a political problem in FL departments as language teachers are treated as “second class citizens in relation to their literature colleagues” (Kern, 2002, p. 21) and the upper-level courses tend to be taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty members while lower-level courses are usually taught by part-time faculty (Allen & Paesani, 2010). As Maxim (2004) points out, the lack of content in CLT approach to language and its skill-based orientation and focus on everyday spoken language may be the reason for the indifference to lower-level classes contributions to university humanistic learning goals.

The “literacy turn.” To address this bifurcation problem, a literacy-oriented approach to language emphasizing texts and textuality as basis for FL education is currently advocated as a way to reform collegiate FL programs (Maxim, 2004; Paesani,

2018; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2015). According to Kramsch and Nolden (1994), two theories dominated the literacy practices in FL education; information processing theories of reading which dominated lower-level language classes, and reader-response theory of literary criticism which dominated higher-level literature classes. Paesani et al. (2015) summarize traditional approaches to literacy associated in Second Language Acquisition

(SLA) research, which were based in cognitive psychology, like Bottom-Up processing

text-driven models constructing textual meaning in a linear manner from letters to words, phrases, and sentences and was a characteristic of lower-level reading instruction aiming at transmission of information. The second tapes of cognitive models were Top-Down

Processing models which are reader-driven and are discourse-oriented and more popular in advanced-level reading. And finally the Interactive Processing Models in which textual meaning is constructed through the interaction between Bottom-Up and Top- down Processing. As Paesani et al. note, the Process Oriented Approach to language instruction was the result of cognitively oriented SLA research and had a great impact on

CLT instruction. They argue that these exclusively cognitive approaches overlook the social and contextual factors. Emphasizing the sociocultural dimension of literacy, they argue for reading as “a socially situated act that connects learners to the world around them” (p. 145) and advocate for a multidimensional understanding of literacy that embraces its three dimensions: cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural (Paesani et al.,

2015). Advocates for literacy-based approach to FL expand the traditional view of literacy to much broader understandings. In the following section, I provide a glimpse into different approaches to literacy as a unifying framework to collegiate FL programs.

Literacy–literary lens. Kern and Schultz (2005) criticize what they call “bias toward orality” (p. 382) in language learning, as the dominant traditional view in FL education and SLA that “speech is primary (the real thing) and writing is secondary (a representation).” They note the shifting oral-written language power relation within the

FL program as the lower-level classes focus on face-to face interaction, while in upper- level classes written language holds the prestige. Kern and Shultz call for understanding

FL through the dual lens of literacy and literary. Literacy—grounded in social science—

focuses on “becoming familiar with new ways of signifying, new genres new social practices and new ways of thinking in and about the language,” and literary—grounded in humanities—“involves familiarization with new frames and modes of analysis and interpretation, new cultural schemata, and stories belonging to language community’s cultural heritage” (p. 382).

While embracing a literacy-oriented approach to teaching FL, Warner (2014) highlights an important yet ignored aspect of literacy practice which is experience.

Warner compares interpretation—“a language user’s ability to critically apprehend and produce complex utterances in the social and cultural contexts of their production”—to experience “the pragmatic, affective, often even visceral responses of learners as they do so [interpret], while at the same time trying to find their footing as emergent users of the language,” their sense of the world and their place in it (p. 158). She suggests granting more curricular consideration of the textual experience of FL students’ and their affective reception.

Oppositional literacy. Kramsch and Nolden (1994) discuss the unique position of FL learner and the cultural gap between the learner and the FL text, and they suggest redefining literacy as a form of oppositional practice. They state that “oppositional practice is not resistance, dissonance or contestation. It just claims the right of the reader to position themselves at equal par with, i.e., in (op)position to, the text, by virtue of the very linguistic and conceptual power that the text has given them. By becoming aware of their oppositional stance, readers can enter into dialogue with the text and with other readers” (p. 29). The dialogic literacy Kramsch and Nolden call for is cross-cultural in nature and pays attention to contexts of production and reception of the texts by

perceiving literary texts as “situated utterances, directed by a particular writer to a particular reader about a particular topic” (p. 34). Additionally, Kramsch and Nolden argue that “literacy in foreign language is not an isolated individual achievement, but a social process of rewriting oneself through dialogue with another” (p. 34).

Cultural literacy. Swaffar (1986) advocates for cultural literacy which demonstrates the ability to read “not only the surface structure and signs, but also the underlying configuration of meaning from which those surface structures emanate” (p.

71). Swaffar emphasizes teaching students to locate and analyze cultural ideologies and systems of belief as “an essential skill for cultural survival” (p. 82). In a more recent study, Swaffar and Arens (2005) posit literacy as a framework to reform FL curricula adopting a genre-based approach to the study of FL literature and emphasizing critical and multicultural literacy as an objective for FL departments.

Urlaub (2012) proposes a model of cultural literacy in FL teaching building on reader-response theory, applied linguistics and hermeneutics. Urlaub questions the basis of the segregation of lower-level language classes and upper-level literature and cultural classes, which is the notion of linguistic preparedness. Founding his argument in the field of hermeneutics, he discusses the notion of the distance between the reader and the text which, as Urlaub asserts, is not only historical but also linguistic and cultural.

Urlaub follows Gadamer to emphasize that this hermeneutical distance is a positive factor as it “helps the reader to become actively and critically engaged” (p. 50). In addition,

Urlaub transfers this notion into the field of FL education. He discusses Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” relating it reader-response theories. Following

Gadamer, Urlaub explains that understanding involves the fusion of the horizon of the

reader and the text, and clarifies that “Gadamar’s theory implies the reader’s creation of an interpretive framework that is composed of the reader’s previous background knowledge and the information provided with and within the incoming text” (p. 51).

Urlaub argues that this approach helps students build their “interpretive authority” and transcultural awareness through helping them develop analytical skills to independently and critically approach cultural artifacts including literary works.

Applied literacy. Following Flower’s (1990) differentiation between receptive and critical literacy, Mantero (2006) associates CLT with “receptive literacy” which focuses on how individuals consume information. On the other hand, critical literacy which denotes the ability to think about and through written texts is more central for students’ participation in an academic discourse. He criticizes the dominant CLT approach to literature which “involves reproducing the text rather than producing classroom dialogue in the L2 as the instructor and students negotiate their interpretations of the text” (p. 104). Mantero calls for an Applied Literacy approach employing “text- centered talk” to allow the students the opportunity to engage in dialogue about the literary text and “actively construct the text through classroom discourse” (p. 105).

Mantero advocates for students’ active role in creating new knowledge in L2 and “give meaning to the L2 through their own experiences rather than just having the foreign language assign meaning to their first language” (p. 103). Through what he calls “Text

Centered Talk,” Mantero advocates the use of classroom dialogic interaction to construct textual meaning. In addition, Mantero argues against the concept of linguistic threshold of L2 learners. He asserts that although students may not be able to explain their understanding in L2, that does not mean they do not recognize the textual concepts.

Mantero questions the focus on instructors’ interpretations in literary-based classrooms, stating that “often we do not question whose ideas are valued in literature-based L2 classroom and how we measure ‘good ideas’ in these classrooms” (p. 104), and calls for educators to shift the focus to students’ comprehension and interpretation of texts.

Socioculturally grounded literacy. Kern (2000) defines literacy in FL education from sociocultural perspective:

Literacy is the use of socially-, historically-, and culturally-situated practices of creating and interpreting meaning through texts. It entails at least a tacit awareness of the relationships between textual conventions and their contexts of use and, ideally, the ability to reflect critically on those relationships. Because it is purpose-sensitive, literacy is dynamic—not static—and variable across and within discourse communities and cultures. It draws on a wide range of cognitive abilities, on knowledge of written and spoken language, on knowledge of genres, and on cultural knowledge. (p. 16)

Kern (2002, 2003) explains the sociocultural view of literacy in which literacy is perceived as having a linguistic dimension where the learner is perceived as “a code breaker and code maker,” and a cognitive dimension where the learner is “meaning maker,” sociocultural dimension where the learner is “text user and text critic” and developmental dimension in which the learner is a “scientist and contortion worker”

(Kern, 2002, p. 13). Kern’s (2002) view of literacy includes seven principles: interpretation, collaboration, conventions, cultural knowledge, problem solving, reflection and self-reflection, and language use. Kern (2002) calls for a broader notion of communication as designing meaning, as developing communicative ability within the general goal of developing learners’ “ability to analyze, interpret, and transform discourse-and think critically about how discourse is used toward various social ends” (p.

23).

Viewing literacy from a cross-cultural perspective, Kern (2002) asserts that literacy is not a static, monolithic phenomenon, and thus advocate for literacies, which are culturally constructed. In his book Literacy and Language Teaching, he translates a multiliteracies framework—which I will explain in the coming section—to the field of

FL education.

Byrnes (2004) adopts literacy as a framework for advanced language acquisition and advocates for a socio-cultural view of literacy emphasizing the importance of locating language use in the context of social practice. Drawing on Halliday, she understands language as “a social semiotic that both derives from social contexts and actively constructs them” (p. 13). She asserts that the goal of foreign and second language education is “to create multicompetent users whose resources for meaning making have been expanded through knowledge of several languages” (p. 14). Byrnes argues for the importance of developing advanced-level abilities in multiple languages as an important part of educated citizenship and links it to diverse ways of knowing. She advocates for embracing an epistemology of languages through understanding language education in terms of multiple literacies.

Multiliteracies. Multiliteracies has been gaining popularity since the term was first coined by a team of scholars called the New London Group in 1996 as a vision of literacy education and an approach to literacy pedagogy responding to changes in the global communication environment with its cultural and linguistic diversity and multimodal contexts (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). In the field of FL education,

Multiliteracies represent a framework to reform FL departments and establish their legitimacy in higher education while providing solutions problems of excessive emphasis

on oral language, provide a unified framework for lower- and higher-level language classrooms, reconnect foreign languages and cultural studies with their humanistic origins, and prepare learners as global agents of change (Kumagai, Lopez-Sanchez, &

Wu, 2016). Paesani et al. (2015) view the mission of FL program to be “the development of academic literacy of the teaching of textuality and genre in cultural contexts,” and view text as multi-modal.

As Cope and Kalantzis (2009) emphasize, the goal of literacy teachin in a multiliteracies framework is not about skills and competence, but rather “creating a kind of person, an active designer of meaning, with a sensibility open to differences, change and innovation” (p. 10). The concept of design is a core component of multiliteracies, as

Cope and Kalantzis explain:

Multiliteracies view of design has three aspects: Available Designs (found representational forms); the Designing one does (the work you do when you make meaning, how you appropriate and revoice and transform Available Designs); and The Redesigned (how, through the act of Designing, the world and the person are transformed). (p. 10)

The other core component of multiliteracies is multimodality. As opposed to the monomodal written language in traditional literacy, multiliteracies emphasis different possible modalities including Written Language, Oral Language, Visual Representation,

Audio Representation, Tactile Representation, Gestural Representation, Spatial

Representation (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, pp. 12–13).

Paesani (2018) reflects on the “literacy turn” in FL collegiate education and calls for research to support literacies-based pedagogies in six areas:

operationalizing key concepts; reconsidering the notion of text in collegiate FL programs; exploring the sociocultural dimension of literacy; building transferable skills and cross-disciplinary collaborations; investigating connections among literacies, textual thinking, and ACTFL guidelines and standards; and supporting instructors’ implementation of literacies-based pedagogies. (p. 1) 30

While my study of FL literature education is situated in the current literacy-based framework, it aims at bringing in the alterity lens to engender an “other-oriented literacy”

(Tarc, 2015) in AFL literature classroom.

A Glimpse into the Empirical Research on the Role of Literature in FL Education

Lack of empirical research. The lack of empirical research in the field of FL literature education is commonly recognized. The field of literary studies in general is dominated by published literary interpretations (Miall, 2006), and the field of FL literary education is dominated by theoretical positions. Most of the publications about FL pedagogy rely on anecdotal evidence. Paran (2008) acknowledges the importance of the scholarly work of practitioners by reflecting on what they do in class. He explains, however, that “we still need more empirical studies into what happens in literature and language classrooms (p. 490). Miall advocates for empirical research—already an emerging area of inquiry—to be the future of literary scholarship.

The present time empirical studies might be seen as the Cinderella in the family of literary disciplines. Mostly disregarded, and deprecated when noticed at all . . . no prince will arrive to exalt her at the end of the day. But by her own efforts empirical study will come to dominate the literary field by providing a matrix for evaluation theoretical proposals and for rethinking the nature of literary reading and its cultural place. (p. 12)

Literature language classes–classroom interaction. Investigating classroom interaction in lower-level and higher-level language classes is examine the linguistic s of studying literature and a way to bridge the gap between language and literature. Weist

(2004) examined the interplay between "reading" and "literature" in the second language classroom and explored the underlying beliefs and assumptions that the instructor and students bring into the classroom regarding literature and reading comprehension and their effect on what occurs in class. Findings indicate minimal student participation as

the instructor spoke 90 percent of class time and dominated interpretations of the texts.

This finding is similar to Donato and Brooks (2004) who investigated advanced class literary discussion. Findings of the study indicate teacher talked 80 percent of class time, while 60 percent of students talk was displaying their knowledge of the specifics of the literary works, and did not indicate interpretive activities. Similarly, Scott and

Huntington (2007) examined beginners’ class investigating learners’ discussion of a poem in their L1, English in two small groups, whole class, and teacher-led discussion.

Findings also indicated little interpretive work by students and a narrow focus on language and translation, which exemplify the failure of the current communicative paradigm and the need for a paradigm of textual engagement with the literary work.

Additionally, Kraemer (2008) integrated academic content with linguistic skills using computer-assisted language learning in her fourth-year German literature class. Findings indicated increases in students’ motivation and language skills.

Furthermore, the effect of face-to-face class discussion on students’ construction of meaning of a literary text was investigated in Pace’s cross-sectional case study (2006) as she explored the influence of community standards on the interpretive processes of two students in a college literature class. In addition to interviewing the two students, she analyzed three literacy events: students’ journal, class discussion, and students’ interpretive essay. Findings of the study revealed how students’ critical interpretations of the text changed after class discussion as the communal meaning making process neutralized the text and suppressed students' critical reading of the text.

Innovative pedagogical approaches to literature. Zapata (2005) conducted a one-semester study in a Spanish FL classroom applying the focus-on-cultural-

understanding approach to enhance students’ understanding and openness to Spanish culture. Students read a short story in Spanish, then discussed it in groups in order to agree on a group interpretation. Afterwards, students read the translated experts’ interpretation, which had been collected from college-educated native speakers of

Spanish from Argentina (where the author of the story lived). Finally, students wrote a brief summary describing the similarities and differences of both interpretations and discuss them in the following class. In addition to analyzing students’ essays and group interpretations, the researcher conducted a pre- and post-attitudinal questionnaire to determine students’ attitude towards Spanish studying as a tool for cultural understanding. Through the process of interpretation, comparison and reflection, students gained deeper understanding of the role that culture plays in the way persons view the world and how their own view of the world was culturally biased. In addition, results of the pre- and post-attitudinal questionnaires indicated influence of the approach on students’ desire to travel to Spanish countries and their views of Spanish as a tool for understanding other people and other cultures.

Focusing on how texts denote multiple meanings when framed by different cultural identities, Myers and Eberfors (2010) engaged U.S. and Swedish English education students in an online interpretive interaction. In their study, students read an

English literary text and participated in a web-based discussion. Students first responded to the story, then they read the responses of their colleagues and responded to the responses by identifying the cultural values that shaped these responses. Although students were prompted to identify cultural values that shaped the response of postings by

“others,” the intent of the study was to encourage students to reflect on their own values

and beliefs. The analysis of students’ responses revealed five degrees of mediation: (a) stating an idea in the story, (b) comparing the story to one's own culture, (c) exploring possible values that explain the cultural practice, (d) looking for comparative information from other cultures, and (e) reflecting on and posing questions to one’s own cultural practice. Myers and Eberfors’s study suggested a model to use students’ cultural differences to help students understand that our readings of texts are not neutral, but rather, our values and beliefs shape and influence our readings. Myers and Eberfors argue that cultural differences, while existing in any classroom, tend to be silent in face- to-face discussions. While in their study, the online discussion allowed students the time and space to reflect on the cultural values that shape their ideas.

Kearney (2008, 2012) conducted ethnography of an introductory course to French literature. The study aimed at investigating students’ conceptions of cultural dimensions of their French class and describing and analyzing the classroom practices that carried out cultural teaching and learning. The researcher conducted classroom observations and follow-up interviews with students and the teacher in addition to analyzing a collection of students’ work (especially the memoirs students produced as a final assignment in the course). When analyzing students’ conceptions of cultural learning in their foreign language classroom (Kearney, 2008), several themes emerged from students’ interviews.

Students stated that they experienced separation of language and culture and a tendency to privilege language to the exclusion of culture in early stages of language instruction in the U.S. From students’ perspectives, their earlier classrooms were flat, and their learning was neither meaningful nor deep enough.

Reflecting on the language requirement in U.S. universities, students associated foreign language learning with the ability to communicate with other cultural groups.

Learning about culture through foreign language was associated with participating in the global world. Analyzing classroom discourse indicated that the teacher engaged with students in interpreting cultural narratives through teacher’s highlighting of perspective and a critical stance. The teacher used Global Simulation technique to introduce students to French culture, and in class she posed questions to encourage her students to interpret levels of meaning, and then she re-positioned them to interpret from different angles and access other perspectives. Findings also revealed many challenges in teaching culture through the literature class that the researcher observed. Among them was the uncomfortable position in which the students are placed when exploring voices and perspectives in sensitive issues such as political conflicts. In addition, there was the risk that students might perceive the teacher as the embodiment of the definitive perspective on the FL culture.

Yulita (2010) conducted an action research case study to examine ways interculturality was developed in FL literature classroom. She analyzed a wide range of data from students’ exams, personal diaries, essays, oral presentation, to individual and focus group interviews, participatory observations, and digital audio recording of class discussions. In the first phase of the study, students read the Spanish short story, and then they wrote essays reflecting on the stories through personal narratives of intercultural experiences during their study abroad in Spanish-speaking countries.

Analysis of students’ writing and initial discussions demonstrated students fixing and essentializing the Hispanic “other” through comparisons of gender roles in students’ own

culture. Students’ stereotypical perceptions of Hispanic culture—constructed through media and their limited personal encounters—shaped students’ reading of the story. The purpose of provoking stereotypical thinking through the first reading of the story was to raise students’ consciousness and create spaces in the classroom where students could discuss and reflect upon stereotypes.

In the second phase of the study, students were instructed to read and identify stereotypes and taken-for-granted assumptions in the autobiographical narratives, which was created in the first phase. As students drew comparisons between lived and fictional experiences, they were instructed to find evidence in the text that challenged the stereotypes in the narratives. By deconstructing their own gender stereotyping of

Hispanic culture, students were able to gain new understanding of gender roles in the literary texts. By self-questioning, practicing reflection, and dialoging with others, these students were able to go beyond the superficial understanding of the literary text and construct new meanings and viewpoints reading the story from a different angle.

Porto and Zembylas (2020) investigated the foreign language classroom as a site of ethical and political transformation through utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort using literature and arts-based methodologies. Following Boler’s (1999) emotional discomfort,

Zembylas theorizes for an ethics of discomfort in teaching and learning to deal with difficult issues in the classroom. Porto and Zembylas utilize arts as a way of handling students’ emotional responses to difficult issues treated in FL literature. Their

“pedagogical approach is grounded in the assumption that discomforting emotions are important in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain stereotypes and social injustice, and in creating openings for empathy, solidarity

and transformation” (p. 359). By utilizing arts and literature, this pedagogy allows the space for students to negotiate their emotions and beliefs. After reading literary works, students were asked to individually create multimodal artistic representation of them accompanied by an artistic statement explaining the rationale for their art work. Through emphasizing participants’ creative capacity and integrating language learning, arts and literature participants engaged emotionally with the suffering of others through imagination.

Literacy-based approaches to literature. Studies reporting on results of using multiliteracies approach in literature classes are emerging in the field. For example, Wu

(2016) reports an Advanced Chinese Modern Literature class project at a U.S. university.

To develop students multiliteracies through engagement with primary source films, and readings, the teacher used poster presentation project. Participants were 23 U.S. college students between first and fourth year. After watching movies of their choice, students wrote a summary of the plot commenting on the cultural and social context of the film and attending to different modes of representation in the film (visual, music, gesture, language). After writing the report, students made their posters and presented them to their classmates and visitors, who included Chinese language teachers, Chinese student- residents, Chinese speakers from the community. Students responded to post- presentation survey in which they reflected on the learning experience. Among the aspects of the project that students praised were the research component of the project, writing a long essay in Chinese then condensing it to shorter chunks for the poster, presenting the poster to native speakers, which represented a space to exchange perspective on Chinese culture, language, and society.

Arabic Foreign Literature in U.S. Higher Education

The state of Arabic Foreign Language (AFL) programs in the US does not differ a lot from the picture of other FL programs. In his recent article, well-known Arabic educator Taoufik Ben Amor (2017) summarizes the state of Arabic FL programs in the

United States, and criticizes the “artificial gulf” that separates literature classes form language classes in most current university programs. He argues that the decrease in the use of literary texts in FL classrooms are due to the field’s attempt to distance itself from the old-fashioned grammar-translation approach as well as the recognition of a shift in students’ needs, which he characterizes as bottom-up surge of new academic and professional demands. Ben Amor also discusses a top-down change in Arabic programs in response to the change in students’ body due to the “political push for area studies and the establishment of regional institutions, professional schools, U.S. government funds and scholarships” (p. 98). He adds that the increasing number of undergraduate students studying Arabic also lead to curricular changes to accommodate undergraduate students’ who lack the essential tools for critical and analytical literary reading.

The Canon. Most AFL literature classes follow a canonical approach. Ben

Amor surveyed the Arabic literary canon in U.S. colleges and concluded several biases in choosing literary works including gender, historical and geographical bias as most of the literary works studied were Egypt-centric, authored by men and often two or four decades old. In addition, Ben Amor detects what he calls “diaspora-bias,” “the bent toward the exotic, controversial or that which depicts encounters of the so-called East and West

(some like to call it touristic literature)” (p. 98). In addition, he notices a tendency towards teaching books that were banned by censorship in Arab countries regardless of their quality, linguistic or pedagogical value. Ben Amor concludes that the AFL 38

literature canon in the United States has little regard to the literary canon in the Arab world and thus leads to “creating a canon within the canon” (p. 99). Ben Amor discusses how the increasingly politicize atmosphere of AFL college classes may lead to exclusion of literary works by Palestinian authors from literature courses to avoid the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict despite its significant centrality of this topic to modern Arabic literature.

Another recent review of a sample of Arabic literature syllabi in the United States conducted by Gomaa and Raymond (2014) revealed three dominant topics of literary works, Arabic masculinities, states of war, and women’s place. They conclude that the works studied in U.S. universities represents a more neo-Orientalist vision of the Middle

East more than they represent an Arab aesthetic world view.

In her discussion of the field of Arabic literature, Naaman (2011) points out another “gulf” between scholars of Arabic literary studies in the Middle East and those teaching in the U.S. and European universities. Naaman calls for problematizing the question of canon formation and question the process of legitimization of literary work through literary scholarship and pedagogical choices.

Scholarship in the field of AFL literature suffers from the same lack of empirical research the FL literature scholarship suffer from and focuses mostly on humanistic literary criticism with little attention to the pedagogical aspects. The most recent publication, “Arabic Literature for the Classroom,” edited by Al-Musawi (2017), includes papers from Arabic literature professors in U.S. universities, but does not include even one empirical study. The scholarly works published in the book are either literary

criticism or pedagogical suggestions, course proposals or descriptions, which indicates the dire need for empirical studies in the field of AFL literature.

Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework

Alterity and Ethics

My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness. (Levinas, 1995)

In this study, I embrace the work of the Lithuanian-born French philosopher

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) addressing an ethics of alterity. Levinas, in Dussel’s

(1999) words, was able to boldly “turn twenty-five centuries of philosophy on its head”

(p. 134). Levinas rejected Western philosophies egoism rooted in its preoccupation with ontological questions of existence and being, and epistemological questions of knowledge. Levinas proposed an alternative approach in which the human subjectivity is born out of the relation with the other (Mkhwanazi, 2013) and the focus of philosophy is the ethical responsibility toward the other. Inspired by his Jewish heritage, Levinas articulated philosophy as “the wisdom of love,” rather than “the love of wisdom”

(Dussel, 1999; Shepherd, 2014).

In 1930, Levinas, an Eastern European Jew, became a naturalized French citizen and was conscripted to the military during World War II. While his friend Blanchot was able to assist his wife and daughter to find a safe refuge in France, Levinas’s extended family were victims of the Nazi Holocaust and genocide. Levinas was captured by the

German Army and was a war prisoner until the war ended (Shepherd, 2014). Being a

French officer saved Levinas from death camps, which had been the fate of many of his family members (Davis, 2018). However, as a Jew, he was separated from other French prisoners and put in hard-labor camps for Jewish war prisoners. These traumatic experiences shaped Levinas’s thinking. As Dussel (1999) emphasizes, Levinas’s “life

was the reference situation for his own thinking about the other” (p. 126). Or as Davis

(2018) puts it, “Levinas’s texts do not theorize or seek to explain the Holocaust, but they bear its terrible imprint” (p. 148). Levinas dedicated his book Otherwise Than Being or

Beyond Essence to the victims of Holocaust. In the book’s dedication, Levinas wrote:

To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, of the same anti-Semitism. (1998)

Hansel (2016) defines three major stages in Levinas’s thought which developed over the period of 60 years. Hansel argues that Levinas’s lifelong question was, “What characterizes the humanity of man?” The first stage began in 1934 and continued until

World War II, in which Levinas defined humanity as freedom. The second stage was during World War II, in which Levinas, who spent the war as a prisoner in a war camp in

Germany, defined humanity as the face-to-face encounter with the other. And the third stage started in 1961 after the publication of Totality and Infinity which was shortly followed by the publication of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, as Levinas became more concerned with responsibility toward the other as the ultimate definition of the human subject.

In this section, I review Levinas’s philosophy of alterity to the extent that it serves as a conceptual framework for my study. My goal is not to give a full account of his philosophy, the development of his thought, or the different interpretations of his work.

Rather, I use his conceptualization of alterity as a starting point for my understanding of literature as a site of alterity and reading as an encounter with alterity. Thus, I will explore Levinas’s critique of Western philosophy, his conceptualization of ethics as first philosophy and as a responsibility towards the other, and finally his concept of the third.

The third, for Levinas, moves from the ethical to the political as it represents the responsibility towards others, or the whole humanity.

Ethics as first philosophy. Levinas denounces western philosophy not only as

“incapable of responding to the ethical challenges posed by the post-holocaust world,” but also as “itself, partly to blame for a world of inhumanity” (Shepherd, 2014, p. 19).

Thus, Levinas criticizes Western philosophy’s traditional preoccupation with ontology, questions of being and epistemology, and questions of how we know. Instead, he proposes an alternative approach in which the primary focus is ethics and the responsibility to the other. For Levinas, ethics is not a branch of philosophy. Ethics is the first philosophy (Hand, 2001).

Ethics precedes ontology. For Levinas, the problem of ontology is that when

Western philosophy grounds meaning in being, it “failed to give an account of the relationship between ethical beings” (Shepherd, 2014, p. 18). Levinas (1979) perceives ontology as “a philosophy of power” and “a philosophy of injustice” because it “does not call into question the same” (p. 46). In contrast with Western philosophy’s “ontological violence” (Rae, 2017), Levinas affirms the ethical relationship to overcome this ontological violence and the physical violence resulting from it.

In The Trace of the Other, Levinas (1986) explains his critique of Western philosophy as philosophy of being in which the other has to lose his/her alterity to enter the realm of being. He states:

Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with horror of the other that remains other—with an insurmountable allergy. It is for this reason that it is essentially a philosophy of being. (p. 346)

Western philosophy, with its emphasize on being, alienates the other who has to manifest itself, lose alterity, to become a being. Levinas argues that the horror of the other that remains other and away from the grasp of the subject has marked Western philosophy from its very beginning. It is as if Western philosophy is allergic to the other who does not surrender itself to the same. On the other hand, Levinas emphasizes the priority of the encounter with the other; thus, for him, ethics precedes ontology. Levinas perceives the relationship to the other as prior to ontology since the subject owes its being to the other (Attridge, 2010). The subject has been called into being by the other, and the response to the other is the subject’s very subjectivity (Levinas, 1998). In contrast to

Western philosophy, Levinas conceives the relationship with the other as the source for ethics (Hansel, 2016) and founds human subjectivity on the pre-ontological relationship with the other.

Ethics precedes epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with questions of how we know. Within the traditions of Western philosophy, knowing something means absorbing and grasping it as a theme, an object of study that only exists in relation to the knowing subject. In his book Aspects of Alterity, Treanor (2006) examines alterity in the views of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel. Treanor begins with describing the traditional view of otherness in western philosophy which tends to think of otherness “as something to be conquered” (p. 3). Encountering something unknown, the subject tries to fit it among other things already known. In his examination of Western philosophy,

Treanor asserts the following critique:

Otherness is thought in juxtaposition to, or in the terms of, the same; otherness is other-than-the-same. The goal is to convert something unknown (other) into something known. . . . We are much more likely to alter a new phenomenon to fit

the mosaic of our worldview than we are to abandon our worldview because a new phenomenon does not fit. (p. 4)

As Treanor elaborates, knowing the other is not really about the other. Rather, it is more about the affirmation and identification of the self: The self thinks, knows, and therefore the self is.

In his book Totality and Infinity (1979), Levinas asserts that knowing the other within Western philosophy means grasping the other as a theme, an object that exists in relation to the same. In the process of knowing, the other is “betrayed, surrenders, is given in the horizon in which it loses itself and appears, lays itself open to grasp, becomes a concept” (pp. 43–44). So, knowing is removing from the other its alterity and reducing it to the same. However, Levinas (1979) explains, “The other is not an object that must be interpreted and illuminated by my alien light. He shines forth with his own light, and speaks for himself” (p. 40). Hence Levinas provides a mode of perceiving the other on his/her own terms, not the terms of the subject, by freeing the other from the epistemological grasp of the subject.

Refuting the reduction of the other to the same, Levinas calls into question the primacy of the same in Western Philosophy, the primacy that leads the same to only see him/herself in the other, and thus never truly encounter the other. Levinas (1979) asserts:

This primacy of the same was Socrates’s teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing or to be free. (p. 43)

By reducing the other into the same and seeing nothing of the other, the subject is not challenged through the encounter, does not change by the encounter, and consequently the subject is free. On the other hand, Levinas emphasizes that the relationship with the other cannot be based on knowledge, which makes the other an

object of knowledge, and assimilates it to the same through the act of comprehension.

Levinas emphasizes that reason is a manifestation of freedom. He writes: “Sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it” (p. 43). For Levinas, though, the other is beyond the subject’s power. Hence when facing the other, “freedom can no longer be defined within the framework of power and powerlessness, but rather that of justice and injustice” (Hansel, 2016, p. 134). By negating the other’s otherness, Western philosophy establishes the primacy of freedom over justice. However, for Levinas, encountering the other in a way that challenges the subject’s freedom, “is the start of an ethical conscience” (Hansel, 2016, p. 134).

In The Trace of the Other, Levinas (1986) clarifies how the act of knowing in

Western philosophy strips the other of its alterity, and leaves the subject intact. Levinas explains how the other enters the realm of knowledge as a theme. Although other’s difference is preserved, by gaining a meaning, the other no longer challenges the knowing subject. As Levinas asserts:

The being enters into the sphere of true knowledge. In becoming a theme, it does indeed retain a foreignness with respect to the thinker that embraces it. But it at once ceases to strike up against thought. The alien being is as it were naturalized as soon as it commits itself with knowledge. In itself—and consequently elsewhere than in thought, other than it—it does not have the wild barbarian character of alterity. It has a meaning. (p. 345)

Whilst the thinking subject enjoys the foreignness of the other, the other is tamed and does not strike up against the assimilating thought. Being naturalized, the other is then embraced and adopted as the same. Losing its wild barbarian character of alterity, the other is no longer other and no longer a threat to the same.

For Levinas, Shepherd (2014) explains, “human subjectivity is grounded not in consciousness—I think therefore I am—but in our “infinite responsibility” to the Other—

Here I am!” (p. 22). For Levinas, the relationship does not begin with the knowing the I, but rather with the other’s call for which the subject must respond.

The relation with the other as a departure without return. Within Western philosophy, when encountering the other, the same receives nothing of the other, and the other is reduced to the same, which means that the same returns back to itself. The cognition of the other “does not draw the I out of itself without return” (Levinas, 1986, p.

345). Levinas, on the other hand, conceives the relationship with the other as a movement unto the other without a return, and explains that encountering the other is “a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same” (p. 348). As

Levinas explains, the encounter with the other is a movement without a return, because the same will be challenged, overwhelmed, shaken and changed through the encounter.

Levinas illustrate the difference between his paradigm of departure without a return and

Western philosophy’s “homecoming paradigm” (Robbins, 1999) through comparing the myth of Odysseus to the Story of Abraham: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land” (p. 348). In Odysseus adventure all the events are coincidences in the journey of the same to return home while never having encountered the other (Robbins,

1999), while in Abraham’s the subject never returns home.

Encountering the other means being moved by the other, because the other for

Levinas (1979) is “the stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself” (p. 39).

Levinas’s being at home is a space where the subject enjoys power. It is a site of power that the stranger disturbs and challenges (Robbins, 1999). Levinas emphasizes that “the relationship with another puts me into question, empties me of myself, and does not let

me off emptying me-uncovering for me ever new resources” (p. 351). The existence of subject is called into question by the revelation of the other which demands a response.

The alterity of the other calls the subject into question by constantly calling into question the subject’s understanding of the other, which obliges the subject to recognize the otherness of the other (Downs, 2010).

Ethics as responsibility for the other. While in Totality and Infinity, Levinas

(1979) focused on the “I” being challenged by the encounter with the other, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas (1998) proposes that human subjectivity is primarily ethical.

Regarding Levinas, Hansel (2016) explains:

The innermost structure of the human subject is responsibility towards the Other. Responsibility constitutes the self from the start, prior to any encounter. Ethics as responsibility for the Other does not follow a preexisting existential basis. It is the ultimate step in our quest for what constitutes the humanity of man. (p. 135)

For Levinas, the responsibility for the other precedes the encounter with the other. It is not a choice the subject makes. Rather, the responsibility for the other is the very definition of human subjectivity. To be human, the subject must respond to the other

(Simmons, 1999). In his interview with Nemo (1984), Levinas asserts that the responsibility for the other is “a matter of expressing the very identity of the human I”

(Levinas & Nemo, 1984, p. 196). He adds: “I am I only to the degree that I am responsible” (p. 196). The ethical responsibility for the other is an obligation the subject cannot, humanly, refuse. This responsibility constitutes the identity of the subject.

The Third. Levinas’s account of the third is the site of passage in his thought from the ethical to the political (Attridge, 2010; Bernasconi, 1999). The third, for purposes of simplification, represents the other others, the whole humanity looking at both the subject and the other. The arrival of the third poses a problem to the proximity

of the relationship with the other as it raises the question: To whom is the subject responsible first, the other or the other others?

Levinas rejected Western philosophy for giving intellectual justification for politics of violence against the other. In his turn to ethics, he found himself in a problematic situation where the subject is infinitely responsible for other others, the third.

While the subject’s responsibility to the other comprises ethics, the subject’s responsibility towards the third involves responsibility toward the other others, which introduces the realm of institution and state, and translates into justice. As Rae (2017) explains, the turn away from the political to the ethical leads to a problem, the third, which requires a return to the political. However, this return is to a political that is ethically inspired (Rae, 2017), since the call for justice is founded on the interruption of the singularity of the relationship to the other. However, Levinas’s move towards the political through the third left “a number of questions unanswered about politics in any practical sense” (Attridge, 2010, p. 103). Levinas’s account of the third continues to stir up a debate about the relationship between ethics and politics. Moreover, Levinas’s account of the third differs within different stages of his thought. As Attridge (2010) explains, the concept of the third in Totality and Infinity, as justice, differs from the concept of the third in Otherwise than Being, in which the third is an interruption of the face-to-face relationship with the other (p. 108). Likewise, Bernasconi (1999) acknowledges three accounts of the third in Levinas’s thought; the notion of the third party, and the third person in addition to “the difficult notion of illeity” (p. 76). To shed light on Levinas’s understanding of politics, Bernasconi investigates the three senses of the third in Levinas’s thought as interrelated and “barely distinguishable” (p. 76).

While Levinas’s notion of the third is very important to his idea of justice, in terms of his ethical philosophy his primary concern is the ethical responsibility to the other. In the interview titled The Paradox of Morality, Levinas explains this primary- secondary relationship:

what seems to me very important, is that there are not only two of us in the world. But I think that everything begins as if we were only two. It is important to recognize that the idea of justice always supposes that there is a third. (Wright, Hughes, & Ainley, 1988, p. 170)

As Levinas emphasizes the importance of the third as a call for justice, he stresses the primacy of the singular relationship with the other. Later in the interview Levinas distinguishes between his understanding of justice in Totality and infinity, as part of the relationship between two people, and his later understanding in which justice is inseparable from the political. He then emphasizes the distinction between ethics and justice, and asserts that for him ethics is primary (p. 171). As exemplified in the quote above, the language Levinas uses to describe the relationship to the other and to the third suggests that the relationship to the third is secondary to the relationship to the other

(Attridge, 2010). However, some scholars argue for the inseparability of ethics and politics furthering an ethico-political approach to Levinas’s thought (Fagan, 2009).

Similarly, Bernasconi (1999) perceive justice and ethics as “conflicting aspects of one single structure” (p. 52). He argues that Levinas presents the relationship of the ethical and the political “as difference between layers of meaning” and as the focus shifts from the priority of the ethical over the political to the point of intersection between them (p.

50). Attridge, on the other hand, explains that the contradictions in Levinas’s account of the third is due to the difficulty he is having to balance the responsibility towards the other and the responsibility towards the third. Attridge writes: “He wishes to avoid

compromising the primacy of the ethical relation with the singular other, but at the same time to avoid relegating the third and justice to a merely secondary and subsidiary role”

(p. 107).

The subject’s responsibility to the other does not allow him/her to suspend their responsibility towards the other others. In this way, the relationship to the other provides the basis for an ethical questioning of the political and, as Bernasconi (1999) explains,

“serves as a corrective to the institutions and the laws of the political” (p. 77). As the face-to-face relation questions the concept of justice, “the ethical reorients the political”

(Bernasconi, 1999, pp. 48–49) because from the ethical perspective, justice is always insufficient.

As much as much as politics must be held in check by ethics (Levinas, 2001), the relationship with the other is also called into question by the third (Bernasconi, 1999).

The presence of the third party is the presence of the whole of humanity looking at both the subject and the other. The third interrupts the subject-other relationship introducing the realm of justice and reason. On the other hand, Justice is the “first violence” (Levinas

& Poirié, 2001, p. 55) that suspends the singularity of the other. Thus, the third party corrects the asymmetry of proximity in the relationship with the other by modulating the infinite responsibility to the other (Beach, 2004). As Attridge, in his interview with

Zalloua (2009), concludes: “Living ethically is a constant negotiation between ethics and justice” (p. 21).

Absolute Other. In this study, I will not deal with Levinas’s concept of absolute

Other, which has been a problematic notion for Levinas (Attridge, 2004; Young, 2012).

Attridge (2004) argues that the absolute Other that is wholly transcendent, unknowable

and always separate from the subject, appears to be Levinas’s understanding of God.

After Derrida’s critique of Levinas’s concept of absolute Other, Young (2012) explains,

Levinas (1998) revised his position in his book Otherwise than Being (first published in

1972) to develop a new way of understanding the relation to the other by tracing the other

“through the remains of its derangement of the self” (p. 25). Levinas’s move away from absolute Other, Young argues, is a move to auto-heteronomy “a philosophy of the same, but a same that has been heterogenized with the recognition that sameness must be determined and unsettled by the other against which it defines itself” (p. 38). In

Otherwise than Being, Levinas explains “the other in the same determinative of subjectivity is the restlessness of the same disturbed by the other” (p. 25). Thus, my understanding of the other is guided by Levinas’s later notion of the other that disturbs the same, challenges it to open for the excluded alterity and thus allows an opportunity for the same to change.

Levinas’s Ethics of Alterity and the Study of Literature

Levinas’s Stance Towards Literature

Using Levinas’s ethics to theorize literary engagement, as I do in this project, is a problematic step when we take into account Levinas’s famous antipathy toward art including literature (Davis, 2014; Eaglestone, 1997; Eppert, 2008). Davis (2014) discusses Levinas’s attack on art, including literature and his denouncing of the act of narration as falsification. For Levinas, David explains, “literature is obscure, absurd, selfish, cut off from lucidity; and crucially it is morally pernicious because it fails to acknowledge the priority of the relation with the Other” (p. 98). Davis highlights

Levinas’s condemnation of artistic enjoyment using Levinas’s (1994) famous words:

“There is something wicked and egoistical and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are 52

periods when one can be ashamed of it, as if one were feasting whilst the plague raged”

(p. 146, as cited in Davis, 2014, p. 98). Drawing such a figurative picture of feasting during a plague, Levinas attacks the position of artistic enjoyment as unethical and irresponsible. Levinas also criticizes the common perception that elevates “art and artistic imagination as the prime vehicles for attaining knowledge to absolute truth”

(Eppert, 2008, p. 72). In Levinas’s view, Eppert (2008) explains, “art is not ethically committed simply by virtue of its being art” (p. 72).

A number of contemporary scholars have examined the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic in Levinas’s work. Robbins (1999) recognizes that Levinas’s “harsh assessment of the work of art is evident throughout his writings” (p. 75). However, she maintains that Levinas does not hold a stable view on the issue of art. She discusses

Levinas’s theorization of the work of art in his essay Reality and Its Shadow, which contained severe denunciation of the work of art as well as the work of criticism.

Robbins distinguishes Reality and Its Shadow (1948) from Levinas’s more mature philosophical work, and she situates its ideas within a philosophical tradition of

Heidegger, Kant and Plato. She asserts that the negative views of Levinas on art appeared in his earlier writings in the 1940s and 1950s, in which Levinas associates art with what he calls later “totality.” In contrast, in the texts, published in the 1960s and

1970s, Levinas holds a more positive appreciation of art. However, Robbins does not perceive this change as temporal transformation of his view. Rather, she approaches this change as “one operative within each of his texts about art.” Robbins detects Levinas’s hesitation between praising and condemning the work of art within each of his works.

Robbins (1999) examines instances in which Levinas uses the literary text to

illustrate his conceptualization of ethics and further his philosophical arguments. By investigating Levinas’s movement to and from art and philosophy, Robbins explores the relationship between literature and ethics in his thought. Following the “largely unaccented” responses to literature in Levinas’s texts, she explores “literary dimensions in Levinas which have everything to do with the force of his ethical discourse” (p. 154).

She also suggests that Levinas, from the perspective of Judaism, finds hermeneutical approach to text common to both secular and sacred literatures (p. 136). She concludes that Levinas has modified his understanding of literature and the work of art with regards to its possible relation with ethics but not with regards to art’s ontology.

Eaglestone (1997) explains that Levinas’s rejection of philosophical claims that art can give access to or knowledge of the absolute, or that it transcends ethics. For

Levinas, Eaglestone explains, art only has “an illusory being” (p. 100) from an ontological point of view. Additionally, clarifies Eaglestone, Levinas’s distrusts art’s act of representation which challenges the face-to-face encounter with the other. Eaglestone focuses on the shift in Levinas’s thought between Totality and Infinity (1979) and

Otherwise Than Being (1991), and discusses how the later represents a response to the problem of representation.

Levinas’s Exegesis as Ethical Textual Engagement

Other scholars argue for the importance of Levinas’s work in the field of literature based on Levinas’s practice of exegesis, which represents a model for textual engagement that is rooted in Levinas’s ethics. In his book, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida,

Deleuze, Levinas, Zizek and Cavell, Davis (2014) discusses Levinas’s

Talmudic commentaries and his practice of exegesis to theorize a mode of ethical reading which he calls “overreading.” According to Davis, Levinas’s reading of the Talmud 54

emphasizes plurality of meaning in the text. Levinas’s practice of exegesis accepts any contradictions or disagreements to be found in the Talmudic text and upholds that these contradictions are what allow the text to escape the particular historical conditions of its compilation. Davis discusses the mode of reading that Levinas adopts while reading the

Talmud and summarizes its basic guiding principles. In his account of Levinas, Davis explains:

Exegesis is an act of devotion and adoration every bit as important as prayer, and the Sacred texts require a practice of interpretation that entails both an audacious hermeneutic and listening piously to sovereign orders. This combines the freedom and restraint; it is entirely respectful of the text but fully open to new possibilities of meaning. Commentary thus emerges as a never completed project. (p. 90)

Davis asserts that in Levinas’s conception of reading, the sacred text is inexhaustible, as if revelation happens with every act of reading. Thus the act of reading is a way of participating in the ongoing revelation. Every possible reading is new and unique, yet faithful to the authority to the text, and “the number of possible readings is equal to or perhaps even greater than the number of actual readers” (p. 89). Hence, each act of reading is a unique response to the text, bringing something new to the text so that “each individual may contribute to the never-totalized unity of Truth” (p. 94). The meaning of the text thus lies in the text as well as the commentator/reader who approaches the text with unique questions.

Reading as a unique response to the text means that every reading will bring to being new meaning. Thus reading requires, what Davis calls, “an act of faith, an absolute confidence that the text has something to teach, and that it will be worthy of the attention paid to it” (p. 96). Davis posits that this is the reason Levinas did not extend his hermeneutics to secular literature since the message of secular literature may not be the

message Levinas wanted to hear. Despite the fact that Levinas never applied his approach to secular texts, Davis confirms that this approach to interpretation is not tied to religious texts only and asserts: “reading is a properly ethical encounter, because it exposes me to that which exceeds me utterly; and in my capacity to respond I discover my obligation to the other” (p. 94). Davis argues that Levinas’s approach is a general theory of reading and textuality rooted in Levinas’s view of religious nature of the language. Handleman (1991) explains that language for Levinas, is “the very site of alterity, of inter-human relation, of sociality” (p. 284). Thus, Handleman argues, the act of exegesis “comes from an inherent spirituality in all language” (p. 284). For Levinas, language is prophetic “because it can contain more than it contains, can bear meaning other than those intended in its use as instrumental for transmitting thoughts or information” (Handelman, 1991, p. 283). Based on Levinas’s understanding of language as sacred, exegesis is an ethical engagement with the text, sacred or secular.

Cohen (2004) highlights Levinas’s significant influence on literary engagement through distinction between criticism and exegesis. Cohen explains the difference between criticism which perceives the text as an object of study and analysis, and ethical exegesis, which views the text as a teaching. Cohen explains how engagement in exegesis represents a continuous dialogue leading to a transforming learning experience:

Exegesis produces and requires the engaged or existential self-transformation of the inquirer, through a back-and-forth movement, the very life of inquiry as dialogue between text and reader, between reader and reader, between texts, readers, and reality across time, from an immemorial past to an ever distant future. (p. 254)

Viewing the reading process as dialogue that allows learning demonstrates the pedagogical dimension of ethical reading of literature. In this sense, Levinas’s practice of exegesis can illuminate the engagement with literature through the move away from 56

literary criticism in its traditional sense toward ethical textual engagement.

Levinas’s Ethics of Alterity and Education

In the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in welcoming Levinas in the field of education (Todd, 2016). The importance of Levinas’s philosophy in many academic disciplines increased in the climate of concern with diversity, otherness and difference that marked the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty- first century (Perpich, 2008, p. 2). Since then there has been several initiatives in using

Levinas’s thought and his understanding of alterity and self-other relation to challenge current educational theory and practice (Todd, 2003, 2016). Levinasian ethics offered educational theorists the conceptual tools to rethink educational theory in the context of neoliberalism and the quest for certainty, uniformity, and accountability (Zhao, 2014) and argue against the instrumentalist discourse in education (Strhan, 2012).

While Levinas has not written extensively on education, his career as a teacher, administrator, and a professor gave language to his philosophical ideas, Zhao (2016) emphasizes. Levinas saw his own pedagogical work within educational institutions as of deep political and ethical significance (Strhan, 2012, p. 172). Following Todd (2008),

Strhan (2012) emphasizes that Levinas’s theory of learning lies at the core of his philosophy lies. Education is central to Levinas’s philosophy, Katz (2013) asserts, as

“his philosophical project reinforces the view that education is fundamental to the formation of the new subjectivity” (p. 161). Kats argues that “Levinas’s ethics call for, even assume, an account of education that will deliver the ethical subject he describes in his philosophical work” (p. 167).

However, exploring the relationship between Levinas and education is not a question of application of Levinas’s ideas to education. It is not an attempt to 57

instrumentalize his philosophy in the service of education (Strhan, 2012, p. 12), it is not a new technique in teaching (Biesta, 2003). Levinas questions the notion of subjectivity that is the framework through which education is perceived in the Western modern world

(Biesta, 2003). Thus, reading Levinas in education is an attempt to “disturb established practices and theories of education and open up our thinking about how these might be otherwise” (Strhan, 2012, p. 14).

Rather, Biesta proposes responding as a way to read Levinas and think about education. He follows Sharon Todd who distinguishes between learning about Levinas and learning from Levinas. Learning about Levinas assumes applying truths we learn from Levinas in education. While learning from Levinas, as Biesta (2003) explains,

“opens up a dialogical space where pedagogy becomes—or can remain—an event rather than being a preprogrammed process.” (p. 64)

The Pedagogical Encounter as an Ethical Encounter with the Other

As discussed earlier in the chapter, Levinas founds human subjectivity on the preontological relation with the other. For Levinas, Biesta (2003) emphasizes, the subject is constituted by a relationship of infinite responsibility for other. The subject is being constituted in relation to the other, is brought into existence in the moment of responding to the other. This notion of subjectivity is contrary to Western education’s understanding of the autonomy of the subject, which indicates the subject’s “freedom to take control of his/her life and realize his/her purposes—the noble idea of self-direction and self- realization” (Zhao, 2014b, p. 514). On the other hand, Levinas understands subjectivity as a deepening responsibility emerging through the relationship with the other.

According to Levinas’s understanding of subjectivity, Strhan (2012) writes, “I am a subject only as one primordially exposed to my neighbor who addresses me and looks for 58

my response” (p. 8). For Levinas, the other, outside the subject, provokes the subject to learn and change, as Todd (2003) explains:

The Other signifies a limitless possibility for the self, and it is by coming face to face with such limitlessness that the self can exceed its own containment, its own self-identity, breaking the solitude of being for the self. In this view, teaching is only possible if the self is open to the Other, to the face of the Other. Through such openness to what is exterior to the I, the I can become something different than, or beyond, what it was; in short, it can learn. (p. 30)

Being confronted by the face of the other, the subject is challenged to escape its limits, to change. Teaching in this sense is “the other’s offering of the world to me through speech” (Strhan, 2012, p. 20). For Levinas, as explained earlier, the encounter with the other is a pedagogical encounter. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes the relationship to the other both as a conversation and a teaching relationship, in which the other teaches the subject by occupying a position of an interlocutor (Katz, 2013).

In his view, learning is “not so much concerned with how the subject learns content, but with how the subject learns through a specific orientation to the other”

(Strhan, 2012, p. 12). In Levinas’s view, Biesta (2003) explains:

[learning] is not about the acquisition of knowledge or truth. It is about response and responding. Similarly, pedagogy is not about handing down truths to the next generation, but about creating opportunities for children, students, newcomers to respond and, as a result, come “into presence.” (p. 64)

Biesta (2004) argues against the conceptualization of learning as acquisition of something that already exists. Instead, Biesta sees learning as responding. He states:

If we look at learning in this way, we can say that someone has learned something not when that person is able to copy and reproduce what already existed, but when someone responds to what is unfamiliar, what is different, what challenges, irritates, or even disturbs. Here, learning is an invention or creation, it is a process of bringing something new into the world, namely, one's own, unique response, one's own voice. (p. 320)

According to Todd (2003), “Levinas suggests that teaching is about staging an encounter with the Other, with something outside the self, whereas learning is to receive from the

Other more than the self already holds” (p. 29). As Strhan (2012) explains, “Teaching is, for Levinas, the space of encounter with the Other in which subjectivity is revealed as ethical . . . my subjectivity is only possible through the condition of being taught” (pp.

20–23). Strhan elaborates that Levinas’s understanding of subjectivity as beginning in responsibility towards the other, is what makes education possible. Levinas’s theory of learning is “not so much concerned with how the subject learns content, but with how the subject learns through a specific orientation to the other” (Strhan, 2012, p. 12).

Teaching as Dialog not Miaeutics

The ethical relation between the subject and the other as a conversation in which the other addresses the subject from the outside, is different from the pedagogy of

Socrates, “where truth is pulled out from one person by a series of questions being posed”

(Katz, 2013, p. 130). Within Socratic pedagogy, the teacher is a midwife who can deliver thoughts through his maieutic art. As the students give birth to the idea, the teacher is only “a facilitator of the delivery” (Strhan, 2012, p. 22). On the other hand, Levinas perceives the relationship to the other as exceeding any knowledge that comes from within (Katz, 2013). In Totality and Infinity, Levinas (1979) criticizes this pedagogy as the primacy of the same:

Levinas rejects teaching as miaeutics, since it establishes the primacy of the subject as containing all knowledge. In the same book, he explains that “Teaching is not reducible to miaeutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain” (p. 51). 60

Ethical Educative Community

One of the areas scholars focused on was the relationship between Levinasian understanding of community and the educative community in the classroom. Levinas’s alterity entails an understanding of human community that is plural, a community of absolute separation not solidarity and sameness, in which the other remains a singular in a community (Zhao, 2014). The means to create an ethical community for Levinas is through language and discourse and his idea of singularity and multiplicity, Zhao argues.

She explains, “By cultivating and reorienting the way we approach, speak, and listen to others, we can signify and receive each other as unique subjects with whom we engage in communication and rational debate” (Zhao, 2016a, p. 327).

Strhan (2012) explains how Levinas’s understanding of educative community is rooted in his understanding of radical responsibility, the relationship to the other as dialogue and discourse, and the attentiveness to texts (p. 169). For Strhan (2012), beyond institutional roles and the fundamental challenge is the goal of reaching an understanding of community that troubles social divides and polarization.

the conception of community in education to which Levinas leads us is one in which the obligation to the neighbour, rather than any commonality or shared rationality, is its beginning, meaning and end, interrupting the building of excluding boundaries and walls. (p. 171)

Strhan further explains how Levinas’s understanding of community stems from his understanding of subjectivity, and the relation to the other as teaching.

My being taught depends, then, on my condition of responsibility. I am always already a subject in a community, yet called to bring about a better community, a community of neighbours in which we work towards the conditions of an always better justice to which Levinas testifies, breaking down barriers through practices of dialogue that do not cover over conditions of aliety and vulnerability that would make such a community possible. (p. 172)

For Levinas, justice begins with the scene of teaching as a conversation rather than cooperation (Strhan, 2012, p. 202).

In her article, “Singularity and Community: Levinas and Democracy,” Zhao

(2016c) reimagines school and classroom communities as open to difference. Levinas’s community is characterized by irreducible multiplicity and plurality, a community that cannot be viewed from the outside. For Levinas, Zhao explains how:

. . . the relation cannot be in the form of numbers, concepts, categories, or genera. The individuals in a community cannot be numerically connected identical samples, or individuations of a concept (a member of a culture, a party, etc.), or embodiments of a category (a race, a class, etc.), because if they were, from the outside, the community would become identifiable and totalizable by the very number, concepts, or categories. The community of common substances, therefore, in Levinas’s view, is the community of totality. (p. 349)

By not relating to each other through concepts, or categories, individuals in the community remain unique and different—“already implied in this notion of multiplicity is a notion of individual singularity” (p. 349). Zhao (2016c) explores the philosophy of listening in education through discussing the work of Levinas and Alphonso Lingis that requires listening “earnestly and attentively, to the fullness and unpredictability of others’ expressions and experiences” (p. 357). Focusing on language as a human expression,

Zhao (2016c) describes how listening and speaking can create an ethical arena that enables debate about issues of justice. Through attentive listening to the other we pay our highest respect to their singularity and through responsive speaking we offer ourselves in front of the humanity of the other. Zhao (2016c) emphasizes how the community of the classroom can be a space for an ethical community where students, as unique singularities, open themselves and listen to each other and each speaking with their own voice. The classroom, she asserts, is the place to teach students to accept and appreciate difference: 62

The classroom is not a place for sameness, but the place of multiplicities, bound together by our unconditional responsibility to each other, to our singularity and subjectivity. (p. 358)

Conceptualizing the classroom as a space for difference rather than sameness, Levinas’s conceptualization of community can transform education.

Post-colonial Critique of Levinas

While Levinas’s ethics of alterity provides an overarching framework of my study, it is important to situate my study, as well, within historical, political and cultural context. Hence I want to put the Levinasian ethics of alterity in conversation with Post- colonial thought. Levinas has been critiqued frequently for his insularity, Eurocentrism, and indifference to global suffering (Drabinski, 2011). Among the famous criticisms of

Levinas are those regarding his silence regarding anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, his indifference toward what happens in colonized territories (Drabinski, 2011), his negative comments about people from Asia as “masses of Asiatic and underdeveloped peoples”

(Levinas as cited in Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 68), his understanding of the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict, his reaction to the death of Palestinians, particularly his indifference to the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila, and his refusal to consider the Palestinians the other of the Jews (Maldonado-Torres, 2012). Additionally, Drabinski (2011) explains how Levinas’s thinking lacks a commitment to the materiality of suffering.

Judeo-Christian Centrism

Levinas has been criticized for his commitment to and emphasis on the Judeo-

Christian tradition, along with his problematic views of non-Western cultures (Bahler,

2013). In one of his famous interviews Levinas says, “I often say, though it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks. All the rest can be translated: all the rest—all the exotic—is dance” (Levinas as cited in 63

Drabinski, 2011, p. 5). Ma (2008) argues that during the interview “Levinas identifies humanity with the Bible and the Greeks, which alone represent spiritual seriousness. In contrast, African civilization, as a dancing civilization, is superficial and frivolous” (Ma,

2008, p. 605). The association of non-European culture with dance, indicate the non- serious playful artistic nature, that Levinas criticized in his view of art, as explained earlier. Thus, Levinas’s division between ethics and aesthetics is criticized for leading him to establish two forms of culture; ethical culture and aesthetic culture. Bahler (2013) argues that for Levinas “there are ethical bodies/cultures and aesthetic bodies/cultures, and nothing in between” (p. 7). Bahler continues to explain that “the ethical bodies are particularly Jewish ones” (p. 7), while the aesthetic bodies have a different character:

[aesthetic bodes] may be able to dance, sculpt, and play music, but they are incapable of being ethical. They are, in a word, uncivilized, barbarian. These aesthetic bodies must identify with the logos of Plato and the history of the Judeo- Christian tradition if they are to have an ethics and be capable of judging other cultures. (p. 7)

These views reveal Levinas’s commitment to the moral superiority of European thought

(Bahler, 2013) and a favoring of the abstract humanism over the concrete.

Jewish Centrism

Slabodsky (2014) discusses Levinas Jewish centresim and his limiting of the conception of otherness to the “intra-European case of the Jew.” Slabodsky argues that due to Levinas’s ideal version of Israel, it was impossible for Levinas to acknowledge the change in Jewish politics in the second half of the twentieth century after the formation of the state of Israel and its alliance with the first world as a colonizing state.

Historically, the Jews who were presecuted in Europe for centuries, became presecutors of Palastinians. Butler (2012) explores Levinas’s conceptualization of the

Jews as persecuted, in which persecution charecterizes the fate of the Jews, “a recurrent 64

and ahistorical dimension of existence” (p. 45). She argues that since, in Levinas’s thougt, Jews are persecuted by definition, it is impossible to attribute persecution to

Israel. She discusses Levinas’s view of the universality of Jewish subject in which the

Jew becomes “the model and instance for this preontological persecution” (p. 46) and presecution becomes the essence of Judiasm. Butler continues: “The Jew is, accordingly, no longer historical” (p. 46). This ahistorical nature of the Jews, makes them the preontological other of Europe, and the model for any other in the world. She explains:

The Jew is neither part of ontology nor history, the Jew cannot be understood as belonging to the order of historical time, and yet this exemption becomes the way in which Levinas makes claims about the role of Israel, itself historically formed and maintained, as forever and exclusively persecuted and, by definition, never persecuting. (p. 46)

Levinas uses the word Israel to mean both the Jewish people and the land of Palestine.

The suffering of Israel is thus the timeless preontological suffering of the Jewish people.

Israel for Levinas is not a historically formed state whose history involves the persecution of Palestinians, but as endlessly enduring persecution. Thus, the recognition of the suffering of Palestinians becomes impossible for Levinas.

Inability to Understand Colonization

Maldonado-Torres (2012) points to Levinas’s inability to understand colonization in its own terms separate from the ancient history of Europe and Ancient West.

Levinas’s understaning of colonization, Maldonado-Torres argues, locates the politics of decolonization within the drama of the West, and fails to capture the specifity of Modern colonization. He adds that Levinas was aware of colonization, but had an ambivilent and

Eurocentitic response to it. He states: “the reach of Levinas’s thought is skewed by his own particular forms of identity politics and his Eurocentric bias, and he did not understand in depth the colonial conditions or the lived experience of colonization in 65

places other than Europe” (p. 89). As Maldonado-Torres explains, Levinas’s politics have been shaped by his Jewish identity and his traumatic experiences of the Holocaust.

Levinas’s politics was limiting for his thought as it prevented him from understanding experiences of suffering endured by other nations. Levinas was able to understand colonization within the European continent through his condemnation of Nazi occupation. However, Maldonado-Torres argues, Levinas was not able to recognize other experiences of colonization outside Europe.

Contextualizing Levinas’s Eurocentrism

Slabodsky (2014) discusses contextual reasons that lead to Levinas’s controversial stances. Maldonado-Torres (2012) argues that Levinas was not only demonstrating the culture of his time, but also his place. Drawing on Walter Mignolo’s concept of “colonial difference,” Maldonado-Torres discusses how it is important to contextualize Levinas’s work in both time and place. He explains that the colonial difference does not refer to natural or cultural difference, but rather, difference “in relation to coloniality of power, knowledge and being” (p. 70). Maldonado-Torres also maintains that Levinas was harsh on Europe regarding Nazism, but was less critical of

Europe with regards to colonial politics. While Levinas’s thought was an internal critique of Europe at a time of a crisis, he continued to claim European universal value and was not a critic of Eurocentrism or Orientalism.

Considering the time and place of Levinas’s work does not mean justifying

Levinas’s controversial statements as only opinions showing the prejudice of his time,

Maldonado-Torres emphasizes. He adds that it is important to determine the elements in

Levinas’s thought that are complicit with these problematic ideas.

Slabodsky (2014) argues that Levinas’s views were changed after his encounter with Third World intellectuals. He explains that most of the controversial quoted comments were written before the 1970s and that Levinas’s position changes radically in the 1970s and 1980s when he demonstrated a growing openness to multiplicity of voices in philosophy and to decolonial thinking. However, Maldonado-Torres (2012) cites two interviews with Levinas in 1981 and 1989 containing Eurocentric and racist comments.

For example, in the interview in 1989, Levinas says: “I always say—but under my breath—that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing . . . . There is no racism intended” (Levinas as cited in

Maldonado-Torres, 2012, p. 73). Maldonado-Torres asserts that these statements were not less Eurocentric than his comments in the 1940s or the 1960s.

While acknowledging the importance of Levinas’s analysis of the other,

Maldonado-Torres (2012) calls for consideration of the limits in Levinas’s work, and careful analysis of Eurocentrism and Orientalism in his work. He states that “no matter how much one radicalizes Levinas, Levinasian discourse alone cannot provide sufficient elements for radical thought” (p. 92). Maldonado-Torres poses the question: “How to overcome the limits of Levinas’s discourse?” (p. 92), and responds by suggesting putting

Levinas’s work in conversation with decolonial scholarship, specifically the work of

Fanon and Dussel.

Decolonizing Levinas

Contemporary social theorists have attempted to forge a conversation between

Levinas’s philosophy and post-colonial thought (Slabodsky, 2010). In an effort to decolonize Levinas’s thought, Drabinski (2011) puts Levinas in conversation with postcolonial theorists s such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. These efforts are 67

rooted in Drabinski’s belief that Levinas’s ethics represent a precondition for any ethical action—while being not a complete description of what such ethical action is. Levinas’s ethics represents a cornerstone to establish “the claim of the ethical in difference” (p. 10).

Drabinski believes that Levinas’s conception of the responsibility to the other “who accuses and obligates without prior measure” (p. 2) is a very important dimension to postcolonial thinking. Thus, Drabinski emphasizes, in order to engage with Levinas’s work in different cultural, historical and geographical contexts, it is important to decolonize his work first by creatively rereading it across geographies “in order to think more rigorously about the question of the Other as an ethical, cultural, and political question” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

Since the core of Levinas’s work lies in the primacy and first-ness of the ethical and that the responsibility towards the other comes first before being, Drabiniski (2011) explains, any attempt to take into consideration history and politics contradicts Levinas’s pre-historic ethics. On the other hand, Drabiniski puts this primacy into question by affirming that it limits Levinas’s work to metaphysics as an epistemology of alterity and

“obscures the ethical where it is most demanded—across geographies informed by history” (p. 3). Drabinski calls for focusing on the historical character of the encounter with the other. He considers this a correction of Levinas’s Eurocentrism and an insight that is not foreign to the direction and the methodology of Levinas’s work. He adds that

Levinas’s work benefits from such critique, since Levinas’s thought is “naively unworldly in its Eurocentrism.” (p. 200). He asserts that reorienting Levinas’s thought is an obligation for Levinas’s moving away from the constraints of Eurocentrism.

Moreover, Slabodsky (2014) argues for Levinas’s openness towards decolonialism after his encounter with decolonial South American intellectual Enrique

Dussel. Slabodsky explores the the mutual influence between Levinas and Dussel.

Likewise, Maldonado-Torres (2012) argues that Latin American readings of Levinas approached his work as a way of giving direction to “a politcal process concerned with colonial devastation, death, poverty, and revolution” (p. 77). Since the 1970s, Latin

American thinkers have already been seeing the relevance of Levinas’s work for politics and have “appropriated Levinas for radical purposes” (p. 82). Discussing Dussel’s work,

Maldonado-Torres (2012) asserts that “it is fair to sate that the radicalization of Levinas’s ideas has been well underway, or maybe even the production of a decolonial post-

Levinasian radicality, which passes through Levinas but refuses to be limited by the scope of Levinas’s thinking, his presuppositions, or his framework” (p. 87).

Levinas Against Levinas

More scholars are advocating for a reading of Levinas beyond Levinas, or to

“pose Levinasian questions to Levinas,” in order to develop Levinas’s thought “in a way different from what can be found in his writings” (Tatransky, 2008, p. 493). In his tribute to Levinas Derrida, as Attridge (2010) discusses in details, argues for “ethical duty to extend the Levinasian insights as far as they can be taken” (p. 102). Derrida (1999) argues: “one should no doubt extend without limit the consequences of what Levinas asserts” (p. 23). Similarly, Butler (2012) decides to “read Levinas against himself” (p.

47) and prefers “to think with Levinas against Levinas and to pursue a possible direction for his ethics and his politics that he did not pursue” (p. 61). As most scholars emphasize, there is great value in Levinas’s work despite his political stances. Levinas’s work represents an essential foundation for understanding of otherness as philosophical 69

category. The fact that Levinas was reluctant to be involved with the political events of his time or even failed to ethically engage with politics, has not prevented many scholars from continuing to value his work and advancing it to places that Levinas was not able to reach. In response to one of Levinas’s racist comments, Butler writes that “although his words wound us here, or, perhaps precisely because his words wound us here, we are responsible for him, even as the relation proves painful in its non-reciprocity” (p. 47). In honor of the non-reciprocity of my relationship with Levinas as the other, it is my goal to respond to his challenging concepts, and consequently to get entangled in his perplexing questions.

Post-colonial Alterity

Since the focus of this study is reading literature in foreign language (FL) and specifically in Arabic, a different layer of alterity, that of cultural, political, historical, and geographical and colonial difference, must be taken into account. To use postcolonial alterity in conjunction with Levinas’s philosophical alterity one must be cautious of the conflicting denotations of the terms other and alterity in the two fields. On the one hand,

Levinas’s philosophical alterity is fundamental for being. For Levinas, to be the self means to be for the other, since “being signifies on the basis of the one-for-the-other, of substitution of the same for the other (Levinas, 1998, p. 26). On the other hand, postcolonial understanding of alterity signifies “something produced as a form of exclusion” and the stance is that others should not be othered (Young, 2012, p. 38).

Young (2012) discusses “an unexamined conflation” of two conceptualizations of the other: the first is the other as a philosophical category created since Hegel’s philosophy of consciousness and developed in the thought of other philosophers like

Sartre, Lacan, and most importantly, Levinas. In the philosophical conceptualization of 70

the other, the other does not merely represent difference, but constitutes the very means through which the subject becomes aware of him or herself. Moreover, in Levinas’s ethical philosophy, the responsibility toward the other constitutes the subjectivity of the subject and its very humanity. The second conceptualization of the other, Young explains, is the category of the other as whole cultural or ethnic groups, created by anthropological inquiry, which “comprises the modern form of the category of the primitive” (p. 38).

Young (2012) criticizes how the anthropological concept of the other in postcolonial studies because this concept “continues the founding of conceptual framework of modernity, in which a portion of humanity entered modernity towards the end of the eighteen century . . . while the rest of humanity was relegated to the status of immature, primitive and scarcely human other” (p. 38).

Young (2012) call for postcolonial studies to either use Levinas’s philosophical conceptualization of the Other, or to stop using the term Other at all. He asserts: “the time has come for postcolonial scholars to rethink the category of the other according to

Levinas’s later positions” (p. 39). He continues:

Until people rethink the idea of the other in this way, the most useful thing that Postcolonial Studies could do to achieve its aim of mutual understanding and universal equality would be to abandon the category of “the other” altogether. (p. 39)

I agree with Young that the use of concept of anthropological other retains the discourse of modernity that differentiates between civilized subjects and primitive others.

However, in this study, I would like to keep this concept of othering in the background. I would like to explore whether this conceptualization continues to cast its shadow in the process of reading Arabic literature.

The Exotic Other

I will utilize Huggan’s (2002) concept of Anthropological Exotic Other, in comparison to Levinas’s other, to investigate aspects of alterity in the context of U.S. collegiate Arabic literature classrooms. I understand the theoretical difference between the two concepts, and my utilization of the two terms is not an attempt to conflate them.

However, in juxtaposing these two conceptualizations of otherness, I wish to be able to understand the different nuances of otherness at play when engaging with an Arabic literary text.

In his book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Huggan discusses the marketing of third world literature in the first world and describes the concept of the

“anthropological exotic,” which “describes a mode of both perception and consumption; it invokes the familiar aura of other, incommensurably ‘foreign’ cultures while appearing to provide a modicum of information that gives the uninitiated reader access to the text and, by extension, the ‘foreign culture’ itself” (p. 37). Reading the anthropological exotic other allows readers in the West to view foreign language literature as a “transparent window onto a richly detailed and culturally specific, but still somehow homogeneous— and of course readily marketable other culture” (p. 37). Reading the anthropological exotic other in literature is to perceive literature as a representation of culture, claiming to know the cultural other through reading the other’s literary products while ignoring the differences in value system, world view, and linguistic imagination. Reading literature as a transparent window onto the other’s culture disguises the constructed nature of the text, its historicity, the author’s and the reader’s lenses and results in a monolithic understanding of culture.

Huggan asserts that exoticism as a symbolic system of representation and “a control mechanism of cultural translation” works to bring the foreign/other closer to the sphere of the familiar/same while continuing to define the other in terms of the same.

Huggan explains that "while exoticism describes the systematic assimilation of cultural difference, ascribing familiar meanings and associations to unfamiliar things, it also denotes an expanded, if inevitably distorted, comprehension of diversity which effectively limits assimilation” (p. 14). In this sense exoticism stripping the other of otherness and claiming to comprehend the other holding a one-sided view of difference, represents the opposite of ethical engagement with alterity that Levinas had called for.

Huggan’s concept of exotic other informs my examination of the reading of

Arabic literature in U.S. higher education within the current historical moment as stereotypical representation of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. are likely to stain students’ perception of the cultural underpinning of Arabic literary works.

Alterity and Reading Literature

In this section, I will examine the significance of alterity in illuminating an ethical engagement with literature. My examination will be founded in the work of two scholars who utilized alterity to theorize for a form of ethical reading. The first scholar is Attridge

(2004) who theorizes for literature as an event and the reading of literature as an act- event that constitute a response to alterity. The second scholar is Tarc (2016) who examines representations of literacy in literary texts in light of psychoanalysis, Derrida and Levinas’s alterity to advocate for an “other-oriented” literacy in her book Literacy of the Other: Renarrating Humanity.

Literature as an Event: Derek Attridge

The act-event of reading. In his article “The Literary Work as Ethical Event,”

Attridge (2016) asserts that otherness is at the heart of both the creation and the reception of the literary work and that the literary work is fundamentally a relation to alterity.

Thus, reading creatively is openness to the other. He discusses the ethical dimension of literature, and the literary work as event and experience, terming the process of writing and reading literature as act-events. He describes the event as characterized by “an inventiveness that brings otherness into the field of the same” (p. 221). In his article

Context, Idioculture, Invention, Attridge (2011a) explains that while the reader can control many aspects of reading as an act, reading as an event affects the reader

“intellectually, emotionally, and sometimes physically, without having any control over this process” (p. 687). In this sense, the event of reading is an encounter with the other that disturbs the same and challenges it.

When reading literature, the reader, Attridge explains, has two choices—either to employ reading techniques that reduce the experience of alterity, and thus turn the literary work into an object, or:

. . . to sustain and prolong the experience of otherness, to resist the temptation to close down the uncertain meanings and feelings that are being evoked. In both cases, I am concerned with “meaning,” but in the first case I understand it as a noun, in the second as a verb. I can, one might say, live the text that I read. (Attridge, 2004a, p. 40)

In the act-event of literary reading, the reader responds to the alterity of the text rather than reducing it. The reader lives the text by being open to the text’s meaning, not as a noun or an object that is out there for the reader’s grasp, but as a verb, an encounter between the text’s alterity and the reader’s response to it.

Idioculture and cultural difference. Within the act-event of reading, the reader,

Attridge explains, is an individual in a specific time and place with a specific history.

Consequently, the experience of reading literature, although can be repeated, becomes a different experience every time, thus “a non-repetition, a new singularity” (Attridge,

2004a, p. 40). Attridge (2011a) defines the term idioculture:

The singular, and constantly changing, combination of cultural materials and proclivities that constitutes any individual subject, the product of exposure to a variety of cultural phenomena. An idioculture is the internal, singular manifestation of the broader cultural field, registered as a complex of particular preferences, capabilities, memories, desires, physical habits, and emotional tendencies. (p. 682)

Attridge’s understanding of idioculture brings together the understanding of culture— understood as never stable, internally divided, complex and multiple—and the individual subjectivity of the reader who internalizes such culture. Thus the reader’s culture is not one culture, but an intersection of cultures that manifests in the reader’s emotions, habits and desires.

Taking into consideration the idioculture on both sides of creation and reception of the literary work, Attridge calls reading as a response to alterity “creative,” as it

“brings into being something hitherto excluded by the reader’s idioculture, as well as responsible, in the sense that it welcomes the otherness of the other, and does justice to the inventiveness of the author” (p. 688). As Attridge explains, the reader’s encounter with otherness in the text leads to finding possibilities of otherness in the seemingly coherent culture of the reader. This reading also responds to the inventiveness of the author who has breached his own cultural fabric to give birth to possibilities of otherness.

In his 2011 article, Attridge discusses the cultural difference between the literary works and their reading as inventiveness when literary works are read in different context

by readers who do not share the idioculture of the work’s creator. He asserts that “a work of the past (or another culture) can in its very strangeness push at the limits of contemporary culture” (p. 694). Even when the same reader encounters the text again, he/she comes with a different idioculture and thus experiences the work differently.

When re-reading a literary work, as Attridge (2004a) explains, creative reading means fully responding to its alterity by experiencing it anew while attending to the specificity, historicity, and location of this encounter.

Inner and outer alterity. Attridge’s understanding of idioculture informs his understanding of otherness as inner and outer otherness, while questioning the boundaries between the two. He emphasizes the need to acknowledge that “otherness is not simply

“out there” but is produced by the same operations that constitute what is familiar”

(Attridge, 2004a, p. 19). Thus, with regards to encountering literature with an openness to alterity, Attridge argues:

It [the other] arises from the intimate recesses of the cultural web that constitutes subjectivity, which is to say it arises as much from within the subject as from outside it and in so doing blurs the distinction between that which is “inside” and that which is “outside” the self. (p. 67)

Attridge further explains that the experience of intimacy when reading a literary work is actually an experience of alterity, an inner alterity. This inner alterity represents hidden aspects of otherness in the reader’s idioculture that the reader may not be aware of.

Allegorical reading. Attridge (2004b) discusses two modes of reading, allegorical and literal reading. Allegorical reading “attaches ideas to the images and events it encounters in the text” (p. 36). In allegorical reading, events in the literary work are understood as standing for more generalized events (p. 42). The danger of allegorical reading, Attridge explains, is “moving too quickly beyond the novel to find its

significance elsewhere” and thus “treating it not as an inventive literary work drawing us into unfamiliar emotional and cognitive territory but as a reminder of what we already know only too well” (p. 43). By moving to parallels outside the world of the book, allegorical reading tend to ignore the rich and contingent details of the text (p. 48).

Attridge differentiates between reading allegory and reading literature. For Attridge

(2004b), allegory “deals with the already known, whereas literature opens a space for the other. Allegory announces a moral code, literature invites an ethical response” (p. 64).

Literal reading, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the event of reading as an event. In contrast to allegorical reading, Attridge (2004b) discusses literal reading is an event in which the reader lives the text that s/he reads. Through the concept of literal reading,

Attridge (2004b) invites us to restrain “the urge to leave the text behind” (p. 64).

Openness to change. Creative reading, with the goal of doing justice to the alterity and singularity of the literary work, perceives the text not as a static object

“transcending time, permanently available for our inspection” (Attridge, 2004, p. 59), but rather an event that is not separable from the creative acts that brought it into being or the historical moment in which it is read. For Attridge (2004), that means allowing all aspects of the text to inform this creative reading; “the author’s intentions, or facts of his or her biography, or our own beliefs as readers, or the quality of the paper on which the text is printed” (p. 81). On the other hand, Attridge asserts, creative reading is not dictated by the text or a result of the context, but actually a response to both text and context. Attridge states:

To read creatively in an attempt to respond fully and responsibly to the alterity and singularity of the text is to work against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering what is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in this particular work.

It involves a suspension of habits, a willingness to rethink old positions in order to apprehend the work’s inaugural power. (p. 80)

In this act-event of creative reading, the reader is responsive for the alterity of the literary work in every possible way. In encountering the work’s alterity, the reader is willing to be changed by the work’s power.

Additionally, as Attridge (2004) explains, an important aspect of this openness is the reader’s readiness to reshape conventional norms of language to attend to the singularity of the other. Not only the reader is open to reshape the language, but also he or she is open to change the way of thinking. Attridge emphasizes:

In its encounter with the other, an encounter in which existing modes of thought and evaluation falter, creative reading allows the work to take the mind (understood in the broadest sense) to the borders of its accustomed terrain. (p. 80)

Being open to the literary work that takes the mind to its borders, the reader allows the alterity of the literary work to challenge the way the reader thinks, to disturb “the being at home with oneself” (Levinas, 1979, p. 39). This openness to change underscores a pedagogical relationship between the reader and text in creative reading. This openness also means, as Attridge emphasizes, that there is no single correct reading to a literary work as much as there is no single correct artistic response to the world. Furthermore,

Attridge (2004) argues, the very impossibility of a wholly responsive reading is what allows responsive reading.

To conclude, Attridge envisions the responsible, ethical, creative act-event of reading as an encounter with alterity in the literary work—the author and the self. This act-event of reading is characterized by a total openness to the text and its context, as well as a willingness to learn and change while suspending all assumptions and knowledge about conventions of the word and the world. It is also a constant act of

creation and a journey that never reaches a final destination, or, in Levinas’s words, “a departure without return” (Levinas, 1986).

Literacy of the Other: Aparna Mishra Tarc

In her book Literacy of the Other, Tarc (2015) examines the representation of literacy in literary texts exploring “the inner life of literacy in fictional conceptions of human life” (p. 4). Leaving behind the instrumental conception of literacy and “its naturalized association with English learning” (p. 5), Tarc highlights the link between language and existence and emphasizes how one’s relationship with language impacts one’s life (p. 3). Additionally, she utilizes Levinas’s concept of being for the other, and the role of language in the ethical orientation toward the other, to explore literacy as other-oriented and fictive experience. Through her book, she offers “a radical understanding of literacy as key to one’s capacity to form, narrate and renew their personhood across a lifetime of becoming someone” (p. 122). Through understanding of literacy as for-the-other, of-the-other, she highlights the importance of literacy in opening the door for us to encounter the other, be changed by the other, narrate ourselves to other, renew ourselves through our encounter with the other. Echoing Levinas in Totality and

Infinity, she writes: “This is the only way to do justice to the Other: to read, reread, and respond to her infinitely” (p. 132).

Maternal literacy. Tarc’s investigation of literacy traces the development of literacy as a social construction. In her discussion of Klein’s theory, she investigates reading as the initiation of the child’s entrance to the patriarchal society which is characterized by negation of maternal roles in language and literacy development. In her discussion of Burroughs’s classic novel Tarzan of the Apes, she exposes the power of

English literacy to transform Tarzan/child from savage/illiterate to human/literate through 79

the killing of Tarzan’s Ape mother and the denial of the ape/mother’s language. Tarc

(2015) reorients literacy toward its maternal beginning (p. 73) and opens a new space for a possible and wholesome conceptualization of literacy.

Reading as transference. Tarc (2015) analyzes the depiction of literacy in the chapter The Problem of Evil in Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello. She discusses reading as transference, which she defines as “one’s experience of intense feelings aroused by a person or event” (p. 80). To explain the effect reading as transference can have on the reader, Tarc states:

Caught in the words of the others are difficult memories of our self. Sometimes readings bring rupture and we are transformed by the other’s sublime capacity to move. Other times, reading arrives in the form of deep existential trouble in our self and with others that we might rather forget. Operating through transference, when reading, our thought is never our own. (p. 79)

Thus difficult reading may tear the fabric of our self and uncover buried difficult memories or feelings that we no longer know they exist. Reading as transference awakens the other within us. Thus, we owe our thoughts to the other.

In her explanation of literacy depicted as transference, Tarc encourages readers to encounter difficult and unsettling texts, and praises Coetzee’s “naked inside view” of reading which unsettles the reader’s beliefs about reading. She continues: “From the novel we are left wondering what is this thing reading? And how, in its ordinary and formal sense, reading makes and remakes one’s thinking and acting in the world” (p. 93).

In this sense, the experience of reading a difficult text invites us to rethink our understanding of the process of reading and its effects on our lives.

Stuck reading. Tarc (2015) further examines how literary works “silently tap into our innermost emotional selves” (p. 54) as the other’s words release “our tightly

contained desires and wishes” (p. 41) and unearth the other within us. She explores what she calls “stuck reading,” in which a reader gets caught in the words of the other as the literary work exposes concealed ruptures within the self that the reader cannot bear to admit. She writes:

An experience in reading can leave us shaking from the outside in. Some texts get under our skin and find their way to the fragile raw material of carefully concealed self. Novels can provoke from us intense gut reactions and irrational emotional outbursts. Some content presses our buttons. We shut the book vowing never to return. We are left at loss. How did we let a mere book get to us? Why did we not flee when we still had a chance? (p. 81)

Getting stuck in a difficult reading, the reader may re-find a self that has been left behind, which can lead to change, as Tarc explains, “The other’s language shelters our strange feelings and thoughts. The other’s words leave us open to question, to exposing our inside, to making new thoughts of our self” (p. 118). As an encounter with the other, reading questions us, challenges us, and lead us to discover, what Attridge called earlier, the “inner alterity” within ourselves. Stuck reading is a difficult experience, since it does not leave us at home with ourselves—in Levinas’s words. Causing our emotions to erupt, stuck reading leaves us at loss facing an inner other, questions us and challenge us to change.

Literacy as a pedagogical relationship. Tarc examines reading as a pedagogical relationship with the Other. She explains that through reading literature, the reader makes meaning of his/her life through the words of the Other.

When reading, we can temporarily ruin and renew a sense of ourselves in thoughts of each other. Author and reader are affected by an intense correspondence in mind where two strangers, without speaking to each other, intimately communicate, teach, and learn and make meaning. The exchange of meaning generated by the novel can produce a profound form of literary pedagogy. (p. 39)

Other-oriented reading does not read the novel as an object, but as an Other who teaches.

Literacy as healing. Exploring Morrison’s novel Beloved, Tarc (2015) envisions literacy’s power of healing and reclaiming humanity: “Literacy can make us suffer and regress; it also can help us to repair and grow” (p. 99). Tarc follows Morrison’s depiction of instrumental literacy pedagogy in the school master’s cruel dehumanization of Sethe and the other slaves, and exposes this instrumental literacy “as enacting the most violating aspects of Western symbolic logic” (p. 100). Tarc’s discussion aspires to freeing the reader’s mind from such an instrumental perception of literacy and engendering an “other-oriented literacy” to address dehumanizing forms of language (p.

105), and embracing the uncertainties of learning.

The conceptualization of ethical reading of Attridge, and Tarc informs my understanding of an ethical engagement with literature.

Chapter 4: Methods

The purpose of this study is to understand how U.S. college students in Foreign

Language literature courses encounter alterity when studying modern literary Arabic texts. Specifically, I examine how the political, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which students engage modern literary Arabic texts shape their reading. The study embraces an ethnographic methodology. Hall (2015) explains the need for classroom ethnographic studies of literature in FL education. He emphasizes that “the strength of ethnographic work is to take nothing for granted in investigating participants’ construction of meaning together in specific interactions” (p. 262). Thus, the exploratory nature of ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) allows me investigate what is at play in the process of construction of meaning within collegiate-level AFL literature. It enables me to study a community of readers, learn more about the culture of textual engagement within the academic institution, investigate the potentiality of an ethical engagement with literature, in addition to exploring participants’ experiences as readers.

The study also fulfills a recognized need for empirical research in the field of FL literature education in general (Miall, 2006; Paran, 2008) and AFL literature education in a particular.

Research Questions

This study aims to explore how engagement with alterity in literature informs an understanding of ethical reading?

To investigate this question, the study will examine the following sub-questions:

• How do students in foreign language literature courses encounter alterity when studying modern literary Arabic texts?

• How do students in foreign language literature courses construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern literary Arabic texts?

• How does the political, historical, geographical, and cultural context in which students encounter modern literary Arabic texts shape their reading?

Research Epistemology

The ethical turn in anthropology and ethnographic methods lead to the emergence of new lines of inquiry informed by philosophical scholarship and among them philosophical phenomenology (Mattingly & Throop, 2018). Although the field of anthropology and ethnographic studies has been historically characterized by its long- standing engagement with ethics, as Mattingly and Throop (2018) explain, the ethical turn have been mainly focused on representation. Levinas’s contribution to ethnographic research methodology is getting more attention recently. In the following section I will summarize how Levinas’s ethics have been used in to inform anthropology and ethnographic research methods in two major moments: the moment of field work, and the moment of writing and representation.

Writing the Ethnographic Text

The ethics of “being wrong.” The current ethical turn in ethnographic research has been mainly focused on representation, as Benson and O’Neill (2007) assert. In line with this focus, Handelman (2016) uses Levinasian ethics to theorize for ethical writing of literature. Handelman explains how ethnographic studies is a field of scholarship that seeks an unmediated contact with the other in a face-to-face relationship. Handelman asserts that unlike other fields of academic research which deal with texts, ethnography deals with the other face-to-face and as part of a living community, “How the ethnographer perceives otherness is formed interactively through the practice of relationships that subject each to the other” (p. 46). On the other hand, Handelman 84

discusses the moment of writing which proposes a paradox he calls the “paradox of presence and absence of otherness in anthropology.” In such paradox, the other is present in the field, then turns to an object through the process of the writing the ethnographic text. Adopting Levinasian ethics, Handelman suggests that ethnographic work should be informed by “an ethic of being wrong” (p. 46). He explains that it is the responsibility of the researcher to be wrong, and to resist considering oneself right, which leads to the objectification of participants. Handelman follows Levinas’s differentiation between the saying and the said:

Saying leaves an accessible remainder of itself, of its doing, which is the “said.” Yet this is only a remainder and so is always representaiton, armored ontologically, normatively, morally, textually. Thus, saying is made subordinate to its own remainder, the said. (p. 49)

While the researcher can approach the said with the goal of getting it right, the said is only a trace, the said is “frozen as a leftover of practice of the bodies that are its origination” (p. 49). Thus, what the research may get right is actually “representations, left in the wake of the dynamics of doing that includes Levinas’s saying” (Handelman,

2016, p. 49). Handelman explains that even if the researcher got the “said” right, “this is hardly more than grains of sand caught in the fuildity of a sea current” (p. 49).

Capturing the trace of the saying, the ethnographer is hardly right.

Handelman criticizes notions of reflexivity embedded in academia, in which

“ethics is what matters to the profession and to institutions, yet not to the other” (p. 50), and asserts that they reflect “radical positivism” in their demand of the researcher to be right about the other and otherness. Emphasizing that the researcher may continue to be wrong, Handelman explains:

Being wrong is not against being right and discovering truth. Being wrong is about the pursuit of qualities of otherness by selfness made doubtful, softened, uncertain, and through this, valuing otherness above selfness, selfness as a multiplicity of perspectives even while wondering about the return to hardened edges of knowledge and certainty in the world of institutions and discipline. (p. 50)

The researcher needs to maintain the uncertainty in any claims s/he presents. By doing so, the researcher rspects the singularity of the other and the impossibilty to completely comprehind the other. Handelman emphasizes that the ethnographer must put the other before themselves, learn from the others while the others are living their own life and “in doing so he [the researcher] can only be surprised, be unsettled, make mistakes and be wrong” (p. 57). Handelman argues that being wrong in the field is the ethical response to the other and otherness because “it acknowledges their precedence over the anthropological self, and because being wrong responds to their demand that the anthropologist cannot know in its depths, that is, from within itself” (p. 57). As

Handelman emphasizes, the possibility of being wrong acknowledges the inability of the researcher to completely comprehend the complexity of otherness.

Mattingly and Throop (2018) explain the role of Levinasian ethics in the ethical turn in ethnography and emphasize that confronting the other in ethnography “may evoke in us disquiet, bewilderment, uncertainty, and confusion” (p. 483), which, as they explain, is the existential foundation of ethics in Levinas’s view.

Harries (2014) shifts the question from representation to a question of voice and discusses ethnographic writing as troubled by the voice of the other. Harries criticizes the univocal monologue nature of traditions of ethnographic writing (p. 47), which is dominated by the researcher as the privileged narrator, and sees such narration as an

authoritative totality that only allows difference to exist if it can be assimilated into the interpretation.

On the other hand, ethnographic writing through its novelistic account and affective quality, allows readers to emotionally and imaginatively live through these stories, feel closer to the other, encounter the other though ethnographic writing.

Ethnographic writing is not merely descriptions and the stories told in writing as simply evidence to support researchers’ conclusions. Rather, as Harries suggests, ethnographic writing allows the space and possibility for the other “whose voice both speaks our interpretations and yet undeoes them even in the speaking” (p. 48). Harries explains that as ethnographic writing fails to write the voice of the other, it is haunted by the echo of that voice, and in its inadequacy ethnographic writing “constitutes the space of difference” (p. 50).

Harries emphasizes the need to acknowledge that ethnographic writing is an interpretive fiction. He asserts that when choosing certain stories to share in ethnographic writing, researchers choose stories that supports their claims. Deciding the significance of the story, happens after the story was lived during field work, thus it represents a reading of the fieldwork, an interpretation that is situated in a specific moment. Thus, Ethnographic writing is inhabited by interpretation of what researchers think had happened, an interpretive story. Consequently, Harries encourages using more quotation marks of the other’s language which allows readers of the ethnographic text the space to read something different than the researcher. Sharing participants’ own words, makes space for other potential interpretations to exist, “allowing for a polphony and

perspectival relativiety which troubles our interpretation even as we write them into being” (p. 49).

Engaging with the problem of representation, Rapport (2019) suggests that ethnographic writing becomes novelistic. He asserts that alongside Levinas’s emphasize on the incomprehensibility of the other is his humanism. Thus, Rapport suggests to do

“creative justice” to the uniqueness of the individuality and to do “systematic justice” to the commonality of humanity. He explains that while ethnographic writing about the individual is imaginative, ethnographic writing about human nature is systematic.

Doing Ethnographic Fieldwork

Being “Marked by the Other”

In their article, “Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics,” Benson and

O’Neill (2007) envision “an ethically informed ethnography” by focusing on Levinasian ethics in doing field work, and emphasize that “Face-to-face encounters make ethnography an inherently ‘open’ method, improvisational and potentially transformative of the structured design or set of questions that guide research from the outset” (p. 37).

They explain how debates of the ethical turn in ethnography is focused on representation, and that in their opinion reconfirms the authority of the researcher “as a subject capable of transcending the fieldwork context, orchestrating the chaos and uncertainty of how fieldwork flows, and organizing a synthetic and reflexive account of small-case others”

(p. 42). Focusing on representation only sustains the sovereignty of the researcher as the producer of knowledge. Benson and O’Neill propose to focus on the fluidity spontaneity of fieldwork. By emphasizing ethics in the realm of fieldwork, Benson and O’Neill seek to interrogate the field as a “power-laden” space and envision ethnography as “a deconstructive basis upon which encounters with others dynamically inform the patterns 88

of life and values that define the researcher” (p. 31). Hence, as they further explain, “the researcher’s self is “marked” through encounters with other people, their diverse experiences, value orientations, political positions, and forms of knowledge” (p. 31).

The purpose of ethnography thus is not to realize an accurate representation.

Rather, as Benson and O’Neill argue, “ethnography’s ethical possibilities are actualized when ethnographers change. That is when they change not simply for the self and its interests, but rather for the sake of new kinds of collective affiliations across interpersonal and intercultural boundaries” (p. 31). Following Veena Das (1998), Benson and O’Neill discuss anthropology’s love “as openness to being marked by the other’s knowledge and experience” (p. 38). Benson and O’Neill assert that “although in essence an impossible ideal, Levinasian ethics can usefully inform ethnography’s ethical possibilities insofar as it fosters irritation and an affirmation of unexpected and contingent encounters that emerge within the ongoing flow of fieldwork” (p. 48). Benson and O’Neill recognize the impossibility of putting Levinasian ethics into the practice of field work, yet they emphasize its importance especially in the fieldwork, where the researcher’s knowledge and self is challenged and unsettled by the encounter with the other. Consequently, the researcher’s reflection on the journey of transformation through the encounter with the other, is what constitutes the ethnographic writing, not the documentation or representation of the other’s experience.

Similar to the idea of being marked by the other in the field of ethnography,

Rapport (2019) discusses Levinas’s account of inspiration as an ethical relation with otherness and uses the term “being inspired by the other.”

Doing “Ethnography with” the other. Similarly, Rasanayagam (2018) uses

Levinas’s ethics to propose an “ethnography with” instead of an “ethnography of” the other. Rasanayagam emphasizes Levinas’s notion of knowledge as founded in a relationship and a conversation between the self and the other, in which the alterity of the other is respected and maintained. Rasanayagam explains how in Levinas’s ethics

“knowing as an ethical and critical endeavor” is only possible thorough conversation with alterity (p. 94). He states, “Truth is produced in a conversation with the other where alterity is not overcome or neutralized, nor does alterity present a barrier preventing engagement, but rather the conversation with alterity is the productive source of self- critique” (p. 95). In light of Levinas’s thought, Rasanayagam identifies an ethical mode of knowing with the other. He writes, “In Levinas’s analytic it is precisely the conversation with alterity that enables me to exceed my self” (p. 98). Doing ethnography with the other, the researcher’s knowledge is transformed in conversation with the other.

This decenters the researcher as a producer of knowledge, then re- centers the researcher again as the manifestation of the production of knowledge in relation with otherness. The research is still the instrument of ethnography. Yet, not the instrument that produces knowledge, but the instrument through which the knowledge that was produced in conversation and interaction reveals itself.

How Levinas’s Ethics Informs My Study

Acknowledging the impossibility of Levinas’s ethics, I choose to embrace them as the research epistemology for my study. I start by acknowledging my subjectivity throughout the process of data collection and data analysis by writing constant reflections on my pedagogical and ideological stances and my developing ideas. In an effort to foster a subject-subject relation, my study focuses on the dialogic encounter between 90

subjects. I adopt dialogue as the core component of my data collection in audiotaped focus group and individual interviews, and class discussion. Even students’ written journals, turned to a space for virtual conversation as I ask questions in response to their reflections, and while not required to, they mostly go back and respond to my questions, or address them in our next face-toface conversations. While this meant having to do a huge amount of transcriptions, I feel that this allows me to listen more to participants voice, literary and methodologically. Participants voice echos in my ears in every decision I make as a teacher and a researcher.

In doing ethnography with students, I face the challenge to undermine my own sovereignty and primacy as a producer of knowledge, and reinstate myself, the researcher, as a learner who seeks to know in conversation with participants. This is not easy in a foreign language reading context where participants need help from me as a teacher, a native speaker of Arabic, in both Arabic language and culture. The challenge is to provide linguistic support or fill in contextual information while allowing students to create their own meaning, which I addressed by taking a reader’s stance embracing multiplicity of meaning, open to and excited about different readings. Yet, this represents a continuous challenge of how much to intervene without reducing the space for students’ interpretations to interact with each other and with mine as readers. The design of class activities also attempts to respond to this challenge. For example, students and me collaboratively worked on a google document providing linguistic information about each reading. Additionally, each class two students are responsible for researching and providing cultural background of the text we are reading. The goal of these activities was

to allow for a collaborative way of exchanging and providing information, decentering myself and giving more space for students.

Throughout the fieldwork almost daily encounters, I was constantly challenged as a researcher, a teacher and a reader. For example, I started thinking about this research believing that the lack of cultural background on the part of foreign language readers will result in distorting and misunderstanding the literary works. Through interacting with participants as a reader, I witnessed how my understanding of the literary works evolved through my discussion with each group. I experienced how each reader brought to the text a unique experience or perspective that illuminated parts of the texts unnoticed by other readers. Participants’ readings and interpretations made me look at literary works completely differently.

Writing data analysis and discussion sections has been the most challenging part of this study. As I understood my writing is not a representation of participants’ experiences, every time I sat to write it felt like reducing my students and our experience.

While I enjoyed spending my time transcribing interviews, working with the data, writing my analysis did not seem right. My initial attempts of writing my ethnographic report felt like reducing the richness of the data, and I had to acknowledge the impossibility of the ethical burden of doing justice to my participants’ experiences. In my initial attempt to write, I wanted to create a quilt of students’ experiences by patching together their dialogue, comments and written reflection. In my creation of such quilt I avoided to comment or theorize. The act of theorizing data felt like an act of violence. I wanted to only have students’ voices in my writing. Yet, reflecting on my avoidance I realized that the way I arrange participants’ voices is rooted on my unsaid interpretation of the quilt I

am creating. Furthermore, every time I tried to report what happened, I found everything entangled, and it was difficult to find a way to portray the complexity of actions and relations without dissecting them into simpler units for the sake of writing. Once I started to do that, I saw my writing as a severed deformed image that does not reflect what I have experienced as a teacher and as a researcher during the study. Eventually I had to embrace my failure, and admit that despite my reservations I have a story to tell about this experience. As all stories, it is far from complete, or representative. As all narratives, it is an act of violence and marginalization. It is my story, reflecting on the journey I went through, and my limited understanding of my students’ experiences and my own experience. The meaning I make of this journey has to do with my own history as a reader, a researcher, and a teacher. As I wrote, I tried to give more space to participants voices and offer readers of this research an opportunity to encounter participants and their readings. As I read the data, I strived for an open, responsible, ethical and creative reading like the one my course attempted to promote. I understand that the moments I lived in the field reading and discussing with participants were organic moments that I cannot freeze into a picture. My writing of this dissertation is a constant search for possibilities of responding to alterity when writing my ethnographic text.

Research Design

Research Methods

I use participant ethnography to explore how students in U.S. modern Arabic literature collegiate classroom encounter alterity as they read Arabic literature. In participant ethnography the researcher plays an established participant role in the scene studied (Aktinson & Hammersley, 1998). In this study, I played the role of the teacher of 93

the class that I was observing. This study takes place in a contemporary Arabic literature class at U.S. University in the Washington, DC area in which I was the designer of the course and the teacher. In addition to participant observation of class activities and discussions and weekly walk in meetings in my office to talk about the readings, I interviewed all students, as well as conducted analysis of students’ written work.

Participants. The participants of the study are U.S. collegiate-level Arabic literature students. Focusing on one class which constitutes a single group facilitates an in-depth study (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). As most Arabic literature classes, this class had a small number of students, only nine students. The body of students at AFL literature class usually includes students who studied Arabic as a foreign language, as well as heritage learners who live at the U.S. but speak some amount of Arabic at home.

Initially, twelve students enrolled in the class. After the first week four students dropped the class due to the difficulty of the reading. Then one more student joined the class late to make the total number of students in the class nine. As most Arabic literature classes, students in class had diverse backgrounds. Four of the students were heritage learners, five were FL learner of Arabic. Heritage learners refer to language students who are

“raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken” and who are “to some degree bilingual in that language and n English” (Valdés, 1999, p. 38). Of the five FL learners, three studied abroad in the Middle East, and two never studied abroad in the Middle East.

Consequently, students’ linguistic proficiency and exposure to Arabic culture varied significantly. Their experiences of reading literature in their native language or in foreign language also varied significantly.

Recruitment

Recruitment for the study happened on the first day of classes. I explained the study to students, gave them consent forms, and explained how their participation is not only voluntary but also the amount of participation is up to them. I gave students options to choose from with different levels of participation. I also explained how they can opt out of the study, while continue to fully participate in the class. I explained how their data can be excluded from the study. While all students agreed to participate in the study, their levels of participation varied. All students agreed to be recorded in class discussions, for their classwork to be analyzed as part of the study. While all students agreed to be interviewed at least once, only six of the nine students agreed to complete three interviews protocol. Outside of class group discussions were open opportunities for students to discuss their reflections on the texts and the class, and students used them as they needed, so the participation in these meeting varied.

Site

The data for this study are collected at a university in the Washington DC region that offers Arabic as a major. As is the case in most FL departments, Arabic literature is taught during the third and fourth years of study when students are assumed to have gained the language proficiency that allows them to engage with literary texts. The study takes place in a contemporary Arabic literature class. The course was offered as an elective to upper-level Arabic students who finished Advanced Arabic class. For some students it was their first content class in Arabic while others took previous content classes. To encourage students to take the course, it counted towards their Arabic minor and major.

Data Collection

The study focused on a one-semester AFL-literature class. Data included audio- recordings of class discussions, researchers’ memos after classes and meetings with students, in-depth interviews of students, out-of-class individual and group discussions about the readings, and students’ written work.

Audio-recordings of class sessions. Recording all class sessions, I focused on significant moments of class discussions in which negotiation of meaning happened, or other moments when students articulate their individual understanding or share their reaction to the literary work. I focused on moments during class discussion that were soliciting an encounter with alterity.

In-depth interviews. I conducted three sets of semi-structured interviews

(Seidman, 2013) with participants who volunteered for interviewing during recruitment period. While all participants in the study were interviewed at least once at the end of the class to reflect on their experience, six of the nine students participated in the three- interview protocol. Each interview lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. On the first interview I focused on participants’ life history, and how they came to be students of

Arabic, and their relationship with literature. In the second interview my questions focused on their experience of alterity within the context of studying and reading Arabic literature. In the third interview I focused on their reflection on their experience of studying and reading Arabic literature throughout the semester. The interviews were semi-structured with open ended and conversational questions. I used follow-up prompts and probes to encourage thick, rich descriptions from participants. All interviews were conducted in English and transcribed.

Students’ work. As part of their class activities, students were required to write online reflective journals on each reading, except when students were presenting the reading, in which case they wrote a post-class reflection in which the summarize the arguments in class discussion. Students wrote three response papers about three works of their choice in Arabic. Students prepared a final project in which they creatively responded to one literary work they read throughout the semester. Additionally, they wrote a final reflective essay in which they reflected on their experiences as readers throughout the course. Students’ work gave me access to their engagement with the literary work at a level different than the group discussion. In their work, students had more time to write and articulate their ideas in writing with less audience for their written work than the class discussion. Finally, at the very end of the semester, I asked students to voluntarily complete a quick survey to reflect on course objectives.

I believe these different sources of data provide opportunities for triangulation in order to reach in-depth understanding.

Data Organization

Participants’ discussions and interviews were audio-recorded (digitally) during class sessions and transcribed by the researcher. Despite the huge amount of transcriptions, this intense engagement with data allow the voice of participants to guide every stage of the study. To protect participants’ confidentiality, I used pseudo names for all participants in my filed notes and transcribed interviews.

I stored data on my password protected computer and shreded any data on paper.

In addition to me, the committee members had access to the data. In my results and discussion sections of the dissertation, I use some de-identified quotes from the interviews, students written work, or field notes. 97

Data Analysis

During data collection, I wrote research memos after each class session documenting my emerging ideas about and questions for the data. As Goldbart and

Hustler (2009) emphasize, “data gathering and data analysis are interrelated and ongoing throughout most ethnographic research” (p. 18). In the following section, I explain the process of data analysis.

I approached the data from three angles. First, I utilized a combination of coding methods to approach the data. I used Elemental coding methods, specifically Initial,

Structural, Descriptive, Process and In Vivo codes. Through Initial coding, I read through the data line-by-line and paid attention to the nuances of the data and reflected on them. I used Structural coding to categorize the data corpus, and Descriptive coding to label different topics in the data. Since this is a classroom ethnography focusing on acts of reading, it is important to use Process coding to capture the dynamics of literacy events. Using codes inspired by participants’ language in In Vivo coding also helped me give voice to participants, and stay attuned to their unique circumstances. I used Focus

Coding to examine frequent or significant codes and develop salient categories and Axial

Coding to reorganize the data set and assemble data in hierarchal categorization and subcategories (Saldaña, 2013). During this first round, I immersed myself in the data and examined significant themes that emerged from within the data.

Second, I reread the data alongside the theoretical framework and wrote my notes on how the theoretical framework helped me make sense of the data. This step helped me read the data with my theoretical perspective that allowed me to ask unique questions to the data. The multiple layers in the theoretical framework made a space for me to read the data several times in multiple ways. I explored possibilities for creative (Attridge, 98

2004a) and other-oriented reading (Tarc, 2015) by examining the reading acts-events in the classroom. I explored the ethical philosophical understanding of the other versus the anthropological understanding of the other in students’ interactions with the texts and with each other. I investigated the pedagogical encounter as an ethical encounter and observed the formation of the class as a community.

Finally, I reread data through the perspective of research questions. I divided my analysis into two sections. In the first section (chapter 6), I examined the possibilities of encountering alterity through reading events. I focused on three texts one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end of the course for the analysis to take into account the progression of the course and give a more holistic picture of reading. In the second section (chapter 7), I examined students’ final reflections and final interviews to investigate how they reflected on their experiences and their own understanding of reading and alterity.

Memos

I kept a reflective field log in which I wrote my ongoing thoughts as I conduct my field work. In addition, I wrote analytical memos in which I reflected on patterns I saw concurring the data, and recorded hunches and new questions that emerged from my field work.

Ethical Considerations

There are several ethical considerations that I needed to take into account conducting this research. To protect confidentiality of participants, I used Initials in data collection and field notes, which were transformed into pseudo names when writing the dissertation. Overall, ethical care was taken when handling students written work, like storing students work with other data in a password protected computer. Since students’ 99

written work is considered private documents shared with the teacher, and upon which students’ grades are contingent, it was very important that I used it carefully. When conducting interviews with students I did my best to take into consideration issues of power, being a teacher and a native speaker.

Statement of subjectivity. My selection of Arabic as a Foreign Language classroom as a context of my research is impacted by my 17 years of experience teaching

Arabic to non-native speakers at the collegiate level which have shaped my research interests. The daily interaction with my students continues to raise pedagogical and theoretical questions motivating me to search for answers. As a teacher, I believe in the value of literature in the FL classroom for different proficiency levels. However, through my experience I realize how the literary work represents a challenge as well as an opportunity for both the teacher and the students. While course objectives, pedagogical orientations and methodology may differ from one literature class to another; teachers and students alike continue to face these challenges of dealing with Arabic as foreign language literature in U.S. universities. Students encounter Arabic literary language, which is similar to the Arabic they studied in their first two years, yet remarkably different. Additionally, they encounter a text written for readers of a different cultural, social, political, and historical context. My focus on the encounter of alterity in literature is rooted in my life-long passion for literature and my belief in its power to transform the reader. My study of Arabic literature as an undergraduate deepened my conviction that the literary experience is a learning experience that brings the other in the realm of the self. In addition, my experience of being othered, silenced, and marginalized both within my native context and in the diaspora has motivated me to explore notions of alterity,

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starting with anthological notions until I found my way to philosophical understanding of alterity, which shaped my understanding of myself and the world.

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Chapter 5: Course Design and Participants

In this chapter I will describe the course I designed based on the theoretical framework of the study. I will also describe each participant’s background based on the interviews I conducted with them.

Course Design

I created the course “Readings in Contemporary Arabic Literature” as a site to collect data for this study. In this section, I discuss how I designed the course with the goal of providing a space for encountering alterity and an atmosphere that nurtures a creative ethical and responsible reading of literature.

Readings

The course is organized around two principles: literary genres and geographical coverage. The plan for the course was to read different genres of Arabic literature starting with the study of a novel, followed by short stories, poetry, flash fiction, and finally play. This organization and sequence were built on two pilot studies in which I observed a literature class and a book club at the university level, and examined how students interacted with different genres. The order of genres I presented was meant to be gradually increasing in difficulty. Based on my pilot studies and my experience as a teacher, my hypothesis was that the novel offers more context to students and provide opportunities for students to develop their reading skills. Short stories lack the larger context that the novel provides, but they are still prose. Thus, they represent a middle difficulty as a genre. Poetry was more challenging for most readers in my pilot studies because of its figurative language. Therefore, I decided to read poetry last. I finished the semester with a play for students to read and watch. The play represents a different type

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of difficulty, being performed and written in a dialect. Yet, it was a ceremonial way to end the course by reading and watching the literary work acted to a live audience. The other goal for the course was to read literary works from different countries of the Arab world, to counter the regional bias that Ben Amor (2017) described in Arabic literature courses in the U.S. I made sure to include literary and culturally acclaimed works from different Geographical regions of the Arab world including: Kuwait and Iraq representing the Gulf region, Yemen and Saudi representing the Arab peninsula, Syria, Palestine, and

Lebanon representing the Levant region, and Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco representing North Africa.

To select novels for the literary syllabus, I provided a list of 12 novels for students to vote on. The criteria I used to choose the twelve novels include: appropriate length of the literary work (between one hundred and two hundred pages), moderate difficulty of language; widely and critically acclamation in the Arab World, and range of Arab regions and subcultures. The selection list included my summary of each novel and a brief biography of the authors in English. For the other genres like short stories, poetry, and play, I did not provide summaries of the works. I only provided a list of author names, and their biographies for students to choose from. Before the beginning of the course, students voted online to choose course materials. The course materials started with a novel that we read over four weeks, then multiple short stories for 5 weeks, poems for three weeks, and one play which we read and watched for two weeks.

Course Activities

The class met twice a week. Prior to each class session, students read the assigned literary texts, wrote their reflections on the text in English and shared them with me as Google Documents. In their reflections, students drafted their ideas about the texts 103

as they read to prepare for class discussion. They discussed their emergent understanding of the texts, and reflected on meanings and the feelings the text evoked in them. I asked students to collaborate on building the vocabulary list for each text by contributing to a

Google Document any words they look up as they read. The list was an ongoing process that we all cooperated to build, and it included meaning in English, and a space for comments in which I added cultural explanations when needed.

The course's pedagogy was grounded in knowledge developed in conversation.

My dialogical pedagogy reflects my understanding of reading as a dialogue staged between text and reader that can facilitate a dialogue between worlds and times, and further fostered and mediated through classroom conversation. Hence, classroom discussion was very central to the design of the course as it allowed the space for dialogue between readers. Students took turns leading class discussions. Every class session there were two leaders who cooperated together to lead the discussion on that day. Discussion leaders prepared an eight-minute-presentation in Arabic: four minutes on the literary work’s context—for example, time and place of publication, surrounding political and cultural events, the biography of the author, and the perception of the author within their own culture—and four minutes summarizing the main characters, themes, and plot elements of the literary work. In class, students cooperated to conduct the small group and whole class discussions in an atmosphere of mutual respect, allowing all students in the class the opportunity to engage in the discussion.

After each class session, the discussion leaders wrote a summary report discussing how the class discussion unfolded and relevant comments or questions that were raised, they then shared the report with their classmates on an online platform (Blackboard)

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discussion board. During the class, my role as a teacher was to join the group discussions as a reader and bring the class together to share their ideas in a whole class discussion at the end of the class period.

Students chose a number of texts for which they wrote response papers in Arabic.

In these response papers, students explored issues they found compelling in the literary works. They provided their interpretation of the work and reflected on what the text taught them, what it changed in them, how it questioned them, and challenged them to think differently.

For their final project, students chose one of the texts they studied during the semester and creatively responded to it, illuminating different aspects of the work and inviting their audience to experience the literary work anew. Students produced pieces of art (For example, a poem, a movie, a painting) in response to the literary texts they read.

Two of the students decided to interview the authors of the texts. They arranged for skype interviews with the authors, where they moderated a discussion about the texts with authors and the whole class. One student wrote a poem in response to one of the poems we read. One student made a painting of a verse of a poem that intrigued her using a combination of Arabic calligraphy and painting. One student drew a series of drawings that represent different stages of love that emerged in her favorite poem. On the side of each drawing, the student wrote a section of the poem, and on top of that section a part of a verse from the Bible (Corinthians 13:4-7) in Arabic. One student created a video putting together pictures, videos, music and her own interpretation of one of the short stories we read. Another student created a video of pictures, music and her recitation of a poem. One student combined a video about the different seasons in nature

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with classical music, the poem she read in the course in Arabic weaved with another poem in English that had a similar topic. One student responded to the novel by creating a website in which he shared his interpretation of the novel while combining it with pictures and videos that illuminate his perspective. Through their artistic response to the literary texts in their final projects, each student provided an opportunity for other classmates to perceive the literary work from a different perspective and encounter it anew.

At the end of the semester, students wrote a final essay in which they reflected on how they evolved as readers throughout the course, the challenges they faced, how they responded to these challenges, what helped them the most in their reading experience, and what hindered their experience.

Learning Outcomes

The course had two sets of goals, the first set focusing on students’ linguistic production in the Arabic language, and the second focusing on concepts of creative and ethical reading. The following are the learning outcomes that I shared with students in the course Syllabus, one through four address linguistic concerns and five through seven address literary concerns:

This course aims to enhance students’ ability to read and interpret Arabic literary texts in the target language. As a result of completing this course, students will be able to:

1. Analyze Arabic literary texts in Arabic in verbal presentations, discussions in class and in written essays. 2. Summarize in writing and speaking their understanding of the main points of a literary work in Arabic. 3. Write an essay response to a literary work in Arabic. 4. Develop discussion and presentation skills in Arabic. 5. Responsively discuss Arabic literature with an openness to otherness and to • explore and discuss multiple interpretations of Arabic literary works;

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• learn through conversation with each other; and • practice appreciating values of disagreement and difference in an atmosphere of mutual respect. 6. Read Arabic literary texts creatively; • beyond their immediate communicative messages; • in diverse ways, embracing the multiplicity of meaning and understanding how both the literary work and its readings are products of a cultural and historical moment; and • bringing in one’s own singularity as a reader while being open to the text and its context and open to be changed by the text’s power. 7. Reflect on their experience and growth as readers and thinkers throughout the course as evidenced in the online reflective journal and final reflective essay.

Translanguaging

In designing course activities, I utilized translanguaging to promote deeper understanding of literary texts and allow students more space to express and exchange their ideas. Translanguaging is defined as, the “planned and systematic use of two languages for teaching and learning inside the same lesson” (Lewis, Jones, & Baker,

2012, p. 643). The use of Translanguaging allow students a deeper engagement with the materials. For learners, Baker (2011) explains, Translanguaging “is the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages” (p. 288).

While students read Arabic literary texts at home, they wrote their reflections in

English in preparation for class discussions which were conducted in both English and

Arabic. Students wrote the essays in Arabic and reflected on their development as readers throughout the course in English. As Baker (2011) explains, the value of this approach: “to read and discuss a topic in one language, and then to write about it in another language, means that the subject matter has to be processed and ‘digested’” (p.

289).

The back-and-forth movement between Arabic and English fostered a higher level

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of cognitive processing (Turnbull, 2019); allowed the space for all students to participate in class discussion regardless of their speaking proficiency level; cultivated a culture of inclusion within the class; and helped establishing a dialogic relationship between students. Students read the literary works in Arabic, but they reflected on it before coming to class in English. They also read background information about the author, the work, or its cultural background in English. Finally, they reflected on their experience at the end of the course in English.

My initial decision regarding the language of presentation and discussion in class was to be in Arabic in line with departmental expectations that Advanced classes are conducted in the target language. However, I had to change my decision based on my observation of how students’ speaking level hindered their participation and excluded some from the discussion. I also noticed several times that FL learners would seem very engaged in discussing the texts with peers in English before class began, but when we started the class, they became reluctant to participate in the discussion. In the third week of classes, I decided to allow students to mix Arabic and English in their discussions while the language of presentation remained Arabic.

Participants

The course was newly designed and added to the Arabic program as an elective.

On the first day of classes, there were thirteen students who elected to take the course.

After the first week of classes, five students decided to drop the class due to the difficulty of the reading and the amount of reading required for each class session. By the end of the second week, one more student joined the class, making the total number of students nine. Three of the students who enrolled in the class had just finished their first literature class in Arabic titled “Genres in Arabic literature.” For the other six students this was 108

their first Arabic literature class. In the following sections, I offer profiles of each student, using pseudonyms to preserve anonymity.

Rania

Rania was in the second semester of her third year as an undergraduate student majoring Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic when she started the class. Rania enrolled in International Baccalaureate in high school, where she studied Arabic as a second language. In college, she continued her Arabic studies where she was able to skip language classes, having taken them in high school. She instead started with content classes such as Media and literature. Rania was hired as an Arabic tutor by the Arabic program to help beginning students, and took her first Arabic literature class the semester before this course. She is first-generation Yemeni-American and spent the first year of her life in the US before traveling to Yemen. There she attended elementary school in an international school, studying Arabic and English before returning to America to continue her education.

Rania’s late grandfather was a famous Yemeni poet while her father studied in the

US, and was passionate about English literature. As a child, Rania remembers her grandfather would ask her to say random words and then help her to come up with a meaningful sentence or a sentence reflecting how she felt that day based off of the word she chose. They then sang it together. Rania experienced English literature mainly through school, especially while studying for her IB diploma, where she read classical literary works.

After the war started in Yemen, Rania and her family stopped visiting. Her extended family now lives in many countries in the West and the Middle East. Rania still connects with some members of her father’s extended family who live here in the U.S., 109

and also spends her summer visiting her extended family on her mother’s side, who live in Egypt and Jordan. One year after the course, Rania graduated with a double major in

Arabic and Middle East studies, and was accepted to an MA program at a prominent

European university.

Gwen

Like Rania, Gwen was in her third year studying Middle Eastern studies and

Arabic. Her mother was from the southern west coast and her father from the south east of the United States. Many people have asked Gwen why she decided major in Middle

Eastern Studies and Arabic, and Gwen says that she herself often wondered why. It was to her, no a focused interest or reason, but rather a collection of random moments throughout her life. She prominently remembers 9/11, having lived in New York City at the time. Being very young, Gwen couldn’t understand what happened but she was able to sense the fear in her mom’s response. Gwen specifically remembers, not 9/11 itself, but going up to the rooftop with her mother to see the burning buildings. She recalled when the Iraq War started and that she had begun asking questions about it; she knew at the time that it was beyond her understanding, “but it was too big to not ask about.”

In contrast to this, Gwen remembers studying ancient Middle East in middle school where she made a travel journal going around different ancient cities in the Middle

East for a school project. Gwen also mentioned having watched Prince of Egypt recently with one of her friends and realizing that exposure to Bible stories when she was young may have sparked her interest in the Middle East. Gwen would also watch crime shows in which they spoke Arabic, and remembered wanting to learn the language. She recalled the film Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the analyst who found Bin Laden, and how she had been “blown away by her exposure and her ability to learn so much more from 110

speaking Arabic.”

Gwen was exposed to Arabic language and culture very early on in life. Her hometown in south west had the largest Chaldean population in the country. She would often go to the Mexican-Iraqi market in the area and thinking it was cool. Going to the mall and food court in her city more recently, Gwen mentions noticing that the conversation to her left is Spanish and to the right is Arabic. Apart from that, she remembers that in third grade, her friend Jasmine's Lebanese mom came to school and wrote all the students’ names in Arabic on bookmarks. Gwen recalls being so mesmerized by how pretty, exciting and different it was. She also remembers her grandmother gave her A Thousand and One Arabian Nights when she was younger, which she read and loved. Among other influences from her grandmother, Gwen “grew to love folktales and museums.”

Between patriotic impulse of learning the enemy’s language, nostalgic feelings towards Bible stories happening in the Middle East, and explorative and imaginative travel tour in Ancient Middle East cities, Gwen experienced many different feelings towards the Middle East. Her feelings, she reflects, were not in conflict with each other, but more compartmentalized, “because the people that I'd feel aggressive towards aren't the same people and places that I'd feel nostalgic towards.”

When asked why she studies Arabic, Gwen responds that she was having fun.

She had at one point thought of her studying Arabic as a mission. Going into college,

Gwen planned to work in counterterrorism. However, as Gwen approached the end of her undergraduate studies, she believed this is no longer the case. Gwen rediscovered her interest in movie making and law as she experienced “less pressure to go down the path”

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of counterterrorism. Her college studies made her realize the importance of helping refugees as the biggest counterterrorism initiative. She stated, “I still care about the point of counterterrorism work but want to do it more in life and dialogue and image and education.” Gwen now says she feels more connected to the Middle East, which feels more personal for her. Having lived in a community with “a big refugee presence” brought her to the realization that “there are a lot more faces to pain.” When she watches the news about the Middle East, she was able to connect to people and relate their experiences to the Iraqi refugee community in her hometown.

Gwen’s dream as of yet is to be a successful screenwriter. Her undergraduate thesis was a screen play covering the life story of a female Syrian refugee. Additionally, she has always been interested in medieval history. A year after the course, Gwen graduated with a double major in Arabic and Middle East studies and was accepted to an

MA program in Medieval History in a European university. She plans to go to law school after finishing her Masters. Gwen is fluent in French, and has studied and read

French literature. Before class, Gwen was exposed to Arabic only in her Arabic textbook. She had never read a piece of Arabic literature.

Majid

Much like Rania, Majid was born in the U.S. but moved around a lot as a child.

Born to two Iraqi parents, Majid lived in the U.S. until he was seven years old. He moved to Iraq right after the US invasion in his second grade. A year after that, his family moved to Jordan where they lived for the next three years. Majid perceived his first two years of school in Jordan to be the strongest with regards to developing his

Arabic language, as his school was an Islamic traditional school that taught classical

Arabic. 112

Majid’s parents moved him to an international school in Jordan in his sixth-grade year in order to transition him back to English. Here, Majid studied in both Arabic and

English classes, but coming from an Islamic traditional school, his Arabic was stronger than his classmates. He returned to the U.S. in sixth grade and continued studying Arabic in a Sunday school until the beginning of high school, as the curriculum taught there contained only lower level language classes. Throughout his high school years, Arabic continued to be the language of interaction with family, but Majid stopped studying or reading it.

While growing up, Majid has fluctuated back and forth between Arabic and

English and says he has never got to a point in either language where he can consider either his mother tongue. Yet, as he is almost finishing his college, he stated he could comfortable say he is a native speaker of English. As for Arabic, Majid pointed out that as he visited family in Jordan, Iraq, and Istanbul over the summer, and each time struggled for the first couple of weeks to communicate with his cousins. Then, each time and unfailingly, the language came back to him. Living his life through both English and

Arabic, Majid used both languages to express himself across different domains and fields.

Majid joined this course in his final semester, and the end of his fifth year in college, at which point he was majoring in international affairs. Majid tested out of the language proficiency requirement for his program, but elected to join higher-level Arabic classes. He took Islamic political thought in Arabic and genres of Arabic literature classes prior to our course. Majid was particularly invested in Arabic classes and was keen to graduate with an Arabic minor. Initially, Majid was frustrated by the slower than expected reading rates in the first weeks of class. The main challenge for him, however,

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was in discussion and development of his critical ideas about the literary work.

In the first week, Majid wasn’t talking at all in class discussion. When asked about his participation, he replied, “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk”—he based his response off of previous experience with college Arabic classes in which he was at a higher level of reading and comprehension than his classmates. Majid seldom felt like he should be taking time away from his classmates to practice language, and perceived himself in higher-level Arabic classes almost serving as a teaching assistant; in instances such as these, he would translate for his colleagues. In Majid’s previous experiences, he would not converse with his classmates, and saw doing so more as helping them practice their language, and assessing their comprehension by helping with translating difficult words.

Majid appreciated the openness of the discussion in our class, which allowed him to have genuine conversation. Class discussion helped Majid improve his speaking skills by discussing his ideas about the readings in Arabic. In spite of his active and enthusiastic participation in class discussion, Majid was reluctant to write his reflection throughout the semester. He viewed writing the reflection as an obligation more than a step to organize his ideas and prepare for discussion. He views his interaction in class as really “where the reflection is happening.” In his interview at the end of the course, he claimed, “When I say anything in class, it’s not because I thought about it before, it’s because I’m thinking about them on the spot.”

Majid was very proud to write his first poem in Arabic as his final project. While most of his course work was either submitted late or missing, Majid was never late on reading, and his final project; the poem was submitted on time as he proudly read it in

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class. Reflecting on his project Majid said in his interview, “I didn’t know that I could write like that.” Majid was so proud of his poem, “this is one of favorite things I produced in college. Of course I shared it with my mom . . . I shared it with a couple of my friends.”

Nadia

Nadia, like Gwen, is Caucasian and grew up in the Midwest. She is the first in her family to graduate college and earn a Master’s degree. Nadia was 29 years old when she started the course and was the only graduate student auditing the course. Her experience with Arabic began in elementary school when her teacher’s brother, a translator in the Army, was invited to class and wrote everybody's name in Arabic; from that day on she wanted to learn Arabic. Seeing her name in Arabic letters was “a little bit mysterious, . . . like a code” that she wanted to “uncrack” inspiring Nadia to learn the language that seemed “so different from what [she] had seen before.” Nadia taught herself how to write Arabic when she was twelve, and as she grew became interested in the Arab world. At thirteen, Nadia began to learn Egyptian belly dancing from a

Lebanese teacher.

In high school and throughout college, Nadia started dancing professionally, first with a troop and then solo. She loved Arabic music despite not understanding the lyrics.

Nadia was able to save money dancing and pay for private Arabic lessons, but only ever reached an elementary level until her graduate studies. As a professional dancer, Nadia’s clients were mostly from the Arab community; she danced at weddings, graduation parties, hookah bars, and family restaurants. As she grew older, Nadia gave dancing up as a profession and pursued it only as a hobby. Through her dancing, Nadia got to know

Palestinian, Jordanian, Coptic Egyptian, Lebanese Christian communities, and through 115

this learned more about Arab culture and the background and stigma around different types of dancing.

Nadia’s major in college was a self-designed interdisciplinary major focusing on

Middle Eastern studies. She moved to the East Coast for her graduate study. There she finished her M.A. in Middle East Studies and was able to study Arabic in her graduate program where she studied abroad in Lebanon and Oman. Nadia found her graduate studies to be overly centered on Middle Eastern politics and international relations, and not focusing on aspects of the Middle East that she was interested in such as history, religion, gender, and sexuality. Through her graduate studies, however, Nadia was able to learn the language at a higher level.

After her graduation, Nadia continued to take classes on her own in language centers in the area. She worked as a freelance translator of Arabic, which involved projects such as a documentary on the music of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Nadia eventually advanced to a job as an administrator in the same university where she did her masters. She loves working in translation, especially creative writing.

Throughout her education, Nadia didn’t have a huge interest in reading fiction when she was growing up. When she did read for fun, she’d go for books on a subject I was interested in—a lot of books on Ancient Egypt, for example. Despite her aversion to noneducational literature, Nadia prominently remembers a book given to her by her father’s friend which completely enraptured her and inspired her to write prose during high school.

Another instance in which Nadia found herself enjoying literature was during high school, where she read the work of renowned Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz for a

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modern world literature course. Still, she did not peruse literature afterwards. During a visit to Lebanon, Nadia was given a book of prose by a writer she met at a café. She was scared to read it because she was afraid she would not understand it. By the end of our course, Nadia overcame her fear and started reading the book and she realized she liked it.

This class was Nadia’s first Arabic literature course. Most of the higher-level courses Nadia took focused on media. Nadia saw the class as an opportunity to revive her connection to Arabic through art and music. This course also allowed Nadia to reflect on her anxiety to read Arabic stories and prose as opposed to reading educational

Arabic works or media articles.

Ahlam

Ahlam was a freshman and the youngest student in class. Ahlam was born in the

East Coast to a Sudanese immigrant couple. Her family moved back to Sudan where she spent the first three years of her childhood and spoke Sudanese Arabic as her first language. She returned to the U.S. and entered kindergarten. After a couple of years, she returned to Sudan where she entered a British international elementary school and learned both Arabic and English. She stayed there until fourth grade. Her family felt the Arabic class offered at the international school was not sufficient for her language learning, and

Ahlam’s aunt helped her with reading Arabic. Ahlam then returned to the US where she entered fifth grade and has been in the U.S. since then. Ahlam studied Arabic as a foreign language in school, where she reviewed the basics of the language. When she enrolled in college, she placed in intermediate Arabic. Ahlam’s reading of Arabic during school was limited to school textbooks and reciting the Quran. This course was Ahlam’s first interaction with Arabic literature, and after the course ended, Ahlam started reading 117

her second Arabic novel on her own. Ahlam likes reading novels written in English by

Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese writer who lives in Britain. She likes reading romantic stories and fantasy on her own. She is also fond of African American literature. While she does not read poetry, she sometimes writes poetry in English. She loves listening to

Sudanese music, which she uses as a way to facilitate conversation with her parents and extended family members and a way to feel connected to her heritage.

Reflecting on her experience in Arabic language classes, Ahlam felt a lack of representation of her heritage Sudanese culture. While in her school experience, classes focused on formal Arabic only, her college Arabic classes only offered two dialects:

Egyptian and Levantine Arabic. Ahlam was thrilled to read her first Sudanese short stories in our class.

Danny

Danny was a fourth-year student. He graduated the semester after the course ended. Danny’s father’s family is Jewish, while his father identifies as atheist. His mother comes from a very traditional Roman Catholic family. Danny’s grandmother on his father’s side did not approve the marriage, or the fact that her grandson, Danny, was raised Catholic. When he was a freshman in high school, Danny went on a trip to Turkey through his school. His grandmother, on his father’s side, told him this was a disgrace and that everyone in Turkey is antisemitic. She told him she was so scared he may get killed during his trip. Danny did not listen to his grandmother, and went on his trip and enjoyed it. When he was in Istanbul, he noticed air travel trips to Tel Aviv. That’s when he realized his grandmother was wrong. After his return, Danny decided to educate himself and read on his own, against what his grandmother taught him. Danny’s readings fueled his interest towards international affairs and geopolitical conflict, and ultimately 118

motivated him to study Arabic.

Danny’s grandparents on his mother’s side also share the hostility towards Arabs.

Danny remembers at Christmas dinner, his mom put hummus on the table, and his grandfather said, “Oh what is this Arab shit? I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

Danny said the exacerbate these issues of stereotyping and xenophobia through their constant watching of Fox News.

While Danny’s dad wanted him to study economics or finance, Danny felt secure in the job market through his advanced computer skills, and decided to use his college years to pursuit his passion instead of a seemingly more marketable major. When it came to choosing a foreign language, Danny decided to study Arabic. Yet his father, who was paying for Danny’s expensive college, did not approve him studying Arabic. Danny started his first week of classes taking Italian as a foreign language; he did not feel that studying Italian would force him to think in a different way. Soon, though, Danny dropped Italian and enrolled in Arabic, without telling his family. After a week, he told his mom, whose reaction was, “I'm like really proud of you for exploring your passion,” to which he replied, “Yeah, that’s great. But how do I tell Dad?” Danny finally called his dad and told him he switched to Arabic; Danny explained how he wanted to explore different things in college.

With Danny’s decision to study Arabic, tension between him and hist grandmother increased, especially with his decision to study abroad in Jordan. But they

Ok with when they learned that his host parent in Jordan worked for the U.S. Marines.

While Danny enjoyed his time in Jordan, he stopped his year abroad after one semester. He stated that he was not happy with other students in the program who came

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from Ivy League schools—he perceived them as arrogant and he felt they did not want to be friends with him because he was “in the lower Arabic level.”

Madeline

Madeline was a third-year student. She graduated as an Arabic major the year after the course ended. She had an interest in languages in general. She studied Spanish in high school, while also studying Arabic on her own using Rosetta Stone. She liked the challenge of Arabic as a different and complex language. Madeline did not have any earlier experiences with Arabic before taking this course. In her junior year in high school, she decided she wanted to study international affairs in the service of her dream to be a foreign service officer, or work in the United Nations. She felt that she had to choose between Russian and Arabic for this career. She decided to study Arabic because of how wide spread it is and the number of people who speak Arabic in different countries. Without knowing too much about Arabic culture, she decided to spend a summer studying Arabic using Rosetta Stone. She stated that her parents were not surprised when she decided to learn Arabic, because they knew her love for travel and learning languages. She was already fluent in Spanish before she started learning Arabic and she wanted to learn a new non-European language.

Madeline had no prior study abroad experience. Her language proficiency was one of the lowest in the class. Madeline was taking two other Arabic courses with the class to fulfill the requirement of Arabic major, which was a challenge for her, with regards to the amount of work the class required. Madeline chose to have limited participation in my study. In addition to allowing me to use her course assignments and class discussion in the study, she agreed to one interview at the end of the class, where she reflected on her experience throughout the course. Madeline occasionally made use 120

of office hours and attended some group discussions about the readings.

Madeline traveled to Jordan three weeks after the class ended to study Arabic and to spend the summer studying abroad. Madeline graduated a year after the course ended with a double major in Middle East studies and Arabic. She said that our class opened her eyes to the diversity of Arab culture, which helped in her study abroad experience.

Her study abroad experience gave her more appreciation of Arabic culture and language.

Now, Arabic is less of a career pursuit for her and more of a personal interest. She continues to engage with Arabic through book clubs with her friends in Jordan or with

GW faculty. Madeline liked to read crime novels and was not a fan of poetry. After graduation, Madeline got more involved with computer science and began her career in software development.

Amal

This was Amal’s second semester of her first year in college; she was majoring in

International Affairs. It was also her second course of Arabic literature. When she joined college, Amal’s linguistic proficiency qualified her for higher-level content classes. Born in the U.S., Amal moved to Morocco when she was five years old and lived there until she was twelve years old. Her parents moved to Morocco so that the children would have the opportunity to learn Arabic and French. In Morocco, Amal and her older brother lived with their grandmother, who did not speak English. Amal began

Kindergarten in Morocco and went to local schools through sixth grade, where she learned French and Arabic. Reflecting on her school years in Morocco, Amal felt French was more highly emphasized than Arabic in her school. She was encouraged to read

French books and French literature over Arabic literature. Amal enjoyed spending time with her grandmother watching Turkish soap operas which were dubbed into Moroccan 121

Arabic.

When she returned to the U.S., Amal took French as a second language in middle and high school, as Arabic was not offered in her school. She stopped learning and reading formal Arabic. She continued to visit Morocco every summer, which kept her

Moroccan Arabic up to date. She also continued to interact on social media in Arabic and read news in Arabic online. Amal used to read English novels in her free time during high school years. Amal elected limited participation in the study, allowing me to used her course assignments and class discussion in the study, and agreeing to only one individual interview. Amal never attended office hours or out-of-class group discussions about the readings.

Xiao

This was Xiao’s final semester of college and his final Arabic class. Xiao began studying Arabic in his freshman year in college. As a Chinese student at a U.S. university, he did not expect to be studying Arabic or the Middle East. He had experience studying French in high school and his mother wanted him to study European affairs because she believed Europe is the safest place on earth. When Xiao was registering for classes as a freshman, there was no space in French language classes while

Arabic classes were open, so he decided to take Arabic. Xiao mentioned he started

Arabic 1001 wanting to challenge himself, then he decided to stay. Towards the end of his sophomore year he declared an Arabic minor and a Middle East concentration. Xiao finished elementary and intermediate Arabic in his first two years in college. Then he took Advanced Arabic when he studied in Lebanon in the summer that followed. Xiao then studied abroad in London for a year, where he also continued to study Arabic.

Xiao stopped reading literature after he graduated from high school. He did not 122

take any literature classes in college. During middle and high school, Xiao read excerpts from the Classics of Chinese literature in his school textbooks. Xiao also read English thriller novels and short stories on his own to practice English.

The novel we read was the first nonacademic book Xiao read in five years. Since he came to the U.S., Xiao stopped reading Chinese literature and lost a lot of his academic Chinese. Xiao never read Arabic literature before this class. He reflected on his experience of studying literature in Chinese school where was trained to interpret literature very mechanically. He called this exploiting literature. Students answers on literature questions in school were structured following a specific formula where students almost fill in blanks without emotionally interacting with the piece.

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Chapter 6: Encounters of Alterity in Arabic Literature Class

In this chapter I explore how data from students’ interactions in class and out of class discussions about the literary works, in addition to their written reflection and final interviews, answer the study’s research sub-questions:

• How do students in foreign language literature courses encounter alterity when studying modern literary Arabic texts?

• How do students in foreign language literature courses construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern literary Arabic texts?

• How does the political, historical, geographical, and cultural context in which students read modern literary Arabic texts shape their reading?

To discuss how students encountered alterity, I discuss what alterity the literary work made possible for students to encounter, how their response to this encounter inspired a change in their understanding of themselves and the other. I also discuss how the context of reading the literary work affected the encounter, including the cultural distance between the moment of creation and reception of the work. As I attempt to answer research sub-questions in this chapter, I discuss participants’ literary experiences, as “the experience of a shift in mental and emotional ways of being in order to apprehend and incorporate otherness” (Attridge, 2016, p. 227) and follow their attempts to do justice to the literary works they read.

While during data analysis, I examined all literary works we read and discussed throughout the semester, I chose three to discuss in this chapter where the encounter with alterity was most evident. By using the literary works to structure this chapter, I hope to give the reader a holistic account of participants’ experiences, and attend to the most significant moments during the course in which the literary work unsettled and

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challenged participants. I chose to represent these literary works in chronological order to examine the journey the class went through, the process of cultivating a space for ethical encounter with alterity in the literature class, and the development of the class as an educative community. Thus, I chose to discuss students’ reading experience of the first literary work we read, the novel, which marked a moment of initiation in the course.

I then discuss a class session where we read a group of flash fiction pieces in the middle of the semester as an example of a moment of dissent. Finally, I discuss a poem we read towards the end of the course which was a moment of accomplishment of rich collective interpretation and a demonstration of an ethical and creative stance in reading. In focusing on these moments, I examine the context of reading, participants’ encounters with alterity as a challenge, their response to such a challenge, their grappling with the question of how to do justice to the literary work, and how to welcome alterity to their worlds.

Moment of Initiation: Reading the novel, Handsome Jew

In this section I examine the ways in which students engaged Al-Muqri’s novel

Handsome Jew. I explore what alterity the novel summoned for different students, how reading the novel served to provide space for students to encounter the other and see themselves anew through the encounter, and how the historical, political, geographical and cultural context of the reading event shaped their reading of the novel. I then discuss two moments that represent students’ emerging understanding of ethical and creative reading.

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The Novel as a Moment of Initiation

The novel as a genre. The novel was the first text we read and our first encounter with Arabic literature in the course. For most students it was their first reading of Arabic literature and for all students it was the first Arabic novel they read completely.

I argue that the novel both as a genre and as a theme was a very good initiation into the course and the understanding of reading and its relation to otherness. The novel took nine class sessions to read and discuss. With the exception of the play, at the end of the semester, which took four class sessions to read, all other literary works were discussed in one class session. During some class sessions, we discussed multiple short poems or very short stories. While some students elected to go back and reread some literary works and discuss them outside of class with me individually or in group discussions, most of the literary works were discussed in class. The continuation with one text, the novel, for nine class sessions gave students opportunities to experiment with their reading, while still engaging with a single literary work. The context of the novel guided their comprehension and made it easier for them to detect a misunderstanding of the plot and a behavior that is out of character, as they read.

The difficulty of the novel was an important opportunity to initiate students into an ethical relationship with each other and with the literary work. The amount students had to read before every class session was unprecedented for them. As language learners, none of them was accustomed to reading 20 to 30 pages of authentic Arabic text for each class session. Students’ reflections at the beginning of the course demonstrate this challenge. Xiao, for example, starts his first reflection writing:

I was initially trying to comprehend as much as possible from every page but then realized that it would be impossible for me to finish all the 30 pages in time.

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Therefore, towards the last one-fourth of the reading, I gave up looking up extra vocabulary and fortunately still managed to understand the gist of it.

As Xiao’s comment show, the challenge to read much more than they are used to was intensified by the amount of unknown vocabulary on each page, which forced students to utilize different reading strategies to be able to finish the reading on time and prioritize their attention and close reading for some parts of the texts over others.

The novel also introduced students to a much richer language in terms of vocabulary, structure, themes and use of metaphor compared to what they studied in their language classes. Furthermore, literary language provides multiple layers of meaning that students had not previously engaged with in their FL textbooks. For example, in a meeting with Gwen, during the second week of classes to discuss the assigned portion of the novel, we did a close reading of a section she did not understand. The language in the dialogue between the two protagonists contained sarcasm which was difficult for Gwen to comprehend. Realizing she missed the underlying meaning of the dialogue, Gwen said:

I was just excited I got that section, I totally missed it. It was sarcastic and that does a 180 on character development. Then I’ll have one perception of a character then something’s out of out of character for my perception of her, but because I didn’t realize it was innuendo or it was sarcasm!!

As shown in Gwen’s reaction, the literary text demand working through multiple layers of meaning detecting tone, sarcasm and symbolism. The text demands interpretive labor that was not part of Gwen’s experience reading Arabic in the textbook in her previous classes. As I discussed in Chapter 2, with the dominance of CLT in language teaching,

FL classes embrace a more functional and instrumental approach to meaning (Kern,

2003; Paesani et al., 2015), overemphasizing the referential function of communication and neglecting the poetic function (Blyth, 2003), and perceiving the purpose of reading to 127

be vocabulary and grammar practice rather than interpretation (Kramsch & Nolden,

1994). Often in FL classes, “meaning tends to be treated as a property of the text and therefore to be deemed unproblematic once the reader has mastered the linguistic elements of the text” (Kern, 2003, p. 45). In the above example, by focusing on the surface understanding of linguistic elements in the text, Gwen missed the meaning completely. These moments of misunderstanding were important for students to shift their orientation to meaning and realize the demands of interpreting literary works.

Over nine class sessions, all students continued to have moments of misunderstanding while engaging with the text. The continued engagement provided an opportunity for students to practice interpretation as exegesis, and allowed me the space to intervene and discuss different elements of creative reading as an ethical engagement with the literary work. This enabled us to negotiate our understanding of and expectation for ethical and creative reading as a community. For example, in the first few sessions, I noticed how the discussion was limited to iterating factual parts of the plot in one of the groups. I encouraged the group to engage with the text on a deeper level discussing the meaning each reader understood, how they were challenged by the text; how it made them feel. By explaining my expectations to them, students in the group realized the purpose of the discussion was deeper than demonstrating they read the text. They understood how I expected class discussion to move beyond an instrumental understanding of the plot.

Regardless of their proficiency level, all students reported feeling frustrated while reading the novel, in terms of both comprehension and reading speed. This initial frustration was an important opportunity to question their understanding of reading,

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employ reading strategies, and reorient their stance towards the text. The following excerpts from Gwen’s reflection on the novel in the second week of classes demonstrate the sources of this feeling of frustration:

The Handsome Jew primarily evokes frustration for me, in more than one way. In a practical way, the book evokes frustration because of my inability to thoroughly comprehend the plot. This is primarily due to limitations in vocabulary, confusion in trying to keep straight pronouns and tenses and who or what is being referred to in which tense, and cultural differences in writing style.

Gwen continued to express how sad she feels due to her lack of comprehension as she read the novel:

The extent of comprehension is enough to understand that there is a passionate or dramatic scene, but not enough to follow along, and this is frustrating and makes me feel sad to miss out on giving the intensity of the characters and their arc their full due.

Gwen’s feeling of sadness, frustration, and guilt that her understanding was not keeping up with the intensity of events in the novel demonstrates a feeling of responsibility towards, and an urge to do justice to the text.

Each student found some challenge in the novel, whether it was the literary language, the amount of reading, lack of comprehension, or the writer’s style. The twenty to thirty pages they had to read every session, the way they had to prioritize their focus as they read, coming to class with some parts of the text not understood or even read, the amount of vocabulary they did not know on each page, the confusion about tenses and pronouns, all this forced them to rely on each other and allow each one in the group to contribute to the group’s collective understanding and interpretation. This generated a sense of responsibility for each other to learn together.

To help students think about the challenges they face as they read, I encouraged students to discuss their reading experiences at the beginning of each session during the

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first few weeks. This atmosphere of collective frustration offered students an opportunity to understand and embrace their individual and collective vulnerability.

This situation of vulnerability and responsibility is very similar to the dual language immersion program that Katz (2013) describes as an example of schooling in light of Levinas’s philosophy, where “vulnerability and responsibility are built into the pedagogical structure” (p. 162). The difficulty of the encounter with the novel also set a culture of responsibility to the other in the class. For example, Majid explained during his final interview that he felt an urge to finish the reading for each class session out of respect for his colleagues who expected him to participate in the discussion.

The vulnerability and responsibility the novel evoked in students marked a new understanding of their relationship to each other and lead to what Todd (2003) describes as a condition for ethical possibility. Todd explains, “if we place susceptibility, vulnerability, and openness at the core of relationality, then the question that begins to emerge is how we learn from the other” (p. 9). The novel challenged the students to realize the importance of learning from each other, which initiated a condition of responsibility that is integral to the building of an ethical educative community. Strhan

(2012) explains the feeling of responsibility toward the other is the basis for the ethical encounter with the other, which is the condition of being taught by the other. She describes how this relate to the developing of an ethical educative community:

My being taught depends, then, on my condition of responsibility. I am always already a subject in a community, yet called to bring about a better community, a community of neighbours in which we work towards the conditions of an always better justice to which Levinas testifies, breaking down barriers through practices of dialogue that do not cover over conditions of illeity and vulnerability that would make such a community possible. (pp. 171–172)

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The condition of responsibility in the classroom as a community, inspires the formation of a stronger community. As Strhan explains, both vulnerability and responsibility are important to the formation of such community of neighbors in the classroom in order to create a space for ethical and creative reading.

Themes of the novel. In addition to the novel as a genre, the themes the novel grappled with also helped introduce the class to the topic of otherness. While I only chose the novel among 12 novels to propose for students to vote on online before the beginning of the course, six out of twelve students who initially enrolled in the class chose to read the Handsome Jew. To explain how the themes of the novel invited a conversation about otherness, I will briefly summarize its plot, then discuss how its themes opened a space for engaging with concepts of otherness, reading, and love.

Plot summary. The novel takes place in seventeenth-century Yemen and is narrated by Salim, a Yemeni Jew. Salim’s grandson, Ibrahim, becomes the central narrative voice in the final part of the book. Salim run errands for the Mufti’s wealthy family (Mufti is an Islamic scholar), and he learns to read and write from their daughter,

Fatima. Fatima then asks Salim to teach her Hebrew and Jewish theology. Through this interaction, they exchange books. The two fall in love and decide to elope to the capital where they pose as a Jewish couple and live with Salim’s uncle. Fatima eventually dies while giving birth to their first son. As Salim declares his wife was Muslim, the Jewish community banishes him and his new born, and they move Fatima’s corpse to an isolated grave. The Jewish community did not believe that Fatima agreed to marry Salim while he was still a Jew. They accused him of secretly converting to Islam. Fatima’s family also reject Salim and his baby.

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In response to his traumatic experience and to honor Fatima’s memory and have something of Fatima in him, Salim decides to convert to Islam. In Sanaa, Salim meets

Ali from his village, a Muslim man who escaped with Saba, a Jewish girl from the village to get married and lived in Sanaa before Salim and Fatima decided to elope. The couple sympathize with Salim and agree to help raise the baby. Ali’s wife agrees to nurse

Salim’s son along with her daughter, while Ali helps Salim navigate the Muslim community in the capital. Due to the high degree of education Salim received from

Fatima, he is employed by the Imam as a writer. Having such a prestigious position,

Salim had to travel with the Imam to document his historical battles, and leave his son with Ali and his Jewish wife.

The narrative then jumps in time to Salim in his 60’s. Salim is retired and Said, his son, lives with him. Salim regrets accompanying the Imam and documenting his wars against Sunni Muslims. After the death of the Imam, the court ask Salim to make four copies of the book he created documenting the Imam’s victories. Salim takes the only copy and destroys it. He instead decides to write a book about the history of Yemeni

Jews. The narrative is interrupted with Salim’s book that documents historical events of conflicts between Jews and Muslims in Yemen, which gives historical background to the following event in the novel. Salim and his son witness the Mawza exile, 1679–1680 in which Jews from all Yemeni cities were banished by decree of the Imam to Mawza, in the South. Salim banishes himself with the Jews in honor of Fatima’s memory, who if alive, would have chosen to go with Jews and help the needy. Salim finds his son and his daughter in law, the daughter of Ali and his Jewish wife Saba, in the masses. We learn that although the two kids grew up together, they did not nurse from Saba, which would

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have rendered them brother and sister in Arab and Islamic traditions. The story concludes with Ibrahim, Salim’s grandson, a son of another interfaith marriage, who reflects on his identity.

The novel’s complexity. The story presents the Jewish exodus in Yemen in the seventeenth century when all Yemenite Jews were banished to Mawza’ in Taiz by decree of the Zaydi king. Some students did not know that Yemenite Jews existed. In addition to moving to a moment of crisis in the past, the novel presented its themes through alternating between first person narrative and a fictional historical account. Its depiction of time is also complex. While the teen love story of 3 years makes up two thirds of the novel, the narrative is interrupted by Salim’s historical book. The text then returns to the narrative with Salim in his sixties. The last chapter is narrated by his grandson, after another jump in time.

“Staging of otherness” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 124). The novel discusses a wide variety of complex relations between different group, like Jews minority-Muslim majority, upper-lower class, kings-court-citizens, and human-animal. This assemblage of complex relations in the novel invited students to deepen their engagement with its topics, be perplexed about meaning and change their understanding as they read. For example, Xiao writes in his reflection, at the end of the novel, about how his understanding of the theme of the book changed over time from interfaith love, to sectarian conflict to identity struggle. He concludes his reflection with speculating the author’s demand of the readers to think deeper about the others of “hostile” identities:

My perception about the thesis (or the motif) of the book has changed for a few times since the very beginning. I initially thought it was a book about interfaith love, then believed it was more about class and sectarian struggles, and now at the end, I have realized that another subject that the author has been hinting at all

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along is Selim’s identity struggle. And from the angle of such a struggle, the author wants us to think deeper and more empathetically about others, especially those who are of “hostile” identities.

I assume by “hostile” identities Xiao means identities that are deemed hostile by the readers; opponents of the readers. Thus, I understand Xiao’s interpretation of the intended audience of the book as Arab readers, and their opponents being either Arab minorities or

Israelis. For Xiao, the book invites Arab readers to think of the hostile-other/enemy in a different way. I find Xiao’s idea fascinating, in light of the play of words in the novel’s

which if ,اليهودي الحالي title and the image on its cover. The title of the novel in Arabic is translated in formal Arabic would mean the “current Jew,” but if translated in Yemeni dialect would mean the “handsome Jew.” The cover of the novel features a man in

European hat and a suit carrying a suit case, giving us his back, and walking on a path.

Both the title and cover may allude to the State of Israel, which can be historically perceived as a hostile other in Arabic culture. As Xiao comments above suggest, rethinking otherness as one of the core themes of the novel generated discussions about alterity in class discussion and students’ writings and re-oriented their readings towards the other.

The novel’s open-ended nature. The novel represented an open-ended text that posed a number of questions and demanded labor in interpretation. One of the students discussed this aspect of the novel in his written reflection about the novel. Xiao wrote about the novel’s “ambiguity” in that “it has been a pattern that the author avoids to reveal or to write about inner thoughts of some of the most important protagonists, especially at turning points of the plot,” demanding the readers’ own interpretation, and understanding of the characters and their motives. This openness and the elusive nature of the novel’s character was even explicitly stated in the language of the novel. For 134

example, in an internal monologue in the novel, Salim comments that he needs forever to be able to discover Fatima (Al-Muqri, 2009, p. 90), indicating the other’s evasion of the self’s attempts of knowledge. Characters of the novel not only surprise the reader, but also each other.

The open-ended nature of the novel generated rich discussions in class and allowed “different voices to emerge.” This urged students “to be able to see what is and is not said, to draw out what has been hidden” (Katz, 2013, p. 163), an important aspect of what Katz (2003) calls “a Talmudic style of reading” rooted in Levinasian philosophy.

The theme of reading as love for the other. The novel’s themes provided unique opportunities to contemplate otherness in its relation to reading. The protagonists’ ethical stances towards each other was mediated by reading. One of the most prominent themes of the novel is the relationship between reading and love wherein reading was perceived as an intimate encounter with the other. In the first chapter of the novel, students read the following statement from Fatima, addressing Salim’s father, after he stopped him from going to her lessons because he heard him reciting the Quran:

"كلنا من آدم وآدم من تراب، اللغة ليس فيها دين فقط، فيها تاريخ وشعر وعلوم. أقول لك، وهللا، توجد كتب

كثيرة في رفوف بيتنا لو قرأها المسلمون سيحبون اليهود ولو قرأها اليهود سيحبون المسلمين" )المقري،

ص ١٦(

We are all from Adam, and Adam is from dust. Language doesn’t have religion only, it has history, poetry, and sciences. I will tell you, indeed, there are a lot of books on the shelves of our house, if Muslims read them they will love Jews, and if Jews read them they will love Muslims. (Al-Muqri, 2009, p. 16)

In the above excerpt, the novel presents reading as reconciliation between opposing groups, and Fatima’s plea to Salim’s father. Throughout the novel, events highlighted reading as a form of love. Fatima and Salim’s relationship developed through

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exchanging books. For example, when Salim’s dog was lost, Fatima gave him a book titled “The Superiority of Dogs Over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes,” by Ibn al-

Marzubān, a 10th-century collection of quotes, anecdotes, and folklore on the virtues of dogs. Then when Salim asked Fatima why she refuses marriage proposals, she gave him Ibn Hazm’s book, the Ring of the Dove about the arts of love, in which her answer was hidden. As Salim’s literacy lessons progressed, he read the books from the shelves of Fatima’s house, among them, and to his surprise, was Hebrew Bible in Arabic. After

Salim’s learning Arabic stirred up the Jewish community, they decided to have all the children learn Hebrew at the rabbi’s house. When Salim excelled in Hebrew, he taught

Fatima the language, she then asked him to teach her Jewish theology, to compare it with what she read about Judaism in Arabic (Al-Muqri, 2009, p. 22). Fatima and Salim continued to exchange books in Arabic and Hebrew from the two great traditions, learning the language and heritage of each other as a form of mutual respect and appreciation.

Books. The novel’s treatment of reading as love was one of the topics that students discussed and reflected on in their writings. Ahlam, for example, wrote in her first reflection on the novel about how Salim and Fatima’s “sentiment for each other is also exchanged again through literature and books.” In one of her reflections, Nadia contemplated the significance of trading books in the story. Midway through the novel,

Salim gave Fatima two books in Hebrew, one by Judah Ben Solomon Cohen, titled “the

Quest for Wisdom” about the philosophy of Averroes, and a poetry book for the famous

Jewish poet, Shabazi. By researching the names of the books being traded, Nadia

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interpreted the trading of these books as not only a form of communication between the two protagonists but also a form of communication with the readers. She explains:

I don’t think this is merely a form of communication between the two lovers in the story; it is also a form of communication between the author and the reader. For example, the books written in Arabic that talk about (or were written by) ancient and medieval Jewish poets and other Jewish intellectuals living within the Arab-Muslim world is pointing to their importance and a recognition of their contributions in the realms of art, poetry, philosophy, and science.

Trading books was more than a part of the plot, as Nadia’s insightfully comments. It was an invitation to engage with and respect the other through reading, by highlighting the connection between Jewish and Muslim cultures in art and scholarship.

Likewise, during the group discussion, Gwen highlighted the relationship between learning and love for the other in the novel. In learning from each other, Salim and

Fatima grew much closer and cultivated a relationship rooted in tolerance and unconditional love. Gwen explained:

Every time Salm and Fatima learned, [it] brought them together and it was just that the relationship between tolerance and learning, which like, the inverse would be ignorance and intolerance, but I think it was nice because a lot of times literature articles focus on blaming ignorance and I think it was nice to instead show an example of actually learning.

The learning aspect of the love relationship was highlighted in the novel, as Gwen recognized. This focus on love and learning vs. hatred and ignorance may signify a more hopeful stance of the novel, which Gwen appreciated. The novel also emphasized how the two protagonists learn from each other, not about each other. For the first part of the novel Fatima taught Salim Arab and Islamic heritage, but in the second part of the relationship Salim taught Fatima Hebrew language, Judaism and Judaic literature at her request. Through its unique depiction of reading, learning, and respect of all others as a

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the novel introduced ,” مذهب فاطمة way of love, which Salim calls it “the way of Fatima the connection between reading and alterity to participants as part of its plot.

The theme of difference as basis of love. The two protagonists in the novel related to each other through their differences (Hammoud, 2013; Irvin, 2016). Fatima loved Salim’s Jewishness, endeared him, “handsome Jew,” and never asked him to convert to Islam. Their love relationship seemed to be because of, not despite, their differences. Their difference was not meant to be mitigated or merged. Irvin (2016) argues that the novel presents a critique of notions of hybridity. She explains that while

Said and Ibrahim may represent a desirable hybridity, the novel’s ending is critiquing such notion. Said goes mad at the end of the novel and escapes with his parents’ remains, and Ibrahim’s language suggest he is in exile. Irving emphasizes Al-Muqri’s depiction of the love relationship that is rooted in difference. She explains:

Although Fatima and Salem love each other, al-Muqri explicitly states that neither converts in order to marry; rather than seeking to achieve hybridity, he seems rather to be demanding the right to be different but equal within an environment of radical tolerance. (p. 358)

The novel’s events and language emphasize the right to be different and call for respect and love of difference. The moment of Salim decides to convert to Islam was important to illuminate his relationship with Fatima that was founded on difference. Salim states that he was hoping to get closer to Fatima after her death. Yet, when he does, he laments losing the name that she used to endearingly call him, the handsome Jew, and his sidelocks that she loved. After assimilating to the Muslim society, Salim felt he lost what

Fatima loved the most in him. A number of students focused on this moment in their reflection on the novel. For example, Ahlam reflected on Salim’s “seemingly

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spontaneous decision to convert to Islam,” and how this decision stripped him of what

Fatima loved in him:

One could theorize this is because he somehow wants to get close to Fatma after her death, but in return, him converting to Islam stripped him of the very things about him that related him to Fatma and perhaps made her love him in the first place.

As Ahlam’s interpretation demonstrate, by converting to Islam, Salim was stripped of his otherness that Fatima cherished about him. Gwen on the other hand perceived Salim’s converting as clinging to the influence Fatima had in his life, a way to “hold on to Fatima and have her remain with him after death.” She explains:

Earlier, Salim was adamant that Fatima never asked or pressured Salim to convert, and yet, in the time after her death, he converts. This is not fulfilling one more wish in Fatima’s honor; this is clinging to his understanding of their time together. I think practicing Islam and becoming Muslim reminds Salim of his happiest days, his days falling in love with Fatima in the excitement of a forbidden love.

Gwen interpreted Salim’s conversion as an immature clinging to the past rather than fulfilling a wish Fatima never had. In order to hold on to Fatima, Salim lost himself and what Fatima loved in him, his otherness. Nadia also addresses this part of the novel in her reflection stating, “Salim is struggling with the loss of his lover and also the loss of himself at the same time.” The novel powerfully portrayed the distinction between

“Fatima’s way” of unconditional love that accepts the other’s otherness, and the violence of assimilating the other into the same that Salim had to suffer after she died.

As demonstrated in the above section, the novel, both as a genre and as a synthesis of thematic concerns, inaugurated us successfully into the course. It brought issues of otherness into class conversations, instilled in students a feeling of responsibility towards each other, and cultivated a community of readers that read in conversation with each other. 139

Encountering Alterity

In this section, I discuss how students responded to the novel in different ways, how they viewed the other, and themselves, differently through engaging the novel, and how their reading was shaped by the context and the historical moment of the reading event. As we read the novel, students engaged with the novel from different perspectives and were challenged by different aspects of the otherness it offered. In the following section, I discuss challenges that participants reported facing while reading of the novel, what aspect of alterity they encountered, how open they were to the text, how they constructed the other and the self through their reading, and how the context of the reading event shaped their reading.

Encountering the self as sheltered in the thought and language of the other.

In this section I discuss how Gwen and Danny encountered the alterity of the novel. Both students experienced an intimacy with the novel and its characters despite the cultural distance that separate them as White American students with no experience, or very little, of studying abroad in the Middle East. Both Danny and Gwen found in the novel a shelter for an inner self, which they felt was challenged by their own culture. Both Gwen and Danny read the novel as a universal phenomenon that represented their struggles as part of their own histories.

These responses to the literary work as a reflection of the self may be interpreted as a result of Danny and Gwen’s familiarity with reader response approach to literature, which is a predominant contemporary classroom practice in U.S. schools (Kern &

Schults, 2005). Their understanding of the novel having a universal theme may be seen as an egoistic and “misguided conclusion that other people and other cultures are in essence no different from themselves and their own cultures” (p. 348). However, the 140

strength of the emotional connection both participants had to the novel made me question this hypothesis. The feeling I detected in their responses, and reflections, seems to allude to a feeling of happiness to find language that represents an inner self. Attridge (2004a) explains that while reading the work in a way that confirms prejudices or asserts truisms is not a creative reading of the work as literature:

It is important to realize, too, that the experience is not always one of thinking the hitherto unthinkable: it may be one of capturing in language something already apprehended in some non-verbal way. (p. 77)

It seems as though the novel’s depiction of the protagonists’ struggle captured in language Gwen and Danny’s own struggle, as if the novel gave voice to an inner other.

Engaging with the novel gave them a way of expressing their inner feelings. In her discussion of the healing power of language in the novel Beloved, Tarc (2015) states, “To live well and survive, one needs loving forms of symbolic representation and a healing language with which to bring significance to one’s humanity” (p. 98). Although the context of dehumanization in Beloved is different than the situation of Gwen and Danny’s social context, Tarc’s point is relevant. Growing up within conflicting discourses of religion and secularism may have led to a sense of susceptibility that found refuge in the novel’s depiction of identity struggles in religious conflicts.

Finding shelter in the language of the other. During a group discussion that we held after finishing the novel, the question of misrepresentation of Yemeni culture was raised by Rania, a Yemeni heritage learner. Gwen contributed to the discussion by emphasizing the novel’s universal themes and asserting the novel’s powerful topic:

I think it was important in the book that... Its universal concepts portrayed locally, that it was neighbors closing their doors on neighbors. It was city-by-city. He didn't talk about governments; he didn't talk about big organizations. He didn’t even very often talk about like Judaism and Islam. It was normally the Muslim family and the Jewish neighborhood and I think that a big part of his message was 141

just trying to bring the world back down to that its people living their life in a place next to someone else living their life in a place and just to make it more personal.

Gwen saw the novel not as a depiction of Yemeni conflicts, but as a depiction of religious conflicts that divides neighbors. That theme of “neighbors closing their doors on neighbors” was so powerful for Gwen, she also iterated in her written reflections on the novel. When she wrote about how she reads the experience of Salim’s grandson,

Ibrahim, in the world as an experience of rejection, she explained:

most people in Ibrahim’s society are invested in and loyal to their religion, so much so that they can hardly be empathetic to the pain they cause their neighbor that wishes them no harm.

In the above excerpt, as in many other places in her reflections, Gwen interrogates religious loyalty that leads to causing pain to a neighbor. She relates to Salim’s feelings of being betrayed by religion. The message of the novel for her is interrogating the effect of religious conflict on people’s lives. She asserted:

This is, I believe, the intended message of the author: family, love, and community, what connects people on earth and through history, matters most and yet suffers at the hand of religious conflict. This suffering is not the purpose of religion, and so should not be so easily ignored or excused.

Gwen’s idioculture, as a reader, steered her reading to focus on moments of division in the novel, and read the novel as an interrogation of religious bigotry. The historical moment of the reading event also affected her reading. We read the novel in spring of

2019, as the political polarization and ideological division splits the American society between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. Despite the cultural and historical difference, the tension and societal division in the novel somehow parallel what

Gwen experiences in her own society in the moment of reading.

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Further, Gwen related to Salim’s identity struggle as a minority child. During the final discussion, she explained how she related to the novel from a personal stand point:

I went to a very aggressively atheist school and I’m Christian and so felt really related to just people missing the point of respecting differences. And so like neither Jewish nor Muslim I, not from the Middle East, and the book felt really personal, and so it may have been because I was feeling a different sort of connection.

Gwen perceived themes of the novel as universal themes that she was able to identify with. She identified with Salim being discriminated against by his Muslim neighbors and struggling to navigate his identity. This reminded her with her experience in her school.

In the excerpt above, Gwen emphasizes the point of connection to the novel, “people missing the point of respecting differences.” As Gwen explained above, she personally identified with the themes and characters of the novel to the point that she did not read it as a depiction of Yemen, Middle East or even Muslim-Jewish historical conflict. Her reading of the novel centered on its powerful themes of otherness and respecting difference. The personal connection Gwen felt with the novel may be due to the novel spoke to and gave voice to her inner feelings. Attridge (2004a) explains this experience of intimacy when reading a literary work:

The experience of intimacy that we sometimes have in reading a work for the first time, then, is not a sign that it lacks singularity, inventiveness, and alterity. On the contrary, a sense that the work speaks to my inmost, perhaps secret, being, that it utters thoughts I have long nurtured but never had the power to express. (p. 78)

Although Gwen did not belong to a religious minority group in the U.S., Salim’s character helped her make sense of her feelings during her school experience in which she felt different and unappreciated.

During class discussion, Gwen declared her personal connection with Fatima, the female protagonist. However, as she spoke it was unclear if she was still talking about 143

Fatima or herself. Gwen was visibly emotional and sounded like she was defending herself.

I like that it wasn’t an angry book. Both sides were really humanized, like Fatima was the daughter of Sheikh and like her life was hard. Like she wasn’t allowed to like, I think a lot of times even in discussions that the heart is in the right place of other and (…) and giving a voice to the oppressed. It’s easy to bandwagon and assume someone's an oppressor. And everyone’s life is complicated, just as the oppressed are individual within a group that aren’t the same, people put labels on who the oppressor groups are, and have no idea how those people in their own many worlds may have been oppressed, and people in the name of defending the oppressed were accusing the oppressor and it’s just someone who had nothing … like they didn’t do anything in their life... Like all they did was love people and like because they fell under the label of the oppressor from birth. They weren’t allowed to do certain things. So I think he like… I think he … he had a message but it didn’t feel like he had … wasn’t like malicious ..

In this long emotionally charged explanation, Gwen moved from the specific context of

Fatima in the novel, to a more general argument for people who belong to the oppressor group. As a White American, Gwen identified with the privileged Fatima who despite belonging to a Muslim majority and a rich renowned family, had a hard life in her own society. Gwen uses Fatima to question the label of “privileged,” and explained how the privileged in their own context may be struggling. Her defensive tone here exceeded the purpose of commenting on the novel and sounded more like trying to see a positive image of herself in Fatima. I sense that Gwen’s identification with Fatima was more than trying to find shelter in the depiction of her character. It seemed more like trying to find confirmation.

Attridge (2004a) cautions against such reading in which the literary “work comforts and reassures by simply confirming prejudices or reasserting truisms according to well-known verbal formulae” (p. 77). It seems to me here that Gwen’s connection to

Fatima aims at “confirming already distinct and fully configured ideas” (Attridge, 2004a,

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p. 78). In order to read creatively and responsibly the reader needs explore the new, not the familiar in the text, as Attridge (1999) explains:

What I have to resist is my mind’s inclination toward repetition, its tendency to process novelty in terms of the familiar. Motivated by some obscure drive, I sense that I am pushing at the limits of what I have hitherto been able to think. (p. 20)

A creative reading implies pushing one’s limits of thinking and feeling and resisting reading the new in terms of the old and familiar. As much as I do not wish to delegitimize Gwen’s reading her own experiences of injustice within her own society, I wonder why she was only able to see herself in the text. I wonder if this had to do with her world view or the way she learned to read literature, within the prevailing reader- response approach in U.S. schools, by only drawing on personal connections to the text.

I also wonder whether Gwen’s finding consolation in the novel had to do with the extreme difficulty of reading her first novel in Arabic and the amount of text she had to read every day. I wonder if she clung to the familiar sentiments in the novel to survive a difficult and overwhelming task of reading in a foreign language.

Reconciling the self. Similar to Gwen, Danny had a personal connection to the novel. His reading was more focused on the interfaith relationship and the identity of a child of interfaith marriage. When discussing the novel in my office for the first time, he pointed out how his reading is more sensitive to this aspect of the story:

because my parents are from different faiths. So like I feel that I kind of exclusively … not exclusively, but I definitely pick up more meaning from the Interfaith aspect of the story, where other people who may relate to other aspects of the story.

Danny related to different events in the story from a personal perspective. For example, when commenting on how Salim taught his grandson both Hebrew and Arabic, and read with him books of different religions, Danny wrote: “Again, this is something I can relate 145

to because I spent plenty of time with my grandparents learning about different faiths and cultures.” Danny had a hard time with the language of the story as his reading proficiency was the lowest in the class. In addition, Danny joined the course late at the end of the second week of classes at a point when students had read 60 pages of the novel. He had to catch up on reading as well as read the new chapters for class discussion. It seemed like Danny used the interfaith relations as an access point to the story and context to understand its characters.

Through the novel, Danny reviewed his perception about Arab culture through his

4 months study abroad. Danny was able to reconsider his judgement on Arab culture based on his stay with one Jordanian conservative family, who seemed to him to be anti-

Jews. In the final discussion group about the novel, Danny explained how the novel changed his perspective of the Middle East. He talked about his conservative Muslim host family whom he describes as “their opinions on Jews probably weren’t the best.”

Danny recognizes in the author of the novel a different, more open, kind of Muslim than his host family, as he explains in the discussion:

but in reality, the author is probably just as Muslim as the people that I’m close with who are Muslim. But they have very different experiences. So we have to treat them as different people, or I think it just becomes very easy, especially in an academic setting to kind of group a bunch of people in one category and say okay, this is our . . . what these people think in these are what people think and then we compare them and analyze them. Where it’s just much more complicated than that.

Although Danny’s comment above can be easily reduced into good Muslim-bad Muslim narrative (Mamdani, 2005), putting it in context of Danny’s personal background grants us a deeper look into how he relates to the novel. While Danny did not give details about his relationship with his host family, experiencing anti-Jewish sentiments must have been an alienating experience for him as descendent from a Jewish family himself, even if he 146

does not identify as Jewish. This part of the discussion adds another layer to Danny’s focus on the interfaith marriage in the story, and the humanization of the Jewish other. If we add to this Danny’s family’s opposition to him learning Arabic, his grandmother’s stance against Arabs and Muslims, it becomes clear how Danny was torn in the Arab-

Jewish conflict himself, between his family and his host family, and he found in the novel a reconciliation between the two and a call for a more complicated perception of the other.

Reconceptualizing the Self in the Encounter of the Other

The novel posed a challenge to participants’ ways of thinking about themselves and others in their lives, especially heritage learners. At several points in their reflections and discussions, heritage learners noticed how the literary work demanded they change their way of thinking of themselves and others, which demonstrates Tarc’s (2015) description of other-oriented reading, “The other’s words leave us open to question, to exposing our inside, to making new thoughts of our self” (p. 118). In this section I discuss the changes that students discussed in their way of thinking and being in the event of reading the novel.

The novel’s depiction of sectarian conflict in Yemen in the 16th century, its focus on a traumatic moment of Jewish exile, being narrated by a Jewish character, and depicting a beautiful love relationship killed by an “unforgiving society” (Irving, 2016) offered a social criticism of society in the Arab world. There were four heritage learners in the class who spent their childhood in their home Arab country and who identify as

Muslim. Reading the novel, they recognized how it interrogates Arab Muslim societies from the perspective of religious minorities. Amal writes in her first reflection on the novel about how the Jewish narrator of the novel brings her a different perspective: 147

It offers a different viewpoint from what I am used to, since it is narrated through a Jewish character. I can see why it is controversial, since it sheds light on behaviors that came from Muslim characters. It is essential to recognize when people act immorally if we want to move on and be better human beings in the long run.

Amal understands the controversy the novel may stir up by criticizing Arab Muslim communities in the Middle East, but sees its calling out of immoral acts as essential for becoming “better human beings.” She welcomes the novel’s criticism as constructive.

Throughout her reflections, she responded to the characters’ struggle commenting on the sad events of the story as “heartbreaking” and engaging with the identity crises of Salim and his offspring.

Similarly, Majid saw the novel as social self-criticism. In his final interview when asked if in any of the literary works we read he encountered something different that changed the way he thinks he talked about how novel was “intriguing” for him. He explained:

it kind of opened my eye to how people in in those areas are part of our history and part of the fabric of the society but yet in the general dialogue we always tend to ostracize these groups and put them kind of in a separate place.

Similar to Amal, Majid was challenged by the novel’s perspective and themes that opened his eye on the alienation of non-Muslim minorities in the Arab world.

New perception of the self as privileged. Ahlam was challenged by the novel to think about otherness in her home community, and rethink her perception of herself.

Being a Black American of Sudanese Muslim heritage, she normally perceived herself as a minority in the U.S. After reading the novel, she was reminded by her status in Sudan, her home country. Being part of the Muslim majority, she was able to perceive herself as privileged for the first time. Reading the novel illuminated the complexity of her

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subjectivity as she occupied different spaces in the U.S. and in Sudan. Ahlam discussed this revelation during group discussion at the end of the novel:

I feel like I kind of realized that I am so privileged in a Sudani context, because 98% of Sudan right now is Muslim and I'm also from a tribe in Sudan that has power in the government and has been having power in the government for 30 years.

Through the novel Ahlam perceived herself in a different way. She realized that in her home country she is privileged both as a religious majority and as belonging to an elite class. This new realization of herself made her think of the others in her home country, as she further explains:

Growing up, I never even considered issues of having to deal with people of different beliefs and different ethnic backgrounds because I was always surrounded … well not always surrounded because I live in America but like in the context of Sudan and I was always in Sudan and family and neighbors and we interact with them]. I always felt secured and even if I] نحن بنتعامل معاهم people interact] with people that are from different religious ethnic] أتعامل had to backgrounds, it wasn’t a big deal to me, because … hey, I don’t have to live my life with these people. It’s just day by day, you know interactions and it’s over.

In the above excerpt, Ahlam explained how the novel urged her to think about difference within Sudanese culture for the first time. Growing up surrounded by her extended family and neighbors from similar background, she did not give much thought to the other of her community even when she interacted with them. Living her life mostly in the U.S., and going to Sudan for summer vacations to enjoy the support of her family, she did not concern herself with issues of difference in her home community. It was as if she did not pay attention to, or see their difference. Through the novel, Ahlam realized the existence of others in her home community and this realization entailed a sense of responsibility, as she further explained:

but having to read this, I realized that I’m just so privileged in that sense, and it’s something I have to work on understanding . . . being able to see the humanity in other people. 149

Through the novel’s depiction of minority suffering, Ahlam was reminded of her other(s) in Sudanese context. She realized she needed to change, needed to “work on understanding” both her privilege and the suffering of the others. Her expression, “being able to see the humanity in other people” read within the context of her whole statement, demonstrate an important revelation for Ahlam. She realized how her indifference to otherness of people from different religious or ethnic background was almost denying their humanity. And now that she recognized the existence of others in her home country, she needed to “learn to see the humanity of other people.” Reading the novel encouraged Ahlam to pause and question her day-to-day interactions with people from different backgrounds in her heritage culture. It highlighted and interrogated the majority status of Muslims in Arab countries, which lead to Ahlam’s reconstruction of the self as a privileged self, and interrogation of the self’s stance towards otherness. This change in the way Ahlam perceives herself and others attest to the charge of the novel as a literary work, as Attridge (2016) explains:

The ethical charge of the literary work arises from the fact that the event always involves a change, it is the introduction of alterity into the smoothly working machine of the same. A literary experience then is the experience of a shift in mental and emotional ways of being in order to apprehend and incorporate otherness. (p. 227)

In the event of reading, she had to revisit her daily interaction in her home country and the way she felt when she visits there. She experienced a change in the way she perceived herself during the event of reading the novel. Her reflection demonstrates a heightened feeling of responsibility towards others who do not share her privilege in

Sudan. She then expresses her need to understanding her newly realized privilege.

New perception of the self as part of the oppressor group. Reading her first

Yemeni literary work, Rania had a very personal encounter with the novel. She cherished 150

the few dialect words used in the novel, and was able to pick up nuances of culture more than any other reader in class. Identifying as a Muslim, Rania perceived herself as part of the Muslim majority of Yemen. The novel offered a space for Rania to encounter the other of her community, Yemeni Jews, as a poor and marginalized social class. Reading the novel, Rania remembered how she grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories about

Yemeni Jews, as he grew up close to a Jewish community in Yemen. Rania commented in her written reflection on part of the novel when Salim was reluctant to ride the donkey in the presence of Fatima on their journey to elope saying, “We, Jewish people, aren’t allowed to ride a horse, but we can ride a donkey as long as we get off if we pass by a

Muslim who is sitting” (Al-Muqri, 2009, p. 82). She wrote that this part touched her the most, and continued to explain:

What got to me the most is that I have heard a similar story from my own grandfather! My grandfather grew up in a village that had a small Jewish community, so he interacted with Jewish children every once in a while, even though it was not common. He always told us stories about his few interactions with the Jewish community, including a story of always seeing Jews getting off their donkeys as soon as they saw Muslims, including my grandfather, sitting down. I just find it mind-blowing that this was such a normal form of communication between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

Being reminded of her grandfather’s stories as a testimony to the mistreatment of Jews depicted in the novel intensified the effect of this depiction for Rania. It was mind- blowing for her to realize what the stories of her grandfather meant. The novel posed a challenge to Rania’s perception of herself as a heritage of Muslim majority culture in

Yemen. A feeling of discomfort started with her first interaction with the novel and lasted until she completed it. While Rania’s heritage culture allowed her to identify more with the novel and read nuances in the novel that none of her colleagues was able to detect, it also made her uncomfortable. The adjustment she had to make to register the

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otherness of the novel was to perceive herself as part of the oppressor group, which may have been the source of this un-comfortability.

The novel demanded a conversation about otherness that is normally shut down in

Rania’s community. During the final discussion of the novel, Rania commented on the author’s decision to have a Jewish narrator by asserting that the intended audience of the novel is the Muslim majority community of Yemen. Rania also explained how within her Muslim Yemeni community, conversation about the situation of Yemeni Jews is shut down:

Yes. There should be a discussion about it. To all these .. Muslims… like Muslims in Yemen, don’t talk about this at all. If you try to bring it up, they’ll just shut you up and tell you: “Oh, it’s not like …That’s not a thing!”

Being called into question by the novel, the Muslim majority community in Yemen are demanded to open a space for a much-needed conversation that, as Rania asserted, was often shut down. The anger in Rania’s tone as she said the above statement seemed to be an anger at herself and her own people. She discussed how within her extended family she witnessed different rhetoric among her mother and father’s side of her family.

Revisiting her own stances and ideas was Rania’s response to the novel. When asked how the novel changed her, during the final discussion of the novel, Rania affirmed her desire to research more about her heritage culture and to develop her own perspective, rather than inheriting what her family members have said. She said in the group discussion at the end of the novel:

talking about it in this class, hearing from other people, looking up things on my own, and not being fed things, like “this is what you should think! This is what you should think!” It was like... it changed me; I hope.

Rania’s expression above demonstrates a heightened feeling of responsibility in response to reading the novel. She was challenged by the voice of the other to question the 152

majority narrative of her heritage community and to search on her own for a more just narrative. She confirmed this desire to learn more and investigate on her own during her final interview.

Who is self and who is other? Questioning exclusion. In its depiction of the identity struggle of Salim, his son and his grandson, the novel opened a space for questioning notions of identity of self and other. For example, in the final part of the novel Ibrahim portrays the complexity of his identity, introducing himself as:

I am Ibrahim Saeed Salem, the grandson of the handsome Jew and Fatima, the son of Saeed who was born to a Muslim mother and to a Jewish father, and the son of Fatima the daughter of Jewish Seba and the Muslim Ali. (Almaqri, 2009, p. 141)

Ibrahim continues to tell the readers about the different names he has been called by his parents and grandfather, related to different cities of Yemen that was part of his family history. His father called him Sanaani, relating to Sanaa where he was born, his mother called him Raydi, related to Raydah were his family came from, and his grandfather called him an original Haysi, related to the city where he was conceived. Ibrahim then questions what it means to be true or fake (Almaqri, 2009, p. 142). Rania contemplated

authentic, original] in this part of the novel and on] أصيل on the use of the word

in Yemen’s أصيل (Ibrahim’s comment by asking more questions like “Who was (is society? Was a true Yemeni a Muslim born to two Muslims? Does having a Jewish parent make you a fake Yemeni?” She then wrote:

If Yemeni Jews are not Arabs, then what are they? What makes them “true?” Where do they belong if they do not belong in Yemen? Who are we, Muslim Yemenis, to exclude them from their Arab identity?

The questions of who is Arab or who is Yemeni and who is excluded, what the criteria for exclusion is and who does the exclusions are all question of who is self and who is

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othered, in an anthropological sense, in the community. By questioning the basis of exclusion, Rania questions the binary of self and other, as excluded other.

As part of her final project, Rania organized and conducted a whole class interview with the author, Ali Al-Muqri at the end of the course. During the interview, the author asserted that the novel is reclaiming the other who is the origin of the self, reclaiming the Yemeni Jews as the origin of Yemen. He discussed how Jews constitute not only an important component of Yemeni civilization, but the ancestors of current

Muslim Yemenis. He insisted that he is not depicting a self-other relationship in his novel. Since Jews are already part of the same. During her final interview with me,

Rania reflected on the author’s comment saying:

It made me, I don’t know, get mad at myself for just classifying them as the other this whole semester from the first day that we started reading the novel.

The anger Rania expresses in this excerpt demonstrates a revelation, a new conceptualization of the self as performing the act of exclusion. She saw the novel as exposing the self that excluded Jews as other, while they form the historical origin of the current majority in Yemen. She was challenged to interrogate the self for the exclusion of the other. Rania embraced the author’s stance that Jews are not other but, as she puts it, “they're part of the community just like everyone else.” As she negates the otherness of Jews in Yemen, I believe, she is negating the anthropological conceptualization of otherness as alienation and exclusion of a category of the other as whole cultural, ethnic or in this case religious groups created by anthropological inquiry (Young, 2012). This is different from the philosophical conceptualization of the other within which lies

Levinasian understanding of subjectivity as the responsibility to and for the other. To

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conclude, Rania encountered the other (Yemeni Jews) and the self (Muslim majority) in the novel in a way that challenged her conceptualization of both.

Shifting frameworks of thinking to acknowledge the other. At some moments in class discussion, students reflected on how the questions they ask of the text exposed their own way of thinking. In these moments, the text worked as an other that exposed the self in the encounter, as Attridge (2004a) clarified when he discussed the process of encountering otherness: “the other exposes a reality or truth of which the culture and its subjects were unaware, and unaware for reasons that are far from arbitrary. This uncovered reality may be pleasant; it may equally be unpalatable or even dangerous” (p.

137). This was exemplified in the following incident in which students were able to catch themselves in the act of labeling and boxing identity of the protagonist, Salim.

As previously discussed in this chapter, the way the novel is structured and written, the ambiguity and openness in the events and characters posed a challenge to students’ conceptualization of identity. This led to different questions about Salim’s identity during discussions. Perplexed by the novel’s evasive style, students felt urged to

“resist usual modes of understanding” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 27) in order to acknowledge a new way of understanding identity. While their questions revealed the way they think, their ethical reading of the novel demanded they change their question and interrogate their stance that lead to those questions.

The following excerpt of class discussion happened during the seventh class- session discussing the novel. Ahlam asked why we are so obsessed with finding out what

Salim’s religious identity is, and whether he was a Muslim or Jew. She asserted that putting Salim in a box is opposite to what Salim wanted. She perceived the novel as a

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revolution against labeling and fixed identities. She explained how Salim does not confine himself within one boxed identity.

Before this moment, Ahlam’s group were discussing the part of the plot after

Salim died and his son failed to bury him with Fatima in the isolated grave inside the

Jewish cemetery. When the son buried Salim in the Muslim cemetery, people moved his grave to an isolated grave the following day. Salim’s son was frustrated by both the

Jewish and Muslim community and how his parents weren’t able to be together even after they died.

During the discussion of this part, Majid was confused why Salim did not join

Fatima in the Jewish cemetery, while Xiao explained that the reason was that Salim is now a Muslim. As I joined the group, we did a close reading of the part where both

Salim and Fatima ended in isolated graves in the Muslim and Jewish cemetery. We discussed clues in the novel that indicate if Salim was a Muslim or a Jew in order to understand the conflict about which cemetery he belonged. Majid asserted that Salim was a Jew despite declaring his conversion to Islam, citing indications in the text like his observance of Saturday. Xiao disagreed with Majid and emphasized the importance of

Salim’s declared identity and religion as a social identity. Ahlam rejected both arguments, and asked whether “the meaning is that you don’t have to strictly define yourself.” She continued to explain that “when we are preoccupied in categorizing

Salim, it makes it clear that we are doing the same thing the society is doing to him.”

Amal supported the idea emphasizing the identity of Salim as a human being. Majid revisited his initial stance and said,

Throughout the story, he [Salim] has been resisting the concept of identity. Especially when he said my madhhab [school of thought/sect] is madhhab of

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Fatima. And this is not a madhhab, it is his attempt to get out of… to resist the circles that society put over some identities and some people.

Ahlam agreed to Majid’s comment and stated that Salim chose to have a complicated identity. The debate about Salim’s identity summarized here demonstrates almost a trap we were lured into as readers. We found ourselves tracing clues in the plot to find out if

Salim died a Jew or a Muslim, until Ahlam discovered the trap. We were all exposed by the novel. We looked for the safety of a defined clear identity, and we were forcing it on the character who defied our logic, and exceeded our way of thinking.

In this section I discussed reading the novel as an inaugural moment that introduced students to creative and other-oriented reading. The novel, both through its genre and themes represented a site for students to explore reading as an encounter with alterity.

The Context of Production and Reception

Interrogating the context of the reading event. Reading a criticism of one’s heritage culture in a foreign context that is already hostile to such culture may cease to be an act of social self-criticism or a call of change, and become complicity and affirmation of stereotypes about one’s own culture. This was Rania’s concern as she read the novel.

In her reflection she wrote about the conflict in her feeling as she reads negative portrayal of Yemeni Muslims in the novel. On one hand, she can attest to the authenticity of the portrayal. On the other hand, she feels mad that this critique is presented to worldwide and western audience, she wrote:

I wish I could say I am mad that the author is presenting negative things about Yemeni Muslims, which are read by a worldwide audience (including a Western audience); however, I have no right to say that I am angry because I know how true these stories are. I have heard them from family members who were involved in these experiences first-hand. So who am I to tell the author to not

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portray Muslim Yemenis negatively when I know that the things he mentioned are accurate?

While Rania could attest to the authenticity of the author’s depiction of Jews suffering discrimination, she was conflicted reading it here in the U.S. with a Western audience. In the same reflection, she also commented on other stories of class discrimination in the novel and added that this classist mentality is still prevalent in Yemen until today, she finishes her writing with the following statement:

Like I said, I am not upset that these realities are being addressed because I know that they are accurate and there definitely needs to be a discussion about them. However, I am just upset that the audience I am reading this novel with does not know much about the Yemeni culture and this is what they get exposed to. I wouldn’t have felt this way if I was reading this novel in a college class in Yemen where this discussion HAS to occur.

As Rania’s reflections demonstrate, she was sensitive to the political, historical, geographical, and cultural context in which she read the novel. Rania was aware that the context of reading changes the meaning of the reading event, and the change the literary work may invite. She stated in her reflection above that the place where the discussion of the issues raised by the novel has to occur is a college class in Yemen. She understands how literature can be an “effective social agent” through the “multiple possibilities of change” it offers (Attridge, 2016, p. 228). Rania wished for a cultural shift in her heritage community as a result of reading the novel that expose and interrogate the

Muslim majority of Yemen, whom she perceived as the intended audience of the novel.

However, Rania was concerned about the place and moment of reading the novel in class; reading the novel in an American university within the context of mainstream Western culture that demonizes Muslims, in 2019 during the war on Yemen. The context of reading may have intensified a feeling of vulnerability for Rania as a Muslim student in a

U.S. education. 158

Additionally, Rania questioned the reading of her classmates who have little background on Yemen. She feared that the novel may have misrepresented the rich culture of Yemen through its focus on interrogating negative aspects of the culture like religious conflict and discrimination. She voiced these concerns during group discussion at the end of the novel. She starts explaining her stance with the following statement:

many people in this class don’t have any knowledge about the Yemeni culture and just like religious differences in general in Yemen. So, everything was negative negative negative. But there are positives in terms of the culture and how like … I definitely agree with the way that way Jewish people were treated was horrible and everything. It’s just ... It’s not just that part.

As she read the novel, Rania had to encounter an authentic depiction of negative aspects of her heritage culture. But knowing how rich her heritage culture is, Rania felt reduced by the context of the reading event. She feared if readers only hear Yemen in the news about religious conflict and war between Sunni and Zaidi, then read this novel about another religious conflict between Muslims and Jews, they will have a skewed perception of Yemen and its culture. Despite the novel’s authentic portrayal of Yemen’s societal problems, the negative images the novel depicted confirms negative images of Yemeni and Arab culture in mainstream Western culture. As much as Rania loved opportunity to read her first Yemeni literary work, she was not comfortable with where she read it. She would have preferred to read it where it could make the desired change, in Yemen. For

Rania, the effect of the novel is nullified or even inverted when the audience and place of the reading event shift from local to global. Rania’s concern echoed Huggan’s (2002) question, “What happens when marginal products, explicitly valued for their properties of

‘resistance,’ are seconded to the mainstream as a means of reinvigorating mainstream culture?” (p. 20). I believe this concern is very important to keep in mind whenever a literary text crosses the borders of its locality. I also believe as a teacher that this 159

misrepresentation was mitigated by two important factors in the classroom. These two factors are reading the novel in its original language, Arabic, and the fact that almost half of the students in the class were Arab heritage learners. I will further discuss these two factors in the next chapter. But for the sake of the argument against misrepresentation here, I believe these two factors complicated non-heritage learners’ understanding of the literary work.

In addition to these two factors, the open-endedness of the novel, and the way it was written helped to hold back such stereotypical reading, according to Xiao. A couple of days before the final group discussion on the novel, Xiao discussed the issue of representation with me in my office asking me how I feel about it as an Arab reader while explaining his parallel stance as a native Chinese reader:

when I see some foreigners or people outside of Chinese culture, they are so interested in reading some of the literature that they think are masterpieces produced by Chinese culture, I don’t like it because I think those pieces, they rainforest the stereotypes.

As Xiao explained during our discussion, he too had the feeling that the context of reading, the culture of the reader affects the reading. Like Rania, he was suspicious of the result of reading a locally critical literary work in a global context. Yet, with regards the novel The Handsome Jew, Xiao stated that due to the way the book is written in which “the author doesn’t explicitly convey his stance,” the book “appears very neutral” to him and he believe that the book itself doesn't really reinforce any stereotypes.

Misrepresentation concerns took a big part of the final group discussion about the novel. Different ideas were debated and different participants deliberated their stances.

As mentioned earlier in this section, Gwen affirmed her reading of the book’s powerful universal themes based on her own personal experiences and not at all a representation of

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Yemeni culture. Danny also confirmed how the book changed his view of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world. Through their discussion, all students in the class consented that they believe the book was written for Arab audience not for Western consumption and that they appreciated the discussion the book help open in its local context.

The sensitivity that some participants like Rania and Xiao expressed to the context of reading and its influence on the reading event, demonstrates an ethical stance towards the literary work and an understanding of the importance of the context of the event of reading, as Attridge (1999) explains:

To respond to the singularity of the text I read is thus to affirm its singularity in my singular response, open not just to the signifying potential of the words on the page but also to the time and place within which the reading occurs. (p. 25)

Through reading the novel, students negotiated different aspects of creative reading and negotiated the effect the context of reading and readers’ idioculture on the event of reading. Thinking about the audience, the context of the work’s production and reception, the effect the novel has as an agent of change in a society, all indicate an ethical stance toward the literary work and an understanding of the reading event in itself as a cultural product.

Conclusion

In this section, I examined the event of reading the novel, The Handsome Jew, as a moment of initiation into the course and into an encounter with otherness. Students frustration about the overwhelming amount of reading required each class session for the novel and the amount of new vocabulary led them to collectively embrace their vulnerability and feel their responsibility towards each other inspiring the formation of a community in the classroom. The novel’s themes challenged all students to think about notions of otherness. Some students experienced an intimacy with the novel and its 161

characters and found consolation in the novel’s embrace of excluded others. Other students were challenged by the novel to think about otherness in their home community, and rethink their perception of themselves. Students debated over the context of reception of the novel raising questions about politics of literary production and consumption both within the Arab world and globally.

Moment of Discomfort: Reading flash fiction The Astonishment of Storytelling

Introduction

Flash fiction or the very short story as a genre represents a blurring of borders between the short story and poetry (Taha, 2000). As a hybrid genre, flash fiction mixes poetic condensation with the fictional narrative language of short story employing brevity, tightness, and condensation (Nogueira Guimarães, 2009). While gaining increasing popularity among contemporary Arab writers, flash fiction as a genre poses specific challenges to readers due to the succinct language, lack of context, and its evocation of powerful emotions and surprise.

In this section, I discuss students’ reading of a number of flash fiction from an

the Amazement of Storytelling دهشة القص anthology of Saudi flash fiction named

(Alyousif, 2017). The book was published in 2017 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia by Alfaisal

Magazine, King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic study. While the book was published in 2017, it collects short stories previously published by the authors. We spent one class session reading this group of flash fiction in the middle of the semester after reading a number of short stories and before starting to read poetry. This order of genres was based on my understanding of flash fiction as a genre in between narrative and poetry, thus would offer a transition between the two.

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In this section, I discuss the beginning of this class session as a moment of discomfort. Unlike any other class session throughout the semester, the way this class session started was shocking to me as a teacher and a researcher. It was almost like a moment of rebellion that heritage learners led against the literary works. It was a moment of discomfort for everyone in class; for heritage learners who were challenged by the texts, for FL learners who were challenged by their lack of cultural background and by the raw emotions expressed by heritage learners in class, and for me as I had to respond as a teacher striving to do justice to all students as well as the literary work.

This beginning of the class session was mainly focused on the following four flash fictions (Alyousif, 2017, p. 71) which evoked different reactions and different readings in the class.

Table 1

Flash Fictions.

كرامة :Dignity] صرخ طف ل جائع A hungry child screamed دوت رصاص ة لتُشبعَهُ [.A bullet rang out to feed him نخوة :Chivalry] وقفت تسألهم She stood to beg from them فرموا سيئاتهم في كيسها .[They threw their sins in her bag مباراة :A match] بدأ األطفال مباراتهم وأنهوها في الجنة The children started their match, and finished it in heaven]. دليل :A guide] فتح الكتا َب ليستد َل به He opened a book to seek guidance َفقطعوا عن ُق ه .[They cut off his neck

Moment of Discomfort

Majid, who was co-leading the discussion that day with Xiao, started presenting the flash fiction. He presented the book and how it dealt with some social issues in Saudi 163

Arabia and other Arab countries. He mentioned the purpose of the book, as stated in the introduction, was to have a collection of Saudi flash fiction in order to enrich the cultural arena in Saudi Arabia. Majid then said in formal Arabic:

وهذا شيء غريب بصراحة ألنه يعني أنا ال أعرف عن وجود ... يعني ... ساحة للثقافة السعودية .. وال .. أنا

ال أعرف بوجود أي كاتب .. مؤلفين سعوديين أو ناس في هذه الساحة في المنطقة ليسوا معروفين بفنهم

وكتابتهم

And this is frankly very strange, because I don’t know of any Saudi cultural arena, I don’t know of any writer, or Saudi authors, or people in this arena in the [Arab] area they [Saudis] are not known for their art or their writing

Why are you saying“ ”ليه بس كده يا ماجد؟ “ ,Disappointed, I asked in an Egyptian dialect this, Majid?” Majid responded in mixed English and Iraqi dialect:

"بس دا أقول يعني I thought it was إنه شيء غريب، ما چنت أعرف أنهم أصال يكتبون . "

“I was just saying, I thought that it was a strange thing. I didn’t know that they [Saudis] even write.” This statement encouraged suppressed laughs of Amal, Ahlam and Rania, I suppose partly because they understood his Iraqi dialect, and partly because it referred to stereotypes within the Arab world about Saudis as Nouveau riche and uneducated. At this moment, I decided to interrupt Majid’s presentation and asked him why he thinks

Saudis don’t write, when Arabic literature originated in pre-Islamic Arabia. I added that

Mecca hosted markets like Souq Okaz for poetry contests from all Arab tribes in the peninsula. Majid interrupted me saying that he was talking about contemporary literature. I pushed back against his argument and said that just because he did not hear of Saudi authors didn’t mean they did not exist. I also mentioned that the elite authors in the Middle East were mostly Egyptians. I asked him if this meant that only Egypt writes.

Majid said no. He then shifted the presentation to talking about the themes depicted in the flash fictions, which he viewed as not representing problems in Saudi Arabia. Majid 164

questioned the motive behind the author’s choice of themes and his purpose of writing.

Rania affirmed this was exactly what she wrote in her reflection, and Ahlam agreed.

Majid continued his presentation in formal Arabic about two other authors praising their stories which were, in his opinion, more rooted in Saudi culture as opposed to Abdul-Jalil

Hafez’s four stories, which are translated above. He highlighted the similarities between the stories and reality:

"بصراحة أنا لم أستطع أن أقرأ هذه القصص من دون أن يكون هناك وجهة نظر سياسية ويعني لم أستطع

أن أفرق الواقع من القصة "

“Frankly, I was not able to read these stories without a political point of view, and I was not able to separate reality from the story.” He found it strange because the stories depicted suffering that is in reality inflicted by Saudi Arabia. Majid was referring to

Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. When I asked why he would not consider the stories as a criticism of Saudi Arabia from within, Majid replied:

ماجد: ولكنه انتقاد خفيف يعني وليس بانتقاد يعني بالمرة

األستاذة: أيوة بس انتا عارف الوضع بالسعودية

ماجد: غيروه!

األستاذة: االنتقاد الخفيف مش سهل

ماجد: غيروه .. غيرو الوضع! .. يعني احنا كمان كان عندنا نفس الوضع بالعراق وبسوريا وبمصر

األستاذة: وصلنا لفين يا ماجد في العراق وفي سوريا وفي مصر؟

ماجد: yep we’re trying

Majid: But it is very light criticism, and almost not criticism at all

Teacher: Yes, but you know the situation in Saudi Arabia

Majid: Change it!

Teacher: Even light criticism is not easy. 165

Majid: Change it! Change the situation! We too had the same situation in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt.

Teacher: And where are we in Iraq, Syria and Egypt?

Majid: Yep! We’re trying

Majid did not accept the possibility of the literary work being critical of the war given that the stories did not address who caused these atrocities. When I reminded him of the oppressive regime within Saudi Arabia, Majid angrily demanded Saudi people change that situation. He implicitly here, and explicitly later in the discussion, blamed Saudi people for not revolting like Iraq, Syria and Egypt in the Arab Spring. I proceeded to remind him of how the Arab Spring ended in the three countries he mentioned, my home country being one of them. Majid’s mournfully ended the conversation with, “Yep!

We’re trying.” Our disappointment at the failure of the Arab Spring threw a blanket of silence over both of us, while the class watched.

After a moment of silent, Majid resumed his presentation and talked about the next story. The story was about a family going to a park, the maid put three chairs. The father, mother and daughter sit each on a chair. Then the son pushed his sister from the chair shouting, “it’s my place.” The girl leaves to the swing crying, and the father laughs as he talks on the phone. After summarizing what happened in the story, Majid focused on the fact that the maid brought the chairs and did not sit with them. He then started criticizing the mistreatment of maids in Saudi Arabia. I said that the story is focusing on the status of the girl in the family. Majid responded that maids were also girls. Ahlam added that she was more concerned about the maid than the children in the story. Both

Rania and Majid supported this idea. At this point I felt a vibe of resentment, mainly on the part of heritage learners, to engage with the stories. Majid’s summary of the story

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Place was abrupt and full of unfinished comments in English, like “I don’t know!”, “this is like . . . ” as if words were stuck in his throat. I stood up addressing the whole class and said, in Arabic, “I am sensing there is a negative feeling towards these stories just because they are Saudi.” The response came in English:

Majid: Yeah, I will admit that

Ahlam: I’d say straight up

Majid: I come with a lot of bias against Saudi Arabia

Ahlam: yeah, me too. I can’t take it seriously

if the stories were] لو كانت القصص إماراتية مثال Teacher: would the bias stay Emerati]?

Rania: Yeah

[from the Gulf] خليجي Majid: Yeah, anything

[from the Gulf] خليجي Ahlam: Yeah, everything

I then addressed the FL learners asking if they too perceived the stories as insincere.

Xiao asked what I meant by insincere. I explained in English the argument of heritage learners. I then asked the whole class to sit their political stance aside to read the stories:

Teacher: can we set this aside and just try to sit and read it.

Ahlam: That would be hard

Danny: I think it’s, part of it is . . . it’s hard cause it’s so short. Like there is no context

Xiao: I thought it is just Saudis like writing about random topics, not necessarily about Saudi Arabia, right? Like the political theme.

I then asked Gwen what she thought and she responded:

Gwen: (chuckling) it seems very personal and I was very confused for most of the . . . I don’t know. It kind of reminded me of when we were talking about whether the Handsome Jew] had the right to write about] اليهودي الحالي or not the author of these things, and all the discussion about being able to separate an individual and that person’s intent from their background and the stereotypes of their broader . .

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like I don’t know anything about the writers so it may not apply to this dude, but to be able to separate the writer from stereotypes of where the writer is coming from.

Teacher: Yes, that’s important!

Gwen: Cause otherwise you just take away the voice of anyone from that place that might have good intentions.

The word “good intention” really got under my skin. I somehow felt I had to push back against Gwen’s comment. It seemed too uncritical for me, and inconsiderate given the gravity of the situation we are talking about. Although I agreed with her about the importance of separating the writer from the stereotypes about his community, I also agreed it was unethical to take away the voice of people, I just could not accept the phrase, “they might have good intentioned.” I responded, “But I think the level we are talking about here, is that so many things seem with good intention but in reality, like you can’t really even accept it because the reality is so cruel.”

The discussion diverted to literature within Saudi Arabia, allowing Majid to continue his criticism of the Saudi people. He viewed them as complicit as well as “lazy and incompetent, they are fine living the way it is, and it’s fine, but it’s not going to work for them forever.” I pushed back once more asking Majid how he would respond to stereotypes about Iraqi people. At this point I noticed that it had become just Majid and I arguing back and forth, and took note of the side conversations starting. I asked Xiao to start his part of the presentation, after which Majid apologized. “I didn’t mean for that to be a Saudi rant,” he said.

Later in her final interview, Gwen recalled the incident, explaining how shocked and confused she and Madeline were about what was happening. They wondered “why is Majid and the teacher fighting?” Gwen was also shocked at my position of

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disagreement with Majid’s stance; “A lot of my professors that are Americans . . . like there is a weird pressure on them to be impartial.” She asserted that it was an important moment for her to witness the “raw and intense emotion that was associated with the issue,” which is something that is often cut out of her academic study of conflicts in the

Middle East.

After Xiao’s presentation ended, I left the classroom to get a second recorder from my office. Despite the presence of one voice recorder in the room, heritage learners felt free to express their fury once I left. The following conversation was recorded in my absence:

[!I swear to God] وهللا العظيم !Majid: now they [Saudis] are writing short stories

kids started] بدأ األطفال مباراتهم ?Rania: The short story?! Did you see the last one their match]

Majid: I saw this one, I was like I am over it . . . . I was like I am over it! Rania: No! This is like the Yemeni children who started their school trip on the bus

Majid: Dude, I know! I know!

?in heaven] why is it about Yemen] في الجنة Rania: and they ended it

Amal: Isn’t that fucked? I saw that and I thought about Yemen too!

At this point, Gwen interrupted the conversation asking “What? Sorry!” Majid explained to her that they were talking about one of the very short stories that said the kids started playing and they finished playing in heaven. Amal commented that the story traumatized her. Madeline jumped into the conversation saying “Yeah that’s what I thought!” and

Xiao commented, “All these short stories, they are so unnecessarily traumatizing, it is too much, you know.” Danny brought up the first story about the bullet. Majid then commented that the stories were “not authentic” and “not from a real place.”

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The remainder of the class went on as usual, with student-led discussion in two groups. The beginning of this class session was particularly shocking to me; no other text we read throughout the semester stimulated such intense and emotional interaction on the part of heritage learners. This was the only incident in the class that the F word was recorded in students’ interactions. Majid was obviously furious and took his anger out on

Saudi culture. He questioned the genuineness of a Saudi cultural production. His anger gave voice to Rania, Amal and Ahlam who joined him expressing their resentment.

Rania mentioned in my absence that the story Match reminded her of Yemeni children riding a bus for a school trip and ending their trip in heaven. This was a reference to a

Saudi air strike in August 2018 that targeted a Yemeni school bus passing through a crowded market. According to CNN report, of the 51 people who died in this airstrike,

40 were children, and of the 79 people wounded, 56 were children. Amal, Majid and

Ahlam reacted to Rania’s reference to the news with intense emptions. This led Gwen, in the above interaction, to break her silence and interrupt the conversation, asking “What?

Sorry!” Despite the conversation above being fully in English, FL learners did not understand what was going on. They did not know the reason for heritage learners’ anger. This motivated Gwen’s question, to which Majid responded by explaining they were commenting on the story Match. Amal commented about how she was traumatized by this story, signaling more FL learners engaged in the discussion. The key word for them was “traumatizing.” They were able join the conversation by reflecting on the traumatizing language of the very short stories. Yet, they were not able to connect this traumatizing experience with reality, heritage learners did. Thus, as Xiao’s comment demonstrate, they perceived the stories as “unnecessarily traumatizing.”

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The Cultural Distance

In the following section, I utilize Attridge’s (2011) conceptualization of cultural distance to make sense of difference in reaction to the very short stories between heritage and FL learners. Attridge examines the cultural distance as a factor of reading. He explains that while in reading any literary work there is always going to be a cultural distance between the reader and the work, it is a matter of a degree. When trying to measure the cultural distance between the work and the readers, “it is not clear whether we are referring to the author’s own context or that of its first readers.” In addition, “the

‘first readers’ do not constitute a homogenous and clearly-defined group,” and the author’s cultural context is a matter of interpretation (p. 119). Thus, Attridge asserts, “the original context of the work” (p. 120) is a problematic notion which refutes the claim that a better reading is the reading that is more faithful to the original context of the work. On the other hand, a pure engagement with the work in a vacuum is impossible as the reader cannot discard their knowledge about the culture of the text’s production when reading.

The problem with the above dilemma about cultural distance, as Attridge explains, is the underlying notion “that there is one ideal reading towards which all empirical readings strive for” (p. 120). In his discussion of the ethics of reading a literary work from other cultures, Attridge asserts:

The distance is part of what makes the work valuable, and a responsible reading is one that will take full account of it rather than one that undertakes the impossible task of abolishing it.

There is always a cultural distance between the reader and the text, whether it is from one’s own culture or from other cultures. Doing justice to the literary work entails understanding the difference between the moment in which we read the text and the

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moment in which it was created. This understanding does not mean to delegitimize a novel reading of the literary work.

In the following section, I discuss the cultural distance between heritage and FL learners and the literary work. I argue that the distance between each group and the literary work invited a different mode of reading. While heritage learners lived through the texts as a human experience, FL learners resorted to “generalization and codification” of meaning Attridge, 2004b, p. 61) in an allegorical reading of the texts.

The cultural distance in heritage learners’ readings. The event of reading the very short stories by Hafez (Alyousif, 2017) demonstrated a cultural distance between readers and the literary work, the moment of creation and the moment of reception, and a cultural distance among readers themselves. For heritage learners, the source of tension was the difference between the moment of production and the moment of reception of the stories. While the volume was published in 2017, Hafez’s stories were published online in 2014, and presented in February of 2015 in the Ninth Symposium of Very Short Story in Sharjah. The symposium was dedicated to Aleppo, a Syrian city that hosted very short story symposiums before Arab Spring, and was titled, “Loyalty to Aleppo from Sharjah, the capital of Islamic culture.” While it is impossible to determine the cultural context of the author and the first readers of the literary work, it is possible for me to use my cultural background as an Arab to read through the events around the production and publishing of these texts and provide my interpretation. My interpretation of the cultural context of these very short stories suggest that the stories were referring to the war in

Syria. The Syrian crisis haunted the Arab imagination since 2011, and the Saudi stance was to support Syrian revolution against the Syrian regime. The Symposium in which

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the stories were originally presented was hosted by UAE, whose stance was similar to

Saudi back then. Participants of this symposium presented texts critical of Asad regime.

Their opposition continue until today, as their Facebook page demonstrates. The following symposiums have been hosted in Turkey in the past few years, which I believe is due to the change in UAE’s stance which is now supporting Asad regime. It makes sense to assume that the violence in these stories criticizes Al-Asad regime’s war against its own people, which aligns with the Saudi Kingdom’s official stance, especially since the volume was published inside Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the stories in my interpretation depict atrocities of war in Syria.

The context of reception of the stories was completely different. As we read the stories in class in the spring of 2019, Saudi Arabia had been launching “Decisive Storm” against Yemen since 2015 causing deterioration in the humanitarian situation in Yemen.

Saudi forces had been accused of multiple war crimes against civilians and children.

When heritage learners read the stories, the first thing that came to their minds was the suffering of Yemeni children. Yet students struggled with the idea that the author was

Saudi.

The shared historical and cultural conditions of war that targets civilians and children connected the two contexts of production and reception causing heritage learners to be strongly moved by the images in the stories. Attridge (2011b) explains that there will always be “some degree of overlap between the context of production and the context of reception, stemming from shared historical and cultural conditions or sometimes arising out of sheer coincidence” (p. 119). He asserts that without such overlap, the literary work would be incomprehensible to the reader. In the case of this

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group of very short stories, the two contexts almost matched. Rania started her reflection on the stories that she wrote before class with this statement:

Each story was unique in its own way, but the ones I loved the most were the four VERY short stories on page 71. Each story was 1–2 lines, but they were so deep. The first one, “Karama,” really got to me because it’s exactly what’s occurring to millions of children in Yemen. A hungry child cries out, and a bullet is what simply fills him/her up.

Rania was moved by the stories because it exactly depicts what is happening to millions of Yemeni children as she was reading the stories. The only difference between the moment of production and reception here was the regime responsible for these war crimes. The historical moment of reception, in which Saudi-led coalition was (and still is) destroying Yemen, ignited heritage learners’ anger against the Saudi author. Rania discussed her perspective on the stories during her final interview:

I honestly genuinely believe that the stories were very powerful and touching, just not coming from a Saudi. The problems that were addressed were things that Saudis are not going through, so why are they using other people’s miseries to create literature?

Rania’s criticism of the author’s use of other people’s tragedies to create literature does not perceive the work of art as a response to the cruelty of war. She perceives it as a use of war to create literature, to enter into the world of literature. Knowing that the texts were written by a Saudi author, and published in Saudi Arabia, the texts felt like a hypocritical use of others’ pain to write literature, while ignoring the fact that this pain is inflicted by one’s own government. Due to heritage learners’ familiarity with strict censorship in Saudi Arabia, they did not see the stories as an attempt to give voice to suffering Yemenis, or a critical stance against the Saudi government actions in Yemen.

Moreover, in Rania’s opinion which she iterated in her final interview, even if the author intended to use his voice to speak up for what’s occurring in other places, he had to

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address that he was speaking from a privileged perspective. For Rania, the vantage point of the author was very important in her reading of the text and her assessment of the purpose of the text and its message.

Although some disagreed with Majid’s stance, other FL learners followed his lead and began expressing a dislike that did not exist in their initial reflection on the stories.

As the earlier excerpt of the discussion in my absence demonstrates, Xiao and Madeline adopted heritage learners’ sentiment. Xiao’s remark on the “unnecessarily traumatizing” nature of the stories demonstrates a lack of emotional reaction to the stories. Thus, for him the depicted suffering was unjustified. It is as if Majid’s argument gave Xiao permission to dismiss the story out of hand. Xiao’s report summarizing the discussion clearly echoes the sentiment of heritage learners:

We discussed how the stories by Saudi authors read insincere, which could be ascribed to the strict censorship in place in the kingdom and to that the authors might try to relate forcibly to the sufferings that may not necessarily exist in Saudi Arabia or in their experiences. Therefore, the stories, while seemingly deliberately clung onto the topic of sufferings of various kinds, actually read insincere.

Xiao summary here summarizes Majid’s argument against the stories. Focusing on the commonly known strict censorship in Saudi Arabia, and commonly held perception of

Saudi and Gulf citizens as all wealthy, the stories focus on atrocities of war do not stem from an authentic experience of the author. Rather, they relate forcibly to a non-existent suffering. Thus, they are deemed insincere. This analysis is rooted within the cultural background of Majid and other heritage learners. It does not reflect FL learners’ background or perspective of the very short stories. Yet, Xiao’s summary of class discussion only highlighted this view.

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Heritage learners had a distressed reaction to the very short stories. This reaction indicates they lived the text as they read it. Their reading did not stem from an experience of otherness, but the experience of the familiar. As Arab young men and women, the only news they witnessed in the Arab world since their early childhood was war. In her final interview, Rania stated that the literary works that expressed her the most were the four very short stories, which for her was “frustrating.” However, the pain resulting from experiencing and living through the text caused contradictions. The context of the texts was a factor—their experience of the text, though emotive, did not lead to an ethical reading that preserved the experience of otherness. Rather, it led to the shutting down of the other. They had the ethical reaction to the stories, they were inflicted by the pain and suffering it depicts, and they had the angry response that would be, in my opinion, the ethical response, but this anger was directed back towards the stories themselves because of the national identity of the author.

Heritage learners’ attitudes towards the readings were fueled by their attitudes against Saudi Arabia as a cultural, political, and military hegemony in the Middle East.

During class discussion, Majid mentioned the movement of “buying and assimilating other cultures” in Gulf countries that “are clinging on to their nationalism as a source of pride and as a source of cultural heritage.” Rania talked in her final interview about the appropriation of Yemeni culture in Saudi cultural products.

The cultural Distance in FL learners’ readings. While heritage learners demonstrated awareness of the shared historical and cultural conditions between the context of production and the context of reception (Attridge, 2011), the historical and cultural difference between the two moments affected their readings. On the other hand,

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FL learners did not have this shared historical and cultural conditions with the moment of creation. This magnified the cultural distance between them as readers and the literary works.

To demonstrate this point, I examine online reflections of Madeline and Gwen among other FL learners. I do not focus on the online reflection of Danny and Nadia because each chose to avoid the stories on war in their reflection. Nadia related to the two stories, “Place” and “Girl,” depicting “the female experience in traditional societies.”

Danny only reflected on one story, “A Lonely Cup of Coffee.” His reflection focused on only one word in the story, ignoring everything else—the word “bitterness”—and he wrote about the bitterness of coffee as a metaphor of life. As for Xiao, he did not write a reflection because he was presenting that same day. But his summary of class discussion, which I examined above, demonstrates he adopted the stance of heritage learners and perceived the stories as inauthentic and shallow. In his interviews, Xiao expanded on how it was impossible for him to make meaning of the very short stories due to his lack of cultural background.

Both Gwen and Madeline wrote about all the stories assigned contemplating on the universal themes in them. Here, I examine their readings of the four stories translated above to contrast their understanding with heritage learners’ readings. It was evident that due to the cultural distance between them and the texts they almost had to read the texts out of context. For example, Madeline reflected on the meaning of the story, “match”:

In “match”, the children begin a game that ends in paradise. It does not specify what this “match” refers to, however, this might just acknowledge that we all begin at the same level as children and have different experiences in life but it will all eventually result in paradise.

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While Madeline’s interpretation is loyal to the language of the story, creative and beautiful, it is completely blind to the historical moment on both ends of the literary work, creation and reception. The focus on a universal theme of starting equally, but having different experiences in life, then eventually ending equally again suggests a moral message of the story, which indicate an allegorical reading (Attridge, 2004b).

Madeline’s reading avoids the “unfamiliar emotional and cognitive territory” of war, and remains in what she “already know[s] too well” (Attridge, 2004b, p. 43), some form of the American dream in which everyone starts at the same level with equal opportunities, and end in paradise.

What’s even more interesting is that after the heated class discussion Madeline decided to review her online reflection and added the next section:

I believe now that these matches refer to essentially any conflict you might encounter in life. Although the trials of life might be difficult, heaven is waiting at the end of it all. Although this message is somewhat dark in nature, I think it is important to highlight that struggles are temporary in nature.

This demonstrates that Madeline did not grasp Majid and Rania’s perspective of the story, as well as the reasons of their anger. In the conversation I discussed earlier,

Madeline missed Rania’s reference to the airstrike on Yemeni school bus since the context of war is not present for Madeline as it is present for Rania whose family continue to live throw the atrocity of war in Yemen. Madeline did not get Rania’s interpretation of the story as reflecting the cruelty of life in war zones. All what

Madeline wanted to correct was that the match may refer to conflict and that the message is dark.

Similar to Madeline, Gwen read the stories as universal lesson in life. She started her reflection with the statement, “I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to get from Dignity,

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Pride, Guide, and Game.” She lists a list of brief interpretation for each story. Her interpretation of the story, “match” was: “Children begin a game, and the game continues into paradise; childhood stays with a person forever, and, in a sense, life is a game.”

While I was not able to disagree with Madeline and Gwen’s interpretation of the story “match,” their interpretation of the other stories was obviously flawed and lacking

,in Arabic, guidance—دليل ,basic cultural understanding. In her interpretation of the story guide, and evidence—demonstrates another incident of going off context due to lack of shared cultural imagination. Madeline does not catch the authoritarian regime’s hatred for knowledge that is depicted in the story. She also misses the plural pronoun in the verb, “They cut his neck off.” Instead, this is how she understands it:

. . . in “evidence”, someone opens a book to demonstrate something and consequently gets his neck cut. Perhaps this is to say that although you might have proof of something, sometimes it is not worth it to risk anything personally to prove it.

Gwen chose to understand the title of the story as guidance, yet her interpretation seemed far from the text: “Sometimes always asking for guidance is actually detrimental.” For

Gwen, it was unimaginable to think of the story as signifying authoritarian regimes’ fear of knowledgeable citizens. She was so distant from that being in any realm of reality that she could not fathom a world where this could happen literally.

I argue that all FL learners remained within their own cultural framework whether by avoiding to discuss the stories that contained disturbing images, like Danny and

Nadia, or by using allegory to make sense of them, like Gwen and Madeline, or by questioning the literariness of the stories by accusing them as cliché, like Xiao. I understand that they were all challenged by the extreme lack of context in the very short stories. This was evidenced in Danny’s complaint in class discussion about the lack of

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context. It was echoed in Xiao’s interviews, and in Nadia’s reflection where she wrote

“The shorter the stories were, however, the more difficulty I had understanding the meaning.” Clearly the very short stories as a genre posed a challenge to all FL learners, which did not help them respond to the disturbing content in some of them. I also understand that, as Attridge (2011b) explains, “the responsibility of the reader is not to undertake a reconstruction of the original moment of reception in the home culture but to allow the norms of the host culture to be challenged by whatever is experienced as inventive in the work” (p. 117). It is an impossible task to reconstruct the original context of reception. And it was understandable that the reading of FL learners was impaired by their lack of cultural background. However, I still perceive their responses to the texts as avoidance of the intense pain that the disturbing images in the stories evoke. Resorting to allegory or avoiding the disturbing stories completely did not allow the literary works to introduce something different to the realm of the same. It was almost another way of shutting the texts down.

Ethical Moments

Looking for the cultural distance. Majid’s anger caused him to overlook an important part of his assignment as a presenter which is researching the authors’ background, political stances and history within their local context. Nevertheless, both

Ahlam and Rania asked questions about the background of the writers in their reflection and in class discussion. This demonstrated an attempt to understand and accommodate for the cultural distance between them as readers and the text.

During class discussion of the short stories Ahlam asked about the background of the writers, their political stances within their local community, and their history. I responded that this was the presenters’ job, I added, berating Majid’s earlier demeaning 180

comments against Saudi culture, that it seems he was too angry to look them up since, for him anyway, they do not deserve the research because they neither read nor write. This generated a quick laugh in class. Majid said, “No, no”, embarrassed by my comments.

Through my comment I wanted to remind Majid of the injustice with which he treated the literary work in his presentation because of his political stance. Ahlam invited the class to look up the author’s history and find out more about them.

Rania’s reflection that she wrote before coming to class also inquired about the author’s background:

I’m actually very curious to know what this author is referring to exactly in these stories. Last time I checked; Saudi Arabia wasn’t facing problems of this kind (not saying that the people are not facing any problems). But you never know what this author went through in his lifetime, so I’m curious to know.

The hesitation to judge the author’s motives that Rania expressed in her reflection and the curiosity she expressed to know more about what he was referring to, demonstrates an ethical stance towards the author. She emphasized her stance during the final interview when she talked about the very short stories. She expressed an interest to read more about the author stressing that “background matters, context matters, the author's background matters.”

Recognizing the singularity of the author. Gwen’s stance in class discussion, described above, also demonstrates an ethical stance towards the author as a singular within a culture. Her invitation “to separate the writer from stereotypes of where the writer is coming from” demonstrates a desire to register the alterity of the author’s singularity. Similarly, Rania, in her second interview, also talked about not looking at people as one. To illustrate her point, Rania talked about how when she lived in Yemen as a child, she always heard negative comments about the U.S. She remembered how this

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made her “fear the idea of America including the people and I’m one of them. I’m one of them now I was one of them technically because I was born here.” She explained how, in her own situation as a privileged American, she can distance herself from the actions of her government and use her voice to advocate for the other:

So as an American, for example, I should use my voice for whatever problem that the other is facing and address that this is not something that I’m facing, this is something that the other is facing and that would . . . that would distinguish between the people and the government in a way . . . that’s a way for these people to do it if they really care enough to speak up about these problems about what their government is causing.

Rania’s dual nationality of Yemen and America allowed her to witness firsthand how being casted into a collective identity blankets one’s individual stances and one’s singular responsibility towards the other. Due to attitudes against American imperial hegemony in the Middle East, Rania grew up to fear herself as an American. In the above quote, she is describing her responsibility as an American citizen towards the others of America.

In the same interview, Rania explained how she appreciated the author’s speaking up about such crises, “Are you trying to criticize your government in a way? If you are, then I appreciate your work. I really do.” She genuinely appreciated if a Saudi was criticizing his own government’s war crimes. That’s what she would do as an American, give her voice to speak up for the other. However, Rania’s knowledge of the harsh censorship in Saudi Arabia prevents her from appreciating the work in this way, that was what her next sentence about, “But . . . it was published in Saudi Arabia, so there was no way that the author could have directly said . . . my government . . . and I know this for a fact . . . like they will take you to prison.” It is common knowledge for Rania that such a tyrannical regime would not allow the publishing of stories that criticize it. Yet, Rania’s

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hesitation, her questions, her appreciation, the discomfort with her anger, all denote an urge to do justice to the author.

Conclusion

In this section, I examined an unforgettable moment for me and for everyone in the class, which we continued to reflect on it throughout the semester. Not only did this moment involve raw and intense emotions, but it also involved me being shocked by students’ reactions to the very short stories; I had not foreseen or expected this reaction as a teacher or as a reader. It felt like a moment of rebellion in which the majority of students, led by Majid, simply refused to read. They wanted to shut down the texts completely. They doubted if the text had something valuable to say. For heritage learners, this doubt was not because they did not relate to the texts. Rather, it was grounded in their political stance against the authors, not as individual authors but as a representation of a complicit cultural elite in an oppressive regime. Despite deeply and emotionally affected by the texts, living through them and experiencing the pain and suffering depicted in them, they were disappointed about the context of production and publication of these texts. On the other hand, FL learners’ cultural distance from the texts lead to an allegorical reading that focused on universal themes while ignoring the cultural specificity of the literary works. Their quick movement towards an allegorical reading did not allow them to emotionally engage with the suffering in the stories. For some of them the suffering felt “unnecessarily traumatizing,” for others they tried to interpret it as a metaphor for a more universal wisdom. But for all FL learners, the suffering was never literal.

As a reader, I believe these stories were meant to incite exactly the anger and trauma that characterized heritage learners’ response. I understand how this anger 183

backfired as a political response against the author, due to context of reading (reading the story in 2019 when Saudi is inflecting these tragedies on Yemen). I believe heritage readers were able to encounter the alterity of the text but not of the authors. The basis of my disagreement with heritage learners’ stance is my understanding of the literary text as a creative response to reality (Attridge, 2011, 2004a) and not a representation or a production of commodity.

I cannot ignore that the political stance the heritage readers took to silence the stories that illustrated pain and agony in the Middle East because they come from Saudi writers was a form of othering in the anthropological sense; a form of exclusion. Both

Gwen and Nadia took note of that and I agree with them. As an Arab reader, I believe heritage learners’ anger is justified. I believe they had the right to take a political stance as readers. Yet, as a teacher I believe this did not constitute an ethical stance towards an oppressive other or to the complexity of the other culture.

I also believe FL learners’ allegorical reading that was blind to the cultural context of the text failed to do justice to the literary work’s otherness. However, I do not disqualify FL learners’ reading based on the difference between their reading and a reading that takes into account the culture of the text (Attridge, 2011). Rather, I question their avoidance to perceive the possibility of the horrific suffering depicted in the stories to be literal or real despite studying conflicts and wars in the Middle East in college.

I wonder if this was also a moment of pedagogical failure. Although the rest of the class session was a productive discussion of the rest of the stories, class discussion failed to disrupt the readings of Hafez’s four stories. Even in class discussion we ended up avoiding them in order to keep the class going. We left the uncomfortable moment

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behind and went on to discuss the texts we can discuss. My feeling of failure stems from experiencing a conflict between my role as a reader, a researcher and a teacher, which was ongoing throughout the course but was intensified in this class session. Yet, the amount of times we recalled and revisited this moment throughout the semester tells me that discomfort we all experienced was a moment of being challenged and questioned; a moment of learning.

Possibilities of Meaning: The Return of Lilith

Introduction

In this section, I discuss reading the poem Lilith Return by Joumana Haddad, which was the final poem we read towards the end of the semester. I argue that Lilith poem provided an opportunity for proliferation of meaning and multiple opportunities for encountering alterity within the classroom community, and within the idioculture of each participant. This is due in part to the powerful staging of otherness in the poem, in addition to the moment of the semester in which the reading event occurred. Reading

Lilith at the end of the semester, as students got comfortable with class discussion and with each other, had multiple attempts towards a creative responsible reading, and their understanding of the process of meaning making has evolved.

At the end of the semester, Xiao arranged for a skype interview with the author,

Joumana Haddad from Beirut, and students were able to discuss their understanding of the poem with her and get her perspective, which led some of them to a new reading of the text.

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The Poem

The poem depicts the return of Lilith, the first woman created by God. In the poem Lilith narrates her rebellion against God and Adam, how she was cast away by angels, vilified and cursed by men and women. The poem starts with the following:

أنا ليليت المرأة القدر. ال يتملص ذكر من قدري وال يريد ذكر I am Lilith the woman fate. No male

أن يتملص. أنا المرأة القمران ليليت. ال يكتمل أسودهما إال escapes my spell and no male would wish

بأبيضهما، ألن طهارتي شرارة المجون وتم ّنعي أول to. I am the double moon Lilith. The black

االحتمال. أنا المرأة الجنة التي سقطت من الجنة وأنا السقوط can only be completed by the white, for my

الجنة. purity is the spark of debauchery, and my probing is the beginning of the possible. I am the woman-Paradise who fell from

Paradise, and I am the Paradise-fall.

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Encountering Alterity

The Biblical Reference

In the poem, Lilith the biblical legend of the first woman who defied Adam and

God and was therefore banished, reintroduces the story of origin from her perspective.

The Biblical references in “the return of Lilith,” colored the poem from beginning to end.

The book starts with a verse from Isiah “Wildcats shall meet with hyenas; goat-demons shall call to each other. There too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest” (Isiah 34:

12–14).

A Biblical Reading

Most students did not pay attention to the Biblical verse in the introduction of the book. But as we discussed the poem in my office, Gwen told me that once she started reading the poem, she “did a bunch of research about Lilith” because she never heard of her before. She consulted two of her cousins who went to Seminary and they confirmed to her that Lilith never came up in any textbook or reading. Gwen explained to me that the verse translation was not authentic, and “you have to hunt for a translation” that matches the one in the introduction of the book. She explained that the verse was about

“God being angry and he's going to destroy the city and it’s like the city will go into ruin and like owls will nest there the creatures of the night will sleep there.” So, the above translation replaced “creatures of the night” with “Lilith.” This made Gwen angry, since she perceived starting the book with this verse as insincere. She stated, “it just seems like she's trying . . . she just seems misleading from the very beginning.” The author’s use of the quote annoyed Gwen who saw it as a way to legitimize the author’s ideas, and not as an adaptation of a folk Myth. Gwen’s attention to the verse and her research around the

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authenticity of Lilith in the Biblical tradition suggests that she saw Lilith’s narrative as challenging the stories that she grew up hearing about.

Gwen wrote in her reflection that she “found the writing aggressive, bitter, spiteful, disturbed, judgmental, and ignorant.” Commenting on different parts of the poem, Gwen is criticized how Lilith boasted about sending the serpent to tempt Adam,

“She violated the most intimate and important part of Adam, his soul. For one to boast, to “win” by driving others into sin, is a dark and disturbing place to be.” She repeated this idea during class discussion, “I take a lot of issues about her bragging about causing the original sin.” She saw the reference of the original sin in the poem as an elevated reaction against Adam. In her reflection, Gwen wrote that Lilith “took her spite and elevated it from name-calling to driving people into sin.” Gwen ended her angry tirade against Lilith during class discussion with saying “I just think she is a hypocrite, spiteful and I don’t like her.” Gwen clearly did not like the poem. She expressed this in her reflection, in her meeting with me before and after class, during class discussion, at the end of the course when we revisited the poem after virtually meeting with the author and in her final interview with me after the course ended.

I observed she was completely silent during the virtual interview with the author, although the interview was conducted in English to insure everyone had equal opportunity to express their ideas regardless of proficiency level in Arabic. When the whole class reflected after the interview on how their reading of the poem changed after meeting with the author, Gwen expressed that while she agreed with author’s views during the interview, she maintained that her reading differed from the author’s reading

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of the poem. She explained that if the author really meant what she said in the interview, she would have written the poem differently.

Welcoming Lilith, an Allegorical Reading

Other students in the class read the Biblical references as a poetic decision, a return to the point of beginning to set things right. Majid, Amal, and Madeline expressed how they appreciated the act of going back to the genesis story as a way to illustrate how deep patriarchal notions about women get.

When I asked him in the final interview about what literary work challenged him to change the way he thinks, Majid mentioned Lilith:

Majid: the Lilith piece was interesting idea of Eve being from Adam as an idea that society kind of accepted, whereas Lilith is the new idea of equality, I thought that was pretty intriguing. Definitely changed the way I think about that subject.

Teacher: In what way?

Majid: Like, I am aware of the patriarchal kind of language and dialogue and understanding of the world that exists, but this kind of showed really how deep these ideas can be and where these patriarchal toxins come from, like the origin story.

In the above excerpt, Majid reread the story of Adam and Eve through the poem of Lilith.

He realized how the origin story reflected patriarchal notions of inequality by making

Eve a part of Adam. Majid did not see any contradiction between his religious believes as a Muslim and the narrative presented in Lilith poem. His welcoming of Lilith as a

“new idea of equality” and its questioning the underlying notions in the story of creation demonstrates his understanding of the story of origin as a reflection of societal ideas about men and women. His class interaction also demonstrated an understanding of

Lilith poem as a more equal narrative. When his group deliberated over the use of a

Biblical framework in light of the fact that the author self-identifies as atheist, Majid

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stated that the poem reintroduced Lilith as an independence being. He explained that the new perspective on woman through Lilith, is “a different interpretation I think a more equal interpretation of what men and women should be, biblically speaking.” Majid’s comments demonstrated he embraced this more equal interpretation. Similarly, Amal saw the mention of the serpent as Lilith’s messenger as “Exposing different ways that men blame women.”

Similar to Gwen, Madeline started her reflection by reporting her research on the

Biblical story of Lilith “to see if there would be parallels with the poetry” and summarizing the Biblical myth of Lilith. However, she had a completely different reading of the poem. For example, she reflected on Lilith’s detest of Adam and the need to obey, by writing:

I think that this first section in a way ties into the struggle between genders that occurs around the world. In many societies historically, women have been seen as “belonging” to a specific male, which is exactly what Lilith strives to avoid in her life. This section ends with her saying “what man lacks so that he is not wracked with guilt, what woman lacks so that she may become.” Here, she seems to be implying that this tendency for women to submit themselves to men only holds them back, and through rejecting this submission, women can achieve their full potential.

Madeline interpreted Lilith leaving her husband as criticism of women submission and the societal notion that a woman belongs to a specific man. She read Lilith’s rebellion as a rejection to submit, an endeavor to fulfill oneself. The above excerpt of Madeline’s reflection demonstrates how she moved quickly from its Biblical origin by reading it as a global criticism of gender struggle. She also interpreted the second section of the poem as redeeming Lilith’s character who was exclusively seen as a demonic figure in the

Biblical myth. Reading a “feminist message” and “a more positive image” of Lilith in the second section:

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Here, she is still defiant, but in a way that stands up for herself and for all women. She is something that can be found in all people.

Madeline read Lilith not only as a representation of womanhood, but also of humanity.

In her final interview, Madeline told me that since she went to a Catholic high school and grew up Christian, reading Lilith challenged what she was being taught. Yet, she asserted, she enjoyed the reading to which her first reaction was, “Oh, this is interesting, I have never heard of this.” Madeline was able to relate to Lilith since, as she explained in her final interview, Lilith was closer to her experience in her life. Madeline was able to relate to Lilith through her own experience despite her religious narrative being challenged.

The Poem’s Language

One of the main challenges of the poem is its mimicking of a Biblical language. I could see as a language teacher that the vocabulary and sentence structure of the poem was completely new to all students. I anticipated this challenge and decided to offer the students both the Arabic poem as well as the English translation of the poem that was published in Haddad’s book, Invitation to a Secret Feast. I copied the pages that has the translation of the two sections of the poem. I reviewed the translation and found out in the translation of first section of the poem dropped sentences from the original Arabic poem in 3 places. I translated the missing sentences myself and typed them on top of the book’s pages before I gave it to students.

Having the translation in English in their hands changed the way students read the text, as opposed to previous texts throughout the semester. For example, while students made sure to refer to the Arabic text in their reflection and discussion, I noticed that during discussions students referred to the translation more than the poem itself. Only

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students with higher language proficiency level, like Majid and Rania, complained about the difficulty of the language of the poem. Majid, in his final interview said that the poem was “difficult to digest” due to its “biblical terms” which he “wasn’t familiar with.”

Similarly, Rania confirmed in her final interview that she had a hard time understanding the language of the poem. None of the other students commented on the language of the poem, which makes me assume they didn’t even try to read the Arabic first, like Rania and Majid did. Gwen confirmed this assumption when she described how she read the poem “English and then the Arabic, sentence by sentence.” I believe that having the

English translation allowed participants more access to the poem and more opportunities to engage with and discuss its difficult themes. However, I also believe it may have neutralized the linguistic alterity of the poem. For example, I noticed in class discussion there was less debate on linguistic features of the poem, meaning of words or expressions, and more debates about the poem’s themes. The meaning of the language of the poem was deemed unproblematic as students perceived the translation as the English equivalent of the text and not the translator’s interpretation. While some of the poems in the book were translated by Haddad herself, translations of the two Lilith poems were made by Marilyn Hacker, Khaled Mattawa, and David Matthews.

When Gwen discussed the poem after class in my office, she told me she did not agree with many descriptions of Lilith in the poem, and referred to the ending of the first

-This was translated as “I am Lilith the adversary .أنا ليليث المخلوقة الند والزوجة الند ,section creature, the adversary wife.” Through our discussion I discovered I disagreed with the

I explained to Gwen that .الند translation’s use of “adversary” as a translation of the word

I understand the word to mean “an equal partner.” The dictionary’s translation of the

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word gives the following meanings, “equal, (a)like, same, an equal, a peer, partner, antagonist, rival” (Wehr, 1994). Yet, the translator chosed the word adversary, which for me was too strong in implying animosity. As we closely read the final lines of the first section in Arabic and discussed the meaning, Gwen said it made more sense to her and admitted, “then like I’m limited and I don’t know the nuances of the text.” I explained to her that I gave them the translation to help with their reading of the text’s difficult language, but they can disagree with the translation. Yet, she still maintained that the poem “has just kind of a dark undertones.” When I asked Gwen to reread the poem after our discussion and try to be open to it and enjoy it, she refused, adding “I read it more than once before the reflection and I just . . . I mean . . . I don’t . . . I feel super combative against it.” While Gwen’s stance against the poem was colored by her own believes, her experiences, and her reading of the author, I believe that one of the reasons of her resentment to give the poem another chance was because she read the English translation, which to some extent closed the possibilities of meaning for her and probably for other students in the class.

Encountering Gender

The depiction of gender in the novel staged another aspect of alterity which students encountered in different ways.

Avoiding the encounter. Whereas the other two male students in class were very excited about the poem and welcoming to its challenging of gender notions, Danny did not welcome the challenge. Danny started his reflection by stating that despite reading the poem in Arabic and English and the author’s biography, he still found it confusing and hard to follow. He added:

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I wonder if this is the case for most men in the class. As a white male in society I feel that I am numb to so many systemic biases that it is hard to scratch the service of issues such as gender inequality. I have never faced any issue, therefore systemic issues pass right over me, unless it is extremely clear such as Catcalling, etc. However, the grave injustices of gender inequality from an institutional perspective both in and outside of the Arab world are very hard for me to follow, not because I do not care, but because I don't subconsciously think about it.

Danny found his gender as a “white male” significant to his reading, and thus began his reflection by declaring it as such. He justified his numbness to gender inequality by reverting to his personal experience as a “white male” who “never faced” such inequality.

Danny’s wondering whether other male students in the class felt the same, implies an understanding of gender as an alterity. In the above excerpt, Danny denies his indifference to gender inequality, yet he showed no interest in furthering his understanding through reading the poem, which symbolizes an avoidance of the encounter with alterity of gender.

Aside from one comment about Eve, the rest of his reflection demonstrate a fixed understanding of gender which was not challenged after reading the poem or discussing it in class. He wrote about societal “norms such as women are nurses, men are engineers, women cook, men grill” and how he believed the author was “trying to eliminate these stereotypes.” He then expressed his opinion about the impossibility of equality due to biological differences:

If this is what she is trying to express I think it is valid. The problem is the biological complications of genitalia and hormones. The physical and biological environment that we live in overpowers the hopes and desires for equality and neutrality, in my opinion.

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While he perceived the poem’s challenging of gender stereotypes was valid, by referencing the biological differences as making this challenge impossible, Danny is dismissing the poem. It is interesting that he did not discuss even one line in the poem.

In class, he started his group discussion by saying “it is a bit strange,” then repeated what he wrote in his reflection about being a man, and how he believed it to be the reason he couldn’t understand. He stated that he was confused because the author’s biography said “Haddad did not believe in feminism,” but then Lilith is “like a feminist

God.” Xiao asked Danny where he read that. Gwen explained that the introduction of the book stated that author was opposed to labeling. Xiao commented that the author was

“definitely a feminist in the conventional sense.” Amal added, “I think that she sees women don’t have to be feminist label, it’s natural.” As the beginning of his group discussion demonstrates, it seemed that Danny was avoiding discussion of the poem itself by directing the conversation towards the author. He continued to redirect the conversation away from the poem itself throughout the discussion.

Danny kept repeating that the poem was deep, “I think this is one of the deepest things we read so far,” but during final interview mentioned that Lilith really bothered him. When asked why, he cited the reason being “her challenge of gender.” He added,

“I don't really believe in feminism,” and then stressed that he “can't sympathize with someone that calls every single man a gruesome human being.” In spite of this, when

Gwen raised several issues with the poem during discussion, Danny did not engage or bring up any of his opinions about the poem itself, further demonstrating his aversion to engaging with the text. Danny decided to spend the final 5 minutes of discussion, in his

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group, talking about summer plans with Gwen. Everything he did pointed at shutting down the poem and avoiding the challenge it posed.

Encountering Aggression

One point of discussion that both groups discussed was the aggressive language in describing Lilith, the “woman-man,” “who binds her men, then weeps for them,” who is

“quick to betray,” and “whose thousand cuts are more tender than a thousand kisses.”

Nadia, in her group, brought up the aggressiveness of Lilith in the poem and saw it as a challenge to societal prescription of women’s behavior. Thus, Lilith in her aggressive language in the poem defies the prescribed image forced on women by the society.

Is being aggressive something that is essentially feminine that is being suppressed? It reminds me of when women are socialized to behave a certain way, certain aspects of behaviors are masculine and certain as feminine and that’s like oppressed

Xiao, in his group, responded to Gwen viewing Lilith as aggressive, and her comment,

“There was never an aggressive man in the poem” by defending Lilith:

They are all names people used to call her. Some women used to think of her as too manly. Some men thought of her as like evil. If anything, if there is anything aggressive in this poem, it’s the aggressive language about Lilith, not anything aggressive about man. I don’t know why men get offended reading this. What I think is Lilith can be many things, good things and bad things, and she is playing with those labels and she is challenging, she is trying to say that you can be good and you can be bad.

Xiao explained his understanding of the Lilith story of origins in which women and men start as being equal, and both have possibilities. He saw in the aggressive language in the poem a reflection of the historical aggression against Lilith and women like her. He continued throughout the discussion arguing that the poem in clearing Lilith of the defaming labels, aims at clearing all women, and explaining, “I think she is trying to clear

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women who are labeled as Lilith, women who were just arbitrarily labeled as Lilith, because of somethings that were not their fault.”

Encountering Eve

The poem’s depiction of Eve in contrast to Lilith was one of the main issues in students’ reflections and conversations. Eve is introduced in the poem as the rib for cowering:

أنا ليليت المرأة األولى، شريكة آدم في الخلق ال ضلع الخضوع. من التراب خلقني ألكون األصل، ومن ضلع آدم خلق حواء لتكون الظل. عندما سئمت زوجي خرجت ألرث حياتي. ح ّرض ُت رسولتي األفعى على إغواء آدم بتفاح المعرفة، وعندما انتصر ُت أعد ُت فتنة الخطيئة إلى الخيال ولذة المعصية إلى النصاب.

I am Lilith, the first woman, Adam’s partner in creation, not the rib for cowering. From dust God created me to be the origin, and from the rib of Adam, He created Eve to be the shadow. When I could no longer stand my husband, I left to inherit my life. I instructed my messenger, the serpent, to tempt Adam with the apple of knowledge. When I won, I returned the charm of sin to imagination and restored the pleasure of disobedience.

The portrayal of Eve was one of the main issues that generated a lot of argument in class discussion, as the discussion leaders, Xiao and Nadia, reported in their summary of class discussion:

We also discussed how the poet’s lines on Eve can be read as some dismissal of Eve as a woman. She seems to use Eve to represent the women who hold traditional values, and criticizes them as simply fulfilling the goal of continuing the human lineage by giving birth to children, a duty that is prescribed by men. Some argued that such duty, if willingly assumed by women, should not have discredited such women.

The above comment summarized Gwen’s position of viewing the portrayal of Eve in the poem to be offensive. During class discussion, Gwen explained how Lilith was “very submissive of Eve, and she puts her down and she mocks her as being nothing more than the rib of cowering.” Putting Eve down symbolized for Gwen putting other women down. Gwen ended her written reflection with the following sentence:

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To me, Lilith is the woman that tears down women around her who have a different sense of self and fulfillment, and she does it because she doesn’t know what she wants or how to get there.

Even when she got away from the religious interpretation of Lilith, Gwen saw in her people from her past, people who had put other people down. Gwen mentioned earlier in the course how she had felt alienated in her school for being conservative. During class discussion, Gwen said that Lilith reminded her “of someone who like goes through life knocking other people down.” After class session, I asked Gwen if she felt comfortable discussing her ideas during class discussion. She confirmed that everyone in class was very respectful, and explained that her feeling uncomfortable with the poem had to do with her previous experiences being looked down upon by her colleagues for being religious. Identifying with Eve, Gwen saw in Lilith character people who ridiculed her in her past. When I asked her if the text unsettled her ideas, she responded that this unsettling happened to her on a daily basis. But when I asked her if her point of view changed after class discussion of the poem, she mentioned that she would like to read more texts like the poem, but not for Joumana Haddad.

The other group too discussed the dismissal of Eve in the poem. However, Nadia perceived Eve in the poem not as a real woman, but as the archetype of prescribed femininity: “But also when she talks about Eve, it’s not so much Eve as a woman, but how men constructed femininity.” In this case, the dismissal of Eve is a dismissal of the femininity image prescribed by a patriarchal society. Madeline reflection, discussed earlier, demonstrated a similar interpretation in which by distancing Eve, Lilith is avoiding the way women has been historically seen “as belonging to a specific man.”

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Reconceptualizing the Self in the Encounter of the Other

Except for Gwen and Danny, most students in the class identified with Lilith in the poem some way or another. This identification was sometimes uncomfortable, other times it led to questioning the self, or to an affirmation of agency and freedom.

Uncomfortable Encounter with an Inner Alterity

Identifying with Lilith was a source of uncomfortable feelings for some students.

For Rania, the depiction of Lilith as everything and its opposite made her seem like an attractive mythical figure. In her reflection and in class discussion, she discussed how she felt she wanted to be Lilith:

It almost made me want to be Lilith at times because of her confidence and superiority (??) when I know that this is not my personality and I would never want to be portrayed in sexual way. However, she was portrayed in such a complete way that she has (and she is) everything. She is the two genders, she is the DESIRED gender (p. 13); this almost made her even more superior to men rather than just equal to men, which was so interesting to read.

Rania wanted to be Lilith, contrary to how she perceived herself, denoting conflicting feelings of admiration and fear. The completeness of Lilith that attracted Rania’s admiration is mixed with her objection was to the sexual depiction. Ahlam and Nadia during class discussion described a similar feeling:

Nadia: For me Lilith seems more of like an Anti-Heroine that I think is attractive, too.

Ahlam: Yea, like when I read this, I almost admire her but that makes me uncomfortable because—

Nadia: Exactly

Ahlam: This is not the good side—

Nadia: Yeah

Being uncomfortable with their admiration of Lilith seemed to be grounded in the way

Lilith contradicted their understanding of themselves. Rania mentioned sexuality, and 199

Nadia and Ahlam mentioned Lilith being the villain. One of Ahlam’s remarks during the discussion may illuminate these two remarks. Ahlam started her discussion with affirming the patriarchal fear of women as a threat to be a reoccurring phenomenon. She added, “They counter that by vilifying women in any way possible.” When I asked her how women were perceived as a threat, she gave an example of what she called

FGM), to which I agreed and asserted how) ” الختان الفرعوني Pharaonic circumcision“

FGM was a way to neutralize women’s sexuality by denying her sexual desire. I believed

Ahlam’s example of FGM as a cultural tradition in Sudan, Egypt and other African societies perfectly illustrated a societal conceptualization of women’s sexuality as a threat, and loved the way she connected vilifying Lilith-women to the violent act of

FGM. Yet, we were not able to take this point further in the discussion after her sentence and my comment as the discussion took a different direction with Nadia’s comment on the aggressive nature of Lilith. Reflecting on this moment now, I am not sure if students were uncomfortable discussing the issue or that they did not even notice the mention of

FGM. Both Ahlam and myself used the Arabic word for FGM which, I assume, may have been the reason for the discussion of this point to be cut off.

Connecting Lilith’s vilification with her sexuality seem to offer an explanation of

Rania and Ahlam’s uncomfortable admiration of Lilith. An admiration that did not seem to feel right for them due to, I argue, an internalized aversion towards women’s sexuality.

Tarc (2015) discussed reading as more than a function of the conscious and comprehending mind. She explained, “Reading mostly plunges us into the unconscious where reside our difficulties with comprehension, and particularly with those representations that call into question passionate attachments to our self and others” (p.

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77). I believe the discomfort they experienced was an unconscious conflict between societal understanding of sexuality as a threat, and an inner other embracing such sexuality. Attridge (2004a) explained, “Otherness is that which is, at a given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving.” This understanding of Lilith as an inner other is also supported by

Nadia’s comment during class discussion—“each woman has a little bit of Lilith”—a phrase that all her colleagues quoted in their later discussion or reflection on the poem.

Nadia emphasized this idea in her final reflection on the course: “As a woman, I feel like we all have a little bit of Lilith in us, and that reading Joumana Haddad’s poem on Lilith serves as a reminder to us about this truth.”

The embrace of Lilith as part of the self, though uncomfortable for some, is in agreement with the poem’s glorification of Lilith’s—perceived—negative description.

Nadia pointed this out in class discussion, “I almost feel like women are demonized no matter what they do. Lilith is like the archetypal woman as demon.” Nadia added,

“Well, you know women are going to be demonized anyway, so we might as well own it.” The encounter with the poem represented “a reminder” of an inner alterity, exoneration of a demonized version of the self.

Furthermore, students pointed out how tension between admiration and fear, desire and unacceptance characterized men’s feeling towards Lilith, as the following excerpt of class discussion demonstrates:

Nadia: I thought that was interesting because it’s like Lilith is an unacceptable woman, but she is the woman that Adam—

Majid: Wants.

Nadia: Wants (laughing).

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Majid: Of course.

Majid completed Nadia’s sentence and confirming her understanding. Furthermore, when Ahlam’s group discussed Lilith as scary figure, it seems like the female students identified with Lilith. It started when Majid stated that he liked Lilith, to which Ahlam responded that he would be shivering in fear if they brought Lilith to him. As Majid laughed loudly, Amal, who was working with the other group, jumped into the conversation to assert, “Men are so terrified of women.” In response, Ahlam quipped,

“Yea, it’s true, they are so terrified,” while Majid continued to laugh and affirmed his agreement saying “scared!” By questioning Majid’s declared fondness of Lilith, the conversation moved from Majid being afraid of Lilith, to men being terrified of women.

Both Ahlam and Amal align themselves with a powerful Lilith that terrified men. This interaction demonstrates how the inner Lilith surfaced when Lilith was replaced, in their comments, by women.

Questioning Lilith, questioning the self. The feminist message of the poem was clear to all students. Madeline wrote about it in her reflection and it was a significant part of students’ discussions. Ahlam perceived the distinction between Lilith and Eve as a distinction between two types of feminists. Xiao and Nadia summarized Ahlam’s interpretation in their report on class discussion:

Some felt like Joumana Haddad was pitting Lilith against Eve (almost as if Lilith was this radical feminist and Eve was the one who is more traditional and tries to improve things within the patriarchal system) and that this was not helpful for women overall.

In her group, Ahlam discussed how she viewed both Lilith and Eve as two opposites on the spectrum of feminist movement. She discussed what she called a “Toxic narrative” in which women “bring each other down” as “counterproductive.” In her discussion of how

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“feminism is relative to societal context,” Ahlam reflected on her own feminist beliefs in contrast to her family members and Sudanese feminist in her home country. She explained, “feminist movements in Sudan are completely different than mine . . . it’s not radical like my thoughts.”

She added that she had to respect her mother who she perceived as “a Sudanese feminist,” despite disagreeing with her positions. Ahlam stated her obligation not be arrogant or say, “Yours is not the right way” to her mother or other Sudanese feminists.

She added, “We both contribute inside and outside, the radical feminists and the traditional feminists both contribute.” In her interpretation of Lilith as a radical feminist,

Ahlam identified with her, and questions the arrogance of both Lilith and herself. Ahlam continued this self-interrogation during her final interview. Ahlam reflected on how she would criticize her mother and women in her family “for saying something problematic, offensive, degrading to women.” Yet, “By being inside the system and by being who they are, and by being mothers and by being caregivers and workers, single mothers, maybe they are doing more than I could ever do.” Ahlam stated that it was unfair for her to undermine the struggle of women inside her community: “They are the ones that are clearing the way. They are the ones that are making a change essentially, a generational change.” As she felt uncomfortable with Lilith’s categorization of Eve, Ahlam revisited her own attitudes towards females in her family and community. While she aligned with

Lilith’s radical views, she felt the need to embrace Eve as occupying a different space on the spectrum of feminism. By doing so, Ahlam pushed the poem to transcend its own limits.

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In the final interview, Rania reflected in the class interview of the author and how it changed her perspective on the poem. In the interview, as Rania quoted her, Haddad said, “It’s not about excluding Eve, it’s about including Lilith.” Rania added that this was different from the way she initially read the poem. However, in the same interview,

Rania admired how Gwen disagreed with the author’s interpretation of the poem. Rania agreed with Gwen that the author’s intent expressed in the interview, not excluding Eve, was not clear in her writing. While Eve needed to be included here, in the West, Rania understood the poem to be calling for “including Lilith in the community especially in our community. We don’t include people like Lilith” in the Arab world. Like Ahlam,

Rania appreciates what both Lilith and Eve stand for.

Lilith as freedom. During his class discussion of the poem, Xiao saw that the poem is about freedom and choice. Reading a universal statement in Lilith, he stated, “I think it’s all about freedom,” not only freedom of women, but also freedom of humanity.

He explained:

I think what she is trying to say is for the right and for the wrong . . . for the good or for the bad, you are entitled to do them anyways because you are free created with the possibilities . . . any possibilities . . .

out] "من فرط الحياة عند احتمالها خلقها ليليت" ,To support his interpretation, Xiao cited the poem of the excess of life at its possibility, He created her Lilith]. Created out of possibilities,

Xiao interpreted, Lilith is entitled to her choices and responsible for them. Xiao concluded, “God created Lilith with all possibilities. Bad qualities of Lilith, converted to meanings of freedom, she can be what she wants.” From Lilith Xiao learned the value of choice, that’s how he ended his final reflection on the course:

I think I will remember the Lilith poem forever, because it encouraged me to pursue what I want without minding other people’s labelling—we should take

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control of our own lives. And isn’t Lilith one of the “others”? And if so, then who are we to judge her?

The welcoming of Lilith without judgment, interpreting her as the possibilities of life, reading the poem as self-liberation of demonizing discourse that haunted her for centuries, made Lilith like a hero to Xiao.

Similarly, Nadia wrote in her final reflection how the poem was one of her favorite texts throughout the course. She stated that she would recommend it to her mother and her best friend to read in English. She added, “I think that the Lilith character and her story is almost universally relatable to women and maybe even to most men, even if one does not agree with emulating all aspects of her character.” Nadia also reflected, at the end of the semester in response to the survey, on how Lilith poem made her feel stronger and helped her stand up for herself.

I noticed after reading the Return of Lilith, I spoke up to a man instead of keeping my thoughts to myself, and I was proud of myself for doing that! It made me feel a little stronger. I was thinking about that poem for days!

Reading the poem helped Nadia to speak up, and Xiao to assert his personal liberty.

The Context of Production and Reception

Students examined the context of production of the literary work during class discussion. Danny stated during discussion that he thought the author “is almost like not

Arab” because she was “so well informed” and “speaks so many different languages.”

When Xiao, who studied abroad in Beirut, interrupted by saying that this was a normal thing in Lebanon, Danny said, “I don’t think we have read anyone as . . . I don’t want to say western educated because that’s not the right word but . . .” The conversation then continued between Amal and Danny:

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Amal: I think it’s not western at all, I think it’s just being a woman, I don’t think this has anything to do with her being Arab. I think she is breaking stereotypes everywhere

Danny: Well, I agree but I am saying like if she was born in Saudi Arabia do you think she would have a similar . . . like do you think she would have similar ideas in somewhere else?

Amal: Yeah, she just wouldn’t be able to publish them the same way. Ideas are existing among women in general

Danny: right I am not saying that like she is having these ideas because of . . . she is not like woman, I just saying I wonder what extent her speaking French and Italian at a young age and her being exposed to like you know French television drama at the age of eight influence her opinion

Later in the discussion, Xiao revisited Danny’s idea and said, “I can see that it’s very

European,” to which Amal responded, “I don’t like that, because it’s crediting Western thought when it’s like every woman has the right to think this way no matter she is

European or not.” Most importantly, this debate about the European nature of the poem or the author is a debate about the context of production. Amal’s comments above demonstrated a belief in a universal understanding of women’s condition of suffering across all cultures. Danny’s disparaging comments, despite demonstrating a monolithic image of Arab women, seemed to have some foundation not only in Haddad’s upbringing but also in the cosmopolitan cultural environment of Beirut that Xiao is familiar with.

Additionally, Xiao questioned the choice of Lilith as a global feminist symbol. When discussing the poem in my office after the class session, Xiao stated that the poem was

“heavily influenced by European feminism and European culture.” Xiao explained that his understanding of the culture of production of the literary work comes from his study abroad experience in Lebanon, which made him perceive Beirut as “a bubble” adding,

“Everyone in Beirut, part of the Elite Class living in Beirut, they identify themselves more with the globe rather than Lebanon.” In this sense, Xiao understood the poem as a

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universal condition intended for a global audience. Yet he added, “but I can certainly validate criticism against it.” Xiao voiced this criticism in his discussion of the poem with me stating, “I think a female poet from the Arab world somewhere else other than

Lebanon could write another poem expressing probably exactly the same idea, using one of the defamed figures in Arab culture without being this provocative.” In this comment,

Xiao both understand and appreciated the global perspective of the poem. Yet, he questioned whether its global appeal may have affected its local acceptance. Rania too revisited the European vibe in the poem in one of her later comments on the poem at the end of the course. She stated that she started thinking that maybe the contrast between

Lilith and Eve might be a contrast between White European feminism and third world feminism.

As the above debate demonstrates, the way students understood the poem’s context of production and reception affected their view of the message of the poem.

Additionally, students’ understanding of the context of production is rooted in their individual experiences. For example, Danny’s questioning Haddad’s Arab identity reveals his conceptions about Arab women education. Amal’s comments on women feelings of oppression being the same worldwide reveals her understanding of feminism as a global phenomenon while Rania’s questioning of this very idea of global feminism demonstrates a heightened awareness of Western cultural hegemony in the Middle East.

Conclusion

In his book, The Singularity of Literature, Attridge (2004a) explains the literary work as the event which opens new possibilities of meaning and feeling (p. 59). My discussion of the poem, “Return of Lilith” demonstrated how the poem opened proliferating possibilities of meaning. While students came to class discussion with a 207

specific meaning of the text, their interaction in the discussion generated more meanings and consequently, most of them changed their perceptions of the text.

The discussion of the poem was heated with arguments with and against Lilith.

The encounter was intriguing, challenging, difficult, and unforgettable, as students confirmed in their final reflections and interviews. All students mentioned Lilith during final interviews and described it either as a challenging text or as a text they will never forget. It posed different challenges to different students. Class discussion witnessed multiple interpretations of Lilith, and different attitudes toward her. Some felt offended and uncomfortable, some were ambivalent, and some felt liberated through the event of reading the poem. During class discussion, different interpretations of Lilith as Biblical, archetypal, feminist, and as Freedom, emerged. The portrayal of Eve in the poem as

Lilith’s other, stirred up controversy as some students identified with Eve, while others perceived the attack on Eve as an attack on the ideal feminine image prescribed by patriarchy.

During class discussion, students’ different stances and interpretations posed a collective challenge to each other’s reading. Students referenced each other’s interpretations during interviews with me. For example, Rania understands Gwen’s reservations against Lilith, and says that in America there need to be a space to accept

Eve, while in the Middle East we need a space for Lilith. On the other hand, Gwen who did not agree with the author’s reading of the text, celebrated Nadia’s comment that there is Lilith in each one of us. Additionally, the interview with the author allowed students a unique perspective on the poem, which challenged them further. Even students who declared their resentment against the poem and refused to change their stance, the

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richness of class discussion questioned and challenged them. The alterity of Lilith, who came back to reclaim the story of origin, was complicated by the alterity of students’ different idiocultures, which made Lilith poem a rich moment of engagement with alterity and the most memorable literary work throughout the semester. In addition to the alterity that Lilith poem staged, the moment of the semester in which the reading occurred helped students discuss its difficult themes. Students got comfortable with class discussion and with each other, they had multiple attempts toward a creative responsible reading, and their understanding of the process of meaning making evolved. They learned to embrace each other’s reading while still valuing their own reading. They learned to examine and reflect on the working of the literary work as they read it. They found space to express how the literary work made them feel, how it changed the way they look at themselves and others. They have reflected on the context of reading event, and how it may change one’s reading, and makes one understand where other readings come from.

I argue that Lilith poem provides a good example of the richness that a creative ethical reading may provide. It attests to the power of open discussion, nurturing of trust and openness to others’ viewpoints to build a community of readers that embraces alterity.

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Chapter 7: Conditions of Alterity in Arabic Literature Classroom

In this chapter I discuss how students’ encounter with alterity informs a deeper understanding of ethical and creative reading that is grounded in students’ reading experiences, which is the overarching research question of this study. The main sources of data in this chapter are students’ written final reflections on the course and their final interviews. Focusing on these two sources of data allows me to investigate how students view their experience in the course in terms of their understanding of reading and its relation to alterity. Since this is an exploration of students’ emerging conceptualization, my investigation will occasionally use other sources of data from throughout the course to make sense of students’ final comments and revelations.

By investigating different conditions of alterity that emerged throughout the course, I explore how students engaged with and experienced “other-oriented” reading

(Tarc, 2015) as inventive, responsible, creative and ethical. In addition to encountering the literary work as other, students encountered Arabic language as other and their peers as other to be encountered and embraced. In this chapter I discuss students’ reflections on these three conditions of alterity which emerged throughout the course and examine their significance to creative and responsible reading.

I argue that viewing the text as other allowed students to conceptualize the openness of the literary work and the multiplicity of its meaning. It urged them to focus not only on how they relate to a text but also on how the text challenge them, and expose them to themselves. Viewing the literary work as other allowed readers to understand how they are transformed by each work they read. It made them view reading as an event, something that happens to them, in addition to being an act, something they do.

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The Arabic language as other cultivated uncertainty and humbleness as important stance in creative reading. It also pushed students to feel responsible for each other which is integral to building an ethical educative community (Strhan, 2012).

The peer as other helped students appreciate the role of reader in the formation of meaning and the multiplicity of meaning—“the number of possible readings is equal to or perhaps even greater than the number of actual readers” (Davis, 2014, p. 89). The different readings students had of the same work urged each student to understand their own reading as related to their idioculture. In their conversations about each literary work, students discovered how each reading is challenged by other readings, which made them question and reconsider their usual mode of understanding (Attridge, 2004a, p. 27).

After discussing students encounters with alterity as they read different literary works in the previous chapter, this chapter aims at answering the main research question of this study, how the encounter with alterity when reading literature illuminate our understanding of ethical and creative reading.

The Literary Work as Other

A creative responsible reading is “a reading open to the otherness offered by the work” (Attridge, 2016, p. 227). It entails a pedagogical relationship between the reader and text (Attridge, 2004a). As Attridge (2004a) explains: “To read creatively in an attempt to respond fully and responsibly to the alterity and singularity of the text is to work against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same” (p. 80).

Throughout the semester, I observed many moments in which students responded to the alterity of the literary works, were challenged and changed by the work’s power. I have discussed some of these moments in the previous chapter. In this chapter, I examine

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students’ reflections on moments of transformation through reading as well as their understanding of creative reading as an encounter with alterity.

Changed by the Literary Work

Several students reported in their final interviews how they felt changed through their experience of reading. For example, when I asked Xiao at the beginning of his final interview to reflect on his overall experience in the course he responded:

Personally, I have grown as a person, not particularly knowledge-wise but the ability to sympathize and empathize-wise. I think it’s because each piece of literature has very strong theme, so it kind of drags me in to think deeper about the subject.

Xiao’s feeling of growth as a person is not tied to an acquisition of knowledge throughout the course but rather his understating and sympathy. Xiao felt being dragged in by the literary works. He was pushed to think deeper, to go beyond his limits. Xiao then gave an example to illustrate his point:

Xiao: Like for example, there’s feminism. If you ask me before I started taking this class if I support feminism, I would say, “Of course I support feminism,” right? But I think after what we've read, I think I now have a deeper connection to this topic and deeper appreciation and understanding of it.

Teacher: How?

Xiao: I don't know. I think it’s like soul touching.

This excerpt demonstrates a transformation in Xiao’s understanding of feminism. He already knew he supported feminism before starting the course. But what he developed through reading was “a deeper connection” to it, “a deeper appreciation.” The experience of reading, being dragged in, demanding that he deeply engage was “soul touching” for him. I believe what changed in Xiao’s understanding of feminism, in this example, was his orientation to the topic: previously he learned about feminism, but through the reading in the course he learned from feminism. Learning about the other is not an 212

appropriate ethical response to difference, as Todd (2003) maintains. Rather, the ethical response to difference is learning from the other. What Xiao did when he read Lilith, for example, was opening himself to an other who teaches. Xiao, as the previous chapter demonstrates, learned from Lilith how to think about his personal freedom.

Rania mentioned in her final interview that she kept all the literary texts we read throughout the semester. For her, she explained, this meant that she intended to revisit it.

She added that she had a habit of throwing away all her school work at the end of the year. But for the readings she engaged with throughout our course, it didn’t feel like she

“was doing something for school.” She explained, “It felt like I was doing something that was, I don’t know, changed the way I think in general.” When I asked her to explain, she said:

It’s the exposure to other things that you are not exposed to as often that make you look at things in a different way that make you think twice about . . . I don’t know the politics, the culture, society in general. We don’t talk about these things . . . In my community, we don’t talk about these things.

Rania’s decision to preserve the readings indicates they meant something to her. They were not part of the “schoolwork” with an instrumentalized emphasis on testing, grading and accumulating knowledge. The literary works she cherished exposed her to something “other,” they challenged her to think differently, and they offered her a space to talk and discuss, a space that is not open in her community.

Ahlam’s final reflection told a different story of transformation through reading.

She wrote about her conflicted Sudanese identity, “Although Sudan is an Arabic- speaking nation, I always found the identification of Sudanese people as Arabs to be deeply problematic as it came from a place of anti-blackness, so I dismissed this label.”

Ahlam’s shedding of Arab identity was her ethical way to stand against the Sudanese

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government long term practice of privileging Sudanese Arabs. Ahlam explained in her discussion of the novel how her family is a privileged family in Sudan with ties to the former Sudanese regime. By dismissing the label “Arab,” Ahlam threw away an important piece of her identity in response to a national identity crisis (Nasr, 2014).

However, the diverse literary works we read throughout the semester—written by authors from all over the Arab world covering different themes like women rights, human rights, and racism—challenged Ahlam’s perception of Arab as anti-Black. Reading these literary works allowed her to see a deeper connection, “an ancient shared linguistic history with Arabs, and a continuous generational conversation between Sudan and

Arabia.” As she engaged with the different issues these works addressed, Ahlam

“couldn’t help but feel an intense sense of affinity and commonality.” She concluded:

I never thought that my experience as a black, Arabophone would parallel the experience of an Arab. This challenged my ideals about what it means to be Sudanese and what role literature plays in our identity as a nation. I still have not answered these questions; however, I decolonized my preconceived notions about Arabness.

Reading Arabic literary works challenged Ahlam rejection of Arab identity as a colonizing identity, unsettled her political stance, and reconciled her with her own

Arabness.

In her final reflection, Nadia recalled how she was unsettled and challenged by the poems of the Bahraini poet, Qassim Haddad:

Ironically, even though I did not particularly like Qassim Haddad’s poetry at first (I suspect because of how challenging it was for me), his poems ended up becoming some of my favorite pieces that we read. Moreover, it was that very unsettling and mysterious nature of his poems that affected me and also allowed me to relate to his writings.

For lack of space in the exploration of particular works of literature, I was not able to discuss the poems of Qassim Haddad. Reading them provoked every student in class. No 214

one was able to reach a satisfying meaning. The poems had powerful, intense and unsettling images. The question that all students repeated was, “What does that mean?”

During class discussion, I explained to them that they should slow down the urge of reaching a meaning and try to experience the poems. Like all students, Nadia was unsettled by the poems. She was one of the presenters on that day we discussed the

Qassim Haddad poems, and she wanted to say something about the meaning of a particular poem but was faced by the poem’s obscurity. In the poem’s resistance to the readers lies the reader’s encounter with otherness, that Attridge (2004a) explains:

Otherness exists only in the registering of that which resists my usual modes of understanding, and that moment of registering alterity is a moment in which I simultaneously acknowledge my failure to comprehend and find my procedures of comprehension beginning to change. (p. 27)

Through her encounter with Qassim Haddad’s poems, Nadia realized the limitation of her

“existing modes of thought” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 80). She opened to the poems and allowed them to take her mind “to the borders of its accustomed terrain” (p. 80).

Encountering the poems, Nadia engaged with a different kind of meaning, a meaning that cannot be put in words. Part of the difficulty of Qassim Haddad’s poems is that they are very rich in imagery. His poems overwhelm the reader with metaphorical images which makes the move to interpretation difficult. Qassim Haddad’s poems highlights the connection between literature and arts. Two students in class used his poems for their artistic project.

The uncomfortable reception of Qassim Haddad’s poems may be a response to the alterity of art that the poems presented. The connection between art and Levinas’s ethics of alterity is significant. Parker (2019) argues for the pedagogical possibilities for art as other. Parker argues that art offers a way of encountering the other and entering into the

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world through creation. She calls for a pedagogy that uses every encounter with the other as “a moment for rupture and revision” (p.43). Parker (2018) emphasizes, “Art offers a way to listen to the other, to broaden students’ exposure to diverse perspectives, and to provoke uncertainty” (p. 29). In her call for introducing art as alterity in education, Zhao

(2014a) emphasizes the importance of difficult art:

In students’ encounters with difficult art, rather than supplying them with predetermined answers, our job is to expose students to uneasy and uncomfortable strangeness, to allow them to be interrupted, confused, even lost. In order for new meanings to emerge, we have to leave open the possibility and threat of no meaning. (p.259)

Qassim Haddad’s poems introduced Nadia to a difficult form of art. Being the presenter of the poems, she wanted to have a definitive meaning to present to her colleagues. Faced with the threat of no meaning even after the conclusion of class discussion, Nadia left the class session confused and angry. The feeling of no closure taught her a lesson she elaborated in her final reflection:

After completing the course, however, I now know that making sense out of a literary text is not necessarily the goal—that is, if it is even possible to come to such determinations with literature.

This revelation was what Nadia appreciated in Qassim Haddad’s poems. Through their resistance to her understanding, the poems demanded a different mode of engagement— an imaginative and emotional mode rather than a rational one. This understanding of

Nadia’s engagement with the poems is supported by Gleason (2009), who conducts a cognitive and phenomenological investigation of image metaphors, focusing on how they promote visualization in the reader. His study highlights the ways texts solicit creative responses in the visual imaginations of readers, an experience expressed in Nadia’s final reflection.

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Nadia talked with me in her final interview about how she felt different after starting the course. She explained that she used to have vivid dreams. She used to love painting and music but for years she did not engage in artistic activities. Somehow as the course progressed Nadia started having vivid dreams again. She stated that she felt an awakening of her artistic faculty. For the first time in years, Nadia started painting again.

For her final project, Nadia created an artistic painting in response to one of Qassim

Haddad’s poems.

Arabic Language as Other: “Reading with my eyes closed”

In this section I discuss encounter with the alterity of Arabic language. For

Arabic language learners, reading literary works in Arabic represented a challenge.

Regardless of their proficiency level, all students in the class encountered Arabic language anew through Arabic literary texts. While all of the students were challenged by the language of the texts, heritage and foreign language learners experienced these challenges differently. Heritage learners were challenged by different registers of written

Arabic and unfamiliar language usage.

The difficulties all students faced when reading the literary works in Arabic challenged them and provided them a space for ambiguity, helping them “resist the temptation to close down the uncertain meanings” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 40). It dragged them into a space of vulnerability and pushed them to rely on each other which created a feeling of responsibility for one another (Katz, 2013). The alterity of Arabic language pushed students to recognize their “obligation to the neighbour, rather than any commonality or shared rationality” (Strhan, 2012, p. 171). Coming from different backgrounds, students faced different challenges when reading Arabic literary works.

Heritage learners faced challenges different than FL learners. Yet, facing these 217

challenges as a community reading together, allowed them to provide and receive assistance from each other. Thus, working together they were able to value their linguistic, cultural and personal differences. Understanding their obligations to each other called on students to build “a better community,” “a community of neighbours” that is not based on similarities, but rather on difference (p. 172).

Heritage Learner Encountering Arabic Anew

Ahlam reported in her interviews that she discovered how her exposure to the language through her family was limited, and how there are aspects of Arabic language that she does not know about. She wrote in her final reflection at the end of the course:

It became clear to me that I know a very limited, and mostly conversational, Arabic. I do not know formal political language, sexual language or romantic language, or even violent and vulgar language in Arabic. Indulging myself in Arabic literature and expanding my knowledge of the language strengthened my connection with the different aspects of my own culture that I never fully understood.

Through the class Ahlam recognized the limits of her language proficiency. In the above excerpt, Ahlam did not mention formal language only, but also violent, sexual and vulgar language—that is, the type of everyday language that would be censored by her family members when they talk Arabic with her. For Ahlam, exposure to Arabic literature connected her to aspects of Arabic culture that were beyond her limited home interactions and that she struggled to understand. Ahlam’s reflection is in line with the general profile of heritage language learners in the U.S that Carreira & Kagan (2011) reported in their national survey of heritage language learners of different languages and different geographic regions in the U.S., specifically with regards to limited exposure to the heritage language outside the home. Through reading Arabic literary works, Ahlam realized the limits of her exposure to Arabic language and its effect on her lexicon.

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Another important characteristic of heritage learners reported by Carreira &

Kagan (2011) is their limited literacy skills compared to their relatively strong aural and oral skills. The group of heritage learners in the class all went to school in an Arab country in their childhood, which led to them having stronger literacy skills than that of the general profile of heritage learners. However, through reading literary works from different Arab regions, they came to realize diversity within written Arabic across the

Arab world. For example, Rania, whose linguistic proficiency was one of the highest in class, commented on the difficulty of reading texts albeit written in formal Arabic. Her expectation was that formal Arabic should be the same in every Arab country regardless of its historical, geographical and cultural context. She mentioned in her final reflection that she faced difficulty understanding the texts written by Moroccan, Sudanese and

Bahraini authors. She reported feeling “some type of disconnection” with these texts.

Yet, she concluded with the statement, “Nevertheless, it was nice being exposed to different styles of writing and different sub-cultures.” When I asked her what challenges faced her during the course she responded, “I never realized how different the cultures are within the Arab world until I took this class.” Through exposure to Arab writers from different regions of the Arab world, Rania revised her monolithic understanding of both

Arabic culture and Arabic language. Like many speakers of Arabic, Rania understand the diversity in spoken Arabic dialect but fails to recognize this diversity with regards to formal written Arabic. Her comment reflects the commonly held notion that Modern

Standard Arabic is homogenous and invariable across the Arab world. While most research on varieties of Arabic focus on Arabic dialects, different researchers studied

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large corpora of written Arabic texts to examine diversity in written formal Arabic and regional preferences both lexical (Ibrahim, 2009) and syntactic (Wilmsen, 2010).

Amal, echoed this revelation in her final reflection. She also appreciated the fact that everyone in class shared a similar struggle:

Before this specific class, I was not used to reading long(ish) novels or even plays in Arabic, so I was a bit intimidated. Thankfully, the rest of the class was on the same boat pretty much. It was a journey that I was looking forward to, in order to further expand my vocabulary and grow more accustomed to the different dialects and the manners in which writers from different Arab countries wrote.

While Ahlam’s comment points to newness that stems from breadth of themes, Rania and

Amal’s comments recognize the regional usage of formal Arabic. Their revelation challenges a commonly held conviction that formal Arabic is the same everywhere in the

Arab world. As noted above, Amal mentioned how through the course she was exposed to not only different dialects but also the different manners of writing in different Arab countries. Both Amal and Rania’s comments demonstrate how they gain more understanding of the diversity within formal Arabic through the course. This otherness of language helped unsettle heritage learners’ confidence in their comprehension ability, and allowed them to be struck by the encounter of Arabic language as other. It also allowed a feeling of shared struggle among different readers in class.

Foreign Language Learners Encountering Arabic

In contrast to the heritage learners, foreign language learners encountered the alterity of Arabic language on a larger scale. Among FL learners, Gwen, Madeline, and

Danny had the least proficiency level and the least experience with reading and content classes. The beginning of the course for them was extremely difficult with regards to both the reading amount and novelty of vocabulary and structures in the texts. Gwen’s final reflection described the shock she had on her first day and first week of classes. 220

Feeling overwhelmed, she started crying once she arrived home after the first class- session. After the first week of classes, Gwen was overwhelmed by “the sensation” that everyone was fluent in Arabic but her. Gwen felt that she “literally could not do enough to be on the same playing field.” She added, “It felt like I was reading with my eyes closed, and it didn’t matter how badly I wanted to see, it wasn’t going to happen.”

Watching her suffering, her best friend half-joked with her that she was like someone watching a movie with the screen half-cut. Gwen explained the frustration she experienced:

For me it was like watching a movie with the screen half cut off; I knew something was happening, but I didn’t know what or by whom. I would translate to him what I was understanding, and he would stare at me for a second and then burst out laughing at my struggle.

Starting the class with a lower proficiency level, less exposure to longer texts, and no study abroad experience put Gwen at a disadvantage. It did not help that the literary language is much more complicated than what she read in her textbooks in lower-level

Arabic language classes. The frustration she described in her comment, “It felt like I was reading with my eyes closed” signifies a magnified encounter with the alterity of the language. Yet, her frustration seemed to gradually alleviate as she progressed in the course from total blindness to “watching a movie with the screen half cut off.” Watching only half of the screen, she was able to gain an understanding, even if it remained ambiguous and elusive. This ambiguity, despite painful and frustrating, was very important to open possibilities of meaning for her.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, when Gwen had the translation of the literary work in her hand, and she was able to see the full screen, her reading of the text was more fixed, less cautious and closed to change. The painful doubt she experienced

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while reading the texts in Arabic, I argue, was a much more fruitful possibility than the closing of the text with translation. Gwen started her final reflection with a story of triumph in which she overcame the difficulty of Arabic. As a teacher, I completely agree with her success story. She was the hardest working student in the whole class and her language proficiency, vocabulary and reading skills have improved tremendously through the semester. However, I would like to focus here on a different angle of this success story. It may be read as a success in overcoming an obstacle, or in Gwen’s expression, a language barrier. However, I argue that the alterity of language may be closer to an absolute other in the Levinasian sense: wholly transcendent and unknowable. Gwen definitely became a better and more skilled reader. However, I believe that alterity of

Arabic language will always be there challenging the reader. Gwen, as well as any reader, will always have to encounter the alterity of Arabic language, no matter how skilled she gets. I believe that the alterity of language cannot be overcome and embracing it is not a choice.

In contrast to Gwen’s frustration, Xiao, in his reflection on reading in Arabic, demonstrated an appreciation of Arabic language opening a space for ambiguity:

Reading in Arabic, in particular, has trained me in having patience for the author’s words before jumping to any conclusions of my own, because the linguistic difficulty, though not ideal for a smooth read, entailed much more efforts of mine to understand the text, which in turn deterred my urge to judge. Albeit a word at a time, reading in Arabic actually helped me pay closer attention to what the piece of literature was trying to communicate.

As Xiao’s remark suggests, the alterity of Arabic language demanded hard labor and patience in the process of meaning making. The struggle with language delayed easy conclusions and opened the space for uncertainty. This sentiment is reiterated by

Madeline who wrote in her final reflection: “I think if this course taught me anything it

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would be the beauty and ability of the language to convey meaning and the amount of patience that is sometimes required to fully grasp this meaning.” Encountering Arabic language as other requires patience, attentive listening to what the literary work is trying to communicate through the language. It an act of creation. A creative reading.

Similar to heritage learners, the alterity of language allowed foreign language learners regardless of their linguistic proficiency to listen more to each other, and to embrace the plurality of meaning of the literary text, as Xiao reflected:

The advanced texts, while intimidating to me at the first glance, humbled me by putting me with others on the same leveled ground, where we all had to struggle to read and to deal with the insecurity of not understanding fully. Such a humbling effect let us be more acceptive of and more patient with each other’s view because we could not be too overly opinionated if we were not certain of everything.

What Xiao calls the humbling effect of language leading to embracing the insecurity in meaning making demonstrates this alterity of Arabic language that made students more open to the texts and to each other. The Alterity of Arabic as a foreign language challenged students’ certainties about the meaning they produce, resulting in a more intellectual openness and willingness to listen to different perspectives on the texts. The foreignness of Arabic language unsettled their certainty about the meaning they made, disrupted their habitual ways of making meaning and demanded a change both in the way they conceptualize language and the procedures of comprehension. The awe and wonder provoked by encountering Arabic language as other challenged students to “suspend habitual modes of thinking and feeling” (Attridge, 2004a, p.83) and be open to encounter the text’s singularity.

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Affective Reading

In the above section, Gwen described her reading Arabic literary texts as reading while her eyes closed. Feeling challenged by the alterity of language, Gwen resorted to a mode of emotional engagement with the text. In Gwen’s reflections before each class session she usually wrote a plot summary of the text, followed by an interpretation, and a description of the emotions invoked. While her comprehension improved greatly as the course progressed, in the first half of the course in which we read the novel and short stories in particular, Gwen’s summaries demonstrated her misunderstanding of important parts of the plot and basic details. However, her affective reflections, the way she felt during reading, and the emotions the text evoked in her reflected the emotional tone of the text.

For example, in the first short story we read after the novel, Gwen misunderstood many elements of the plot due to linguistic difficulty and her misunderstanding of cultural elements in the story. However, when Gwen wrote about the emotions inspired by the story, she expressed an emotional reaction similar to most heritage learners in the class who understood the plot. It was also similar to my emotional response, and I believe

I share a lot of the author’s context, since the author was Egyptian with similar cultural background to mine.

Earlier on during the third class-session, as we were reading the second portion of the novel, the Handsome Jew, Gwen reported an experience of Déjà vu. Reading without understanding the plot brought her back to a moment in her high school French literature class when students were reading Antigone and “the entire class missed the fact that there was a suicide at the end.” As she continued to closely read and look up words, she realized there was suicide at the end of the passage. Gwen felt confused about what 224

happened, as she explained in her final interview, “something about that paragraph made me think about the suicide in Antigone and I didn’t know… what it made me think of more specifically was reading a suicide and not realizing I have done that.” When I asked her what exactly she felt, she explained that she felt a sudden change in the pace of the text. As the text slowed down, she felt as though something was wrong.

In her reflection before class, she wrote commenting on how she did not understand the paragraph but it still made her think of suicide. She added, “Somehow, the communication of the desire or threat of suicide was strong enough to make it through the language barrier, even before suicide was specifically mentioned in the text.” Gwen was able to communicate with the text across the language barrier and transcended her comprehension ability through the power of emotion.

When during the final interview, I asked her what helped her the most with the challenges she faced throughout the course, she said this was her first experience of “only communicating with emotions.” She explained, “I would feel things without knowing why, and then in class discussion I would be like, oh that was why.” Gwen described her reading as a feeling. A feeling that she could not make sense of until she would come to class and understand the plot from her colleagues and realize what inspired her feelings.

Gwen’s mode of reading resonates with Tarc’s (2015) understanding of “felt reading,” which she describes in detail:

Engaging our felt reading of literature can tentatively open up an imaginative mode of affectively reading the world and others. Reading with feeling might support us to carefully re-narrate the fictional forms of knowledge by which we stake claims to the world and others. (p. 36)

Gwen’s reading with feeling supported her to navigate through texts despite not understanding their language. Gwen had extensive experience reading literature both in

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English and French. In her final reflection she wrote about how her exposure to “different cultural styles” in French and English literature, “but Arabic presented its own distinct style” which was challenging for her.

Gwen then went on to reflect on how she had used emotion in the past to communicate with people across language barriers, as with her experience playing volleyball in Cambodia. However, she explained, she had never used emotion to communicate with a text:

Transcending a language barrier without body language was a whole new level of patient connection. A text can’t smile back at me to tell me it’s going ok, and I can’t use gestures to make sure we’re in agreement. Nevertheless, despite not being able to perfectly understand plot (in fact often barely understand plot) I felt I was able to experience why the author felt the need to write the text. I never expected that sort of shrinking of the world through the power of emotion.

How does one respond to a text without understanding its language? Recalling her experience communicating with people in Cambodia without understanding their language, Gwen remembered how she relied on her emotion to connect through gestures and body language. But how does one read a text that without knowing its language? Or as Gwen put it earlier, how does one read with their eyes closed? In this excerpt and in her earlier portrayal of reading with her eyes closed, I believe Gwen is describing an encounter with alterity. I believe it is the alterity of Arabic language that challenged her the most throughout the semester to the degree that it may have masked other conditions of alterity for her. Building a relationship with Arabic was “a whole new level of patient connection” for Gwen. It is building a relationship with an other through patient and attentive listening and believing that the other has something to say. As Attridge (2004a) emphasizes, “Attentiveness to what is outside the familiar requires effort” (p. 123).

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Accommodating for the alterity of Arabic language required “shifting of ingrained modes of understanding” (p. 123), and for Gwen, a mode of affective reading.

To conclude, the alterity of Arabic language had a humbling effect on all students.

For heritage learners, it revealed the limitation of their language abilities and their lack of familiarity with Arabic diverse writing traditions. To some extent, this helped alleviate the linguistic proficiency gap in the class and gave a feeling of a more leveled playing field while setting a culture of responsibility to the other in the class. It also humbled both heritage and FL learners’ in their reading. It urged all students to listen to each other and embrace the multiplicity of meaning of a literary work. They were able to appreciate the class as a “place of multiplicities” (Zhao, 2016c, p. 358) reading together and contributing to a diverse and rich understanding of each literary work.

Peers as Other

As students come from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, each participant in the study saw an other in their colleagues. In addition to the division of heritage vs foreign language learners, there were also differences in language proficiency between the two groups and within each group. Furthermore, students had different experiences of Arabic culture depending on whether they studied abroad or not, the length of their study, and for heritage learners the number of Arab countries they visited or lived in and the length of their stay in these countries and their home country.

Furthermore, each student had a different history with Arabic language, as Chapter 5 demonstrates. While it is expected to have varying levels of proficiency and different backgrounds in a class, the differences in this class were more pronounced.

The differences among students in class constituted an important element for their endeavor to read ethically, creatively and responsibly. It allowed students opportunities 227

to “meet and encounter what is different, strange, and other” (Biesta, 2004, p. 321). The differences among students allowed them to see the classroom “not as a place of for sameness,” but as a “place of multiplicities” (Zhao, 2016c, p. 358). Through appreciating their differences and relying on each other students formed a community of readers, a community of difference. Through appreciating their differences, students realized the importance of learning from each other as a community (Todd, 2003). Additionally, the condition of the peer as other in the classroom informed students understanding of ethical reading. Through discussing their different readings for each text, they realize how their reading is shaped by their own idioculture (Attridge, 2004a). All students experienced moments when their reading was challenged by his peers’ readings during class discussions, and were thus invited to question their usual modes of understanding

(Attridge, 2004a).

By examining the condition of the peer as other, I discuss how the classroom community shaped students’ experiences of reading as a social act-event. Through perceiving their classmates as other, students were able to embrace their differences as a community, learn in conversation and embrace the multiplicity of meaning of a literary work by recognizing the reader’s role in making meaning.

The Context of FL Classroom

Before discussing the transformation of the classroom community into a community of difference through the conceptualization of peer as other, I would like to briefly discuss elements of the dominant culture in foreign language programs and its impact on students’ initial conceptualization of their peers. Students past experiences in

FL classrooms colored their expectations of and attitude towards the course and their peers. As a teacher I had to face these challenges in my attempt to set a classroom 228

culture that embraces difference.

Language Proficiency Level

The difference in proficiency level among students was clear since the first day of classes, which is demonstrated in Gwen’s comment mentioned earlier, “After the first week of class, it was hard to see anything past the sensation that (for the most part) everyone was comfortable and fluent with Arabic but me.” Gwen felt she was of lower proficiency level than everyone in the class. This feeling was also shared by Madeline who wrote in her final reflection: “Thinking about my experience in the course as a whole, I don’t know that anything short of being a native Arabic speaker would have made me completely prepared for the course.” And Danny who wrote, “I do not think that this is bad, but it shows that the nonheritage speakers were at a disadvantage due to their lack of exposure before the start of university.” Gwen, Madeline, and Danny were aware they had the lowest proficiency level in the class. However, their statements demonstrated a different attitude toward the class. Gwen’s comment demonstrates a disappointment at herself, a feeling that pushed her to dedicate a lot of time and effort for the course. Gwen spent hours on each reading. Unlike Gwen, Madeline did not direct her frustration towards herself. She believed only a native speaker can be prepared for this course, demonstrating the commonly held understanding of meaning as unproblematic if the linguistic elements of the text are mastered (Kern, 2003). Similarly,

Danny blamed the lack of exposure to the language before the university, i.e., not being a heritage learner. Underlying the three comments runs a feeling of an unjust competition, an impossible task and a wish to have similar or equal peers. While I cannot delegitimize the feeling of disadvantage expressed in these comments, I must point out the underlying educational discourse behind it. 229

Gwen’s disappointment and frustration can be understood in light of what Glynn and Wassel (2018) call “the elitist reputation of world language study” (p. 22). They explain, “language programs tend to be designed to weed out the academically weak students and act as a tracking mechanism to ensure that only the best and brightest are left in the class” (p. 22). Fewer students continue to upper-level classes and those students, as Glynn and Wassel (2018) point out, are likely to be academically successful students.

Students’ proficiency level not only affect their academic performance, but also their continuation in the program. Within this culture we can also read Madeline and Danny’s comments as defending themselves against the label of bad language students. They are not bad students—they simply are not native speakers, or heritage learners. Their situation is another important element in the culture of FL classroom. As Cook (1999) explains, FL learners are judged against the standards of native speakers, which lead to the perception of FL learners as failed native speakers. Cook proposes FL learners to be perceived as not worse or better than any other group including native speakers, just different.

The native/non-native dichotomy have been challenged and critiqued by theorists in the past 20 years (Kubota, 2009). Yet, it continues to dominate many FL programs and classroom. The ACTFL Guidelines holds native speaker competencies as the benchmark to determine the language development of non-native learners. This not only establishes a hierarchical notion of native/non-native dichotomy, but also one that is rooted in an understanding of native speakers as a homogeneous group (Kubota, 2009).

As Keneman (2016) asserts, “The native speaker is therefore an imaginary archetype that does not—simply because it cannot—represent all of the nuances that constitute a

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language and a culture” (p. 89). Both Madeline and Danny’s comments demonstrate perceiving being a native speaker or a heritage learner as the ideal situation for the course. It is as if the meaning of the text can be easily grasped if you master its linguistic elements, as if the native speaker is the “authoritative source of knowledge” (Keneman,

2016, p. 89), as if they could not be different than this native speaker without being worse or less. These are the underlying notions behind their comments. And behind these notions, I argue, is an aversion to difference in FL classrooms.

To demonstrate this from students’ own experiences, I would like to discuss

Danny’s experience of study abroad in Jordan that he interrupted just before joining our class. In his first interview, he discussed his experience as a lower proficiency level student in an immersion program. He mentioned that all other students in the program were from Ivy League schools. He described other students in the program as arrogant, and added, “It was almost like they didn't want to be friends with me because you know, I was in the lower Arabic level which was still immersive!” Feeling alienated by his colleagues in the program, Danny stated: “It was just very clear that they you know, where they kind of viewed me as different.” For the other students, Danny was different due to his lower proficiency level. This difference, as it seems, was not welcomed in his study abroad program, at least by his colleagues.

On the other side of the continuum was Rania and Majid’s experience in language study. Despite their high language proficiency, or rather because of their high language proficiency, they too did not feel welcomed in FL classes. Rania mentioned that she always felt that all language classes were not intended for her. She explained that she felt the need to be silent to give space to FL students practice the language. Similarly, Majid

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began our course with an expectation that he was not supposed to talk. I noticed that despite having the highest proficiency level in the class, during the first couple of sessions, Majid was reluctant to speak in class discussions. When I asked him, he said, “I thought I was not supposed to speak.” During final interview, Majid explained to me how his high proficiency level affected his participation in previous language course. He explained that in all his previous language classes he did not feel he should be taking time from his colleagues who need to practice speaking to learn the language. Consequently,

Majid felt his role in the class was similar to a teaching assistant; he explained, “I end up being more of an assistant to my classmates, which I do not mind doing, but it greatly limits how much I learn from the course.” Being a higher proficiency level student,

Majid did not fit in the dominant FL classroom culture. In all his former classes, he was implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, asked to give up discussion opportunities for lower- level students who needed practice. He was also implicitly expected to help students with language. This relationship between heritage learners and FL learners which is dominant in FL classrooms is problematic in my opinion. It creates a power dynamic not only in the classroom culture but also in the process of reading and meaning making.

Heritage learners as well as more proficient students get a monopoly on meaning and bestow their unchallenged understanding on lower-level students. Consequently, due to lower-level students’ inability to express their opinion in Arabic, class discussion usually ends up one-sided, artificial, and serving only as a tool to practice speaking.

My discussion of the differences in language proficiency between students in class examins the dominant culture in FL programs that does not welcome differences in language proficiency, sets up a hierarchal dichotomy of native/non-native speaker, weeds

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out of lower-level students, and silences heritage learners. As a teacher, I faced the dilemma of how to teach my students to embrace difference, especially difference in linguistic proficiency, if they and the whole system in language programs perceive difference in terms of hierarchy. I even caught myself feeling distressed when I saw how different their levels were on the first day of classes, to discover that, like the students, I have internalized the culture of foreign language program. The questions that troubled me as a teacher were, how could I provide a space for a real discussion with different linguistic abilities? How could I allow heritage learners to speak their mind while providing equal opportunities for FL learners to communicate on equal footing? How could I help them see their differences as a resource and not as an obstacle? How could I unsettle heritage learners’ confidence in their knowledge of Arabic language and culture and urge them to learn it anew through the literary works we read? How could I allow a space for interpretation and thoughtful engagement with literary works to all students equally regardless of their cultural background and linguistic ability?

Opening a Space for Difference

In response to the above challenges, when designing the course, I strived to create an open space in and outside class for all students to engage with the literary text and with each other. First, I utilized translanguaging in most class activities including class discussion. The back-and-forth movement between Arabic and English aimed at creating a space to participate in class discussion for each student regardless of their speaking proficiency level, fostering a culture of inclusion within the class, and establishing a dialogic relationship among students.

In addition to translanguaging, I had walk-in weekly meetings where students could discuss the texts in English. Both FL learners and heritage learners made use of 233

these weekly meetings to discuss any questions they had about the texts, prepare for their presentation, and discuss the meanings they were making out of the text. Furthermore, students shared responsibilities for creating vocabulary lists, leading discussion and presenting cultural background and summaries of literary works. Sharing responsibilities allowed them to trust and depend on each other.

Students Perceptions of Translanguaging in Class Discussion

During final interview, all students reflected positively on moving back and forth between English and Arabic in class discussion. For example, when talking about class discussion Madeline stated that if the discussion had been all in Arabic, she would not have been able to say a lot. Similarly, Gwen said, “I felt that I had an equal opportunity to say what I wanted at any time.” She talked about how not only her reading improved but her speaking as well. She described how she participated in the discussion in class:

If I was struggling with what I wanted to say, I can struggle but I wouldn’t like burn myself to the ground trying to get it out in Arabic I would get it in English and take some pressure off myself.

Having the choice to use both English and Arabic in the discussion allowed flexibility and eased an already complicated task of reflecting on Arabic literary texts. Equally, heritage learners appreciated this aspect of class discussion. For example, Majid stated,

“I think allowing the flexibility and ability to use English kind of helped the fluidity of the discussion.” Translanguaging allowed students to view the discussion not as a means to practice the language, but as a real dialogue that they make use of all their linguistic repertoire to engage in. I believe it granted students some freedom regarding choice of language they use, which relieved some pressure when formulating their statements during discussion. Majid wrote in his final reflection, “I believe that allowing us to freely discuss our thoughts ensured higher levels of discussions and allowed a deeper 234

understanding of the work.” Moving freely between the two languages made space for deeper engagement and deliberating over the literary works.

In the following section, I discuss how the perception of the peer as other deepened students’ understanding and experience of creative reading.

Embracing Multiplicity of Meaning

Students’ final reflections and final interviews indicate that, during class discussion, reading was interrupted and challenged by other readings allowing for richer and deeper engagement with the literary works. Rania reflected on how the way her reading was challenged by her colleagues’ readings during class:

I come in thinking of something and then I hear what other people have to say. It’s something that’s completely different, but it’s completely valid, it makes sense.

Rania was able to see how a different reading of the same text could be as valid as hers though her discussion with her peers. Danny almost repeats the same statement in his final interview,

I come in having read most of the text or all the text and I’m like, “Okay, this is what I think happened.” But when I leave class an hour and a half later, it’s usually shifted because of the conversations we have.

Despite the difference in the language proficiency and their cultural background, both

Rania and Danny felt the same towards class discussion and its effects on shifting their opinions and understanding of the literary works.

Similarly, Madeline reflected on the difference between our class discussion and her former literature classes in which there was one best way to take the interpretation.

She described the different readings exchanged in class discussion as eye opening for her.

She wrote about how the different interpretation of the same text helped complicate the meaning for her: 235

It was really interesting to see other students’ perspectives and then go back through the text to understand where they were getting meaning. These discussions helped me as a reader because it shows you the various ways someone can approach a text as well as different ways to contextualize this meaning.

Going back to the text to see where her peers’ readings came from, Madeline learned more about the text and about reading. Nadia’s reflection reiterates the same idea of appreciating the multiplicity of meaning that the collective reading allowed in class discussion. She wrote that discussing the literary works with her colleagues helped her the most in her reading experience. She described the difference in her interpretation when she read on her own and then discussed the text with her colleagues in class: “My understanding and interpretation of the readings tended to be more straightforward and flat, whereas in the discussion, the texts became multidimensional and more complex.”

Through her encounter with her colleagues’ readings, Nadia’s understanding of literary works turned from flat to multidimensional. Not only did her understanding of the literary works evolve, but also understanding of the process of meaning making. She learned to stop “trying to determine an exact meaning of a text.” She learned “that there can be multiple interpretations of a text, and that one’s interpretation can change over time and with successive readings, as well as after discussing it with other readers.”

Through class discussion, Nadia learned that reading is “to respect and exploit the plurality of meaning rather than to reduce it” (Davis, 2014, p. 86). She learned how one’s reading may change over time, or change through interacting with others’ readings.

Additionally, Nadia also learned how her own reading can change over time.

Creatively responding to the literary work, living though it and with it, the reader “comes to the work, on each encounter, as a different idioculture, experiencing different aspects of its inventiveness at different times” (Attridge, 2011, p. 696). Xiao too alluded to the

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readers’ different idioculture in his reflection. In his final reflection, he wrote about learning from otherness in class discussion:

In-class discussion also helped me understand the text as there was a lot of otherness to learn in other’s opinions as well. As the readings touched upon different themes, including genders, religions, authoritarianism, politics, each person coming from a distinctive background had something to say and to share with the rest of the class. While I might still not align my view with some of the others’, I have learned to appreciate each perspective as it was and to contemplate over it with seriousness.

Xiao’s comment demonstrates his understanding of how the reader’s idioculture shapes his/her reading (Attridge, 2004a), how “each reading is colored by the reader’s personal situation and history” (Attridge, 2004b). Even when he disagreed with his peers’ readings, he learned to appreciate it and “contemplate over it with seriousness.” He learned to listen to and learn from the other in each reading. Danny explained in his final interview how each student reading was colored by their own experiences, “I think every single person kind of gravitated towards one piece of the text because maybe they had a life experience that was similar to that.” He then described class discussion as a cross exchange of ideas. He described the class as a hub in which all readings meet after each going in a different direction: “We each had our Hub, I guess, which is the class and then we each kind of went our own different direction, and then came back, which was kind of nice.”

Gwen also wrote about how she learned from her peer’s different readings about the texts and about her peers:

It was also helpful to the reading experience to see where everyone’s struggles overlapped or diverged during the discussions. Not only did it provide a sense of solidarity, but I also felt I was learning not only about the texts but about each personal lens through which the text was being read.

Like Xiao, Gwen demonstrates an understanding of each reading is shaped by the

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reader’s lens. She also appreciated learning about the struggles her peers went through as they read, where is overlapped or diverged. As everyone sharing their struggles, an atmosphere of solidarity and vulnerability was created.

In class discussion created the possibility of building what Strhan (2012) calls “a community of neighbours,” as students were able to break down barriers “though practices of dialogue that do not cover over conditions of aliety and vulnerability” (p.

172). The openness of class discussion, and students’ willingness to share their struggles of reading created a classroom space in which students are willing to learn from each other (Todd, 2003, p. 9).

Collectively, students as readers challenged each other’s readings and pushed each other to rethink their habitual ways of meaning making, and reconsider their stances and interpretations. Through embracing their differences, students pushed each other towards a more ethical and creative reading.

Heritage/FL Learner Binary

The binary of heritage/FL learner was the most obvious form of difference in class. Not only due to the gap in linguistic proficiency but also the gap in cultural understanding. There were moments in class when students argued and debated different nuances of Arabic culture. During these moments, students talked about their experience and perception of different cultural practices in different parts of the Arab world. While heritage learners had more to say, students who studied abroad were also able to participate in the discussions from an observer’s point of view. This excluded two students in class, Madeline and Gwen, who did not study abroad. During final interviews, I asked each of them if she felt excluded during these moments of discussion.

Madeline responded, “Yes and no, and I think cause Gwen and I talked after some of 238

those classes and I think both of us felt like more of an observer as opposed to a participant.” She added, “I didn’t feel negatively about it. It was more of interesting, I guess.” Madeline also added that it was rewarding to learn about differences among

Arabic cultures, and how this was useful for her in her plan to study abroad.

Likewise, Gwen responded to my question about the discussion focused on different Arab cultures saying laughingly:

I loved that, I definitely felt like those were the ones that I was a fly on the wall (laughing), but that was one, all the different Middle Eastern background in the class, was one of the best parts of the class for me, because that’s a really hard thing to have access to. So, I just enjoyed learning about it and what people had to say.

Both Madeline and Gwen demonstrated a mixed feeling towards these moments in the discussion. As everyone were contributing their experience of the cultural aspect under discussion from the perspective of one or more Arab culture, Gwen and Madeline were definitely excluded from the conversation. Feeling like “a fly on the wall” watching in silence, they felt overwhelmed by the differences they heard. They both reported this to be a learning moment that they valued. It unsettled the monolithic image of Arabic culture that is usually presented in textbooks, and presented them with a more live, multifaceted and dynamic portrayal.

In addition, these moments colored the tone to the discussion for Gwen. When I asked her in the final discussion whether she encounter in class an other who is different, she responded,

Yea, I think it’s the makeup of the students in the class. I’ve never been a minority like in an Arab background majority in a room in college.

Although heritage learners were four out of nine students in the class, Gwen felt she was a minority in an Arab background majority. One reason could be that both Xiao and

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Nadia had study abroad experience in more than one Arab country as well as a high proficiency level in Arabic. The makeup of the class in itself introduced Gwen with something different, an alterity that was surprising, challenging and unsettling.

As a teacher, I wanted to undo the hierarchal aspect of the heritage/FL learner relation, not by delegitimizing heritage learners’ readings but by freeing the meaning of literary works of any monopoly, including my own, by allowing all students to see how literary works can have multiple and different meanings outside its original cultural matrix, by unsettling a monolithic understanding of Arabic culture. As shown in the previous section on the alterity of Arabic language, the course did unsettle heritage learners’ conceptualization of Arabic language and culture. It did challenge any monopoly on meaning, as students opened to multiplicity of meaning of literary work.

However, the hierarchal aspect of the relationship between heritage and FL learners was a bit harder to shake. As Gwen and Madeline’s comments demonstrate the heritage learners tended to dominate the tone of the discussion. Additionally, they were seen as a model by FL learners. For example, in his final discussion, Xiao discussed how he witnessed heritage learners uncertain about meaning; he said they were “all the times in class where they’re like, oh, yeah I didn't read that that way.” When I asked him what that told him, he answered,

It tells me that probably I'm understanding not too much less than what they do. So like it kind of encourages me to read more, but I think they’re . . . I think maybe reading Arabic is another difficult experience for them as well.

Underlying Xiao’s response is his perception of heritage learners as a model for his success. There is also the problematic notion that if the reader masters the language he will grasp the meaning of the text completely and certainly. However, by sharing their

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vulnerabilities, heritage learners encouraged FL students to embrace their vulnerabilities as well.

Additionally, as Danny and Madeline expressed, the presence of heritage learners made it possible for FL learners to read nuances of Arabic culture in the literary works.

Danny wrote in his final reflection on how heritage learners helped him understand the different aspects of words they discuss bringing words to life through their experiences that they share, in contrast to when he looks up words in the dictionary and get a one- dimensional meaning. Danny’s comment demonstrates how he perceived heritage learners, a mediator that enriched the engagement with texts. As a teacher, I observed how heritage learners enriched the discussion of many aspects of each literary work and brought it to life. In his discussion of the cultural distance and its relation to creative reading, Attridge (2004a) discusses the danger “that cross-cultural appreciation may be based on superficial similarities between the two contexts” (p. 51), which prevents the work from being received in an inventive way. He adds:

Only if I find a way of absorbing the nuances of the other cultural matrix—which might entail living in another place for a considerable period—will I be able to enjoy to the full the inventiveness that the work has in its original context. (p. 51)

I believe the composition of students allowed juxtaposing diverse readings and provided a more complicated understanding of both the language and the culture.

Conclusion

In this chapter I discussed how students encountered three conditions of alterity throughout the class. They encountered the literary work as other, the Arabic language as other and their peers as other. Through examining students’ final reflections and final interviews, I discussed the significance of these conditions of alterity to students understanding and experience of creative reading. 241

Encountering the text as other meant being challenged and changed by the reading event. In addition to the detailed examination of students’ readings that I presented in

Chapter 6, I presented here how they contemplated on being changed by the literary works. Encountering Arabic language as other opened space for uncertainty in meaning making, humbled all students and encouraged some to engage in Affective reading.

Encountering the peer as other challenged the current culture in FL classrooms and called students to bring about a better community, a community of neighbours where differences are embraced. It helped them appreciate the multiplicity of meaning and understand the role of the reader’s idioculture in shaping reading. By challenging each other’s reading, students collectively experienced creative reading.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

We are not born with reason but with the capacity to make relations to other. (Tarc, 2015, p. 71)

This final chapter provides a discussion of the findings in relation to literature in the field of foreign language education and the field of education in general. The chapter starts with personal reflections on how my experience throughout the study challenged my perceptions as a teacher of Arabic literature, followed by a summary of findings in addition to pedagogical implications and finally recommendations for further research.

Failing as a Teacher

The questions that kept echoing in my head throughout this study and were scattered in my memo notebook were “What is it exactly that I am doing? What addition am I offering to the field of teaching literature and education in general? How am I helping my students to read ethically? How do my class activities reflect Levinasian ethics and theories of ethical creative reading?” Basically, I kept asking myself, about the fundamental purpose of my teaching and research.

I would first like to examine the underlying ties to an instrumental understanding of education behind these questions. These questions represent an aching desire to create a program, a recipe that prescribed the theoretical framework of this study as a practical application. The absence of such program made me feel, as a teacher, that I was not adding anything of value to the students and their learning. However, as I have discussed earlier, bringing Levinas to education cannot be an instrumentalization or an application of his theory in the classroom (Strhan, 2012). Biesta (2003) emphasizes:

[It] is not and cannot be a new technique because as a technique it would always already have to assume its own success. We are rather operating in the sphere of

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necessary risk, in the sphere of a genuine questioning that doesn’t presuppose its own answers. (p. 67)

My questions were inspired by my fear of scholarly and pedagogical risk and the difficulty of working in the sphere of unpredictability. I needed a program, an intervention in order to feel that I was teaching. In a way, my questions also demonstrate a resistance to the sense of passivity that characterizes the creative process as a “creation of the other” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 22). Attridge (2004a) explains the creative process of writing as a creation of the other. According to Attridge, to think of the process of creation as bringing “into existence by skillful and imaginative intellectual labor an entity that is irreducibly different from what is already in being” (p.22) is to emphasize creation as agency and activity. However, as Attridge explains, the act of creation “has an element of passivity” (p.23), which is “an important aspect of the coming into being of the new” (p. 23). Thus, creativity springs from the “openness of the mind to what it has not yet grasped” (p. 23). In creating the course, I was initially resistant to this openness to my new creation and skeptical about its coming into being.

This “genuine questioning that doesn’t presuppose its own answers” (Biesta,

2003, p. 67) characterized not only my inquiry as a researcher, but also my acts as a teacher and a reader. The destination of each conversation we had in class was unknown to me; I did not have a specific meaning that I wanted students to reach. There were times when we did not reach any meaning, and we left the class unfulfilled and unsettled.

In these moments, I felt that I failed as a teacher. I failed to guide them through a specific route to a specific meaning. My expectation of myself as a teacher was to have a plan. Reflecting on these feelings now, I realize how my conceptualization of teaching was still dwelling in the instrumental discourse of education. What I have come to learn

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through my reflection on the course, as I will explain later in this chapter, is that teaching is not a program or an implementation of a technique to reach a predetermined goal, but rather “the space of encounter with the Other” (Strhan, 2012, p. 20). Unanswered questions were perhaps important to understanding that not everything is knowable and closure is not the goal.

The Research Questions

The overarching research question guiding my study is: How does engagement with alterity in modern Arabic literature U.S. collegiate-level class inform the understanding of ethical reading? A series of sub-questions were essential to the breakdown of the primary question. The following is a brief summary of findings related to each sub-question:

Research Sub-Question 1

How Do Students in Foreign Language Literature Courses Encounter Alterity

When Studying Modern Literary Arabic Texts?

Participants in this study encountered different aspects of alterity when studying modern Arabic literary works. The alterity of the literary works challenged them to think and feel in new ways. The alterity of the language lead them to be humble, uncertain and open to each other’s interpretations. The alterity of their peers allowed them to realize how each reading is shaped by the reader’s idioculture. Encountering alterity was unsettling and uncomfortable. There were moments when students did not appreciate the literary work as inventive, viewed it as cliché and refused to engage with it. At times, some students avoided the encounter completely with a literary work that hit a nerve. In other instances, students left the class puzzled, perplexed, not knowing what the literary

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work wanted to say. Often, class discussion brought up “raw and intense emotions” and elicited moving personal stories.

The encounter of alterity in FL classroom contributes to the theoretical perspectives of the role of literature in FL education. Additionally, my study offers an alternative to the instrumental approach to literature that dominates the field.

Historically, the different approaches to literature in FL programs were dominated by an instrumental view of literature, reading and language (Kramsch & Kramsch, 2000; Kern

& Schults, 2005). Whether literature was seen as a canon, an authentic text, or a representation of culture, it is clear that in FL programs the literary text has been perceived and treated “as a means to a predetermined end” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 7). My study provides and empirical evidence of the possibility to conceptualize literature and foreign language education otherwise. Findings of the study demonstrate how conceptualizing literature as an encounter with alterity cultivates in students an ethical stance towards reading, the literary texts, the foreign language and the classroom as a community. Further, this study contributes to the ongoing debate on the purposes of foreign language teaching at universities (Porto & Zembylas, 2020). Levinasian ethics of alterity provides the conceptual tools to rethink foreign language education and education in general. Within a framework of alterity, learning can be conceptualized as “responding to what is other or different, to what challenges, irritates and disturbs us, rather than the acquisition of something that we want to possess” (Biesta, 2005, p. 62). Foreign language education can and should aim to expose students to otherness and challenge them to respond and find their unique and singular voice.

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Research Sub-Question 2

How Do Students in Foreign Language Literature Courses Construct the Other and

Reconstruct Themselves as they Read Modern Literary Arabic Texts?

While students were challenged by the literary works they read throughout the semester, they responded to the challenges in different ways. Some encountered an inner alterity that found shelter in the literary work, as they experienced intimacy with characters that are culturally, geographically and historically distant. They found themselves in the words of the other and made meaning of their own world through the world of the other. At times, the identification was so strong it seemed like the other served to justify the self and not just to give it a voice. Other times relating to the literary work felt uncomfortable, signaling an inner alterity that is alienated by the readers’ society and was awakened by the work of literature.

Sometimes students felt exposed and questioned by the literary works. They were confronted by an uncomfortable sense of self that made them question their positions and world view. They often felt surprised, or angry with themselves when the literary work exposed their way of thinking. This challenged them to shift their framework of thinking.

One interesting finding is the difference in students’ response to otherness in literary works. Specifically, in their reaction to the novel, most FL learners’ identification with the characters led to an affirmation of themselves, while most heritage learners’ identification with the characters challenged them to question themselves and their beliefs.

In her book, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education, Boler (1999) analyzes the political aspects of emotions and theorizes for a pedagogy of discomfort. Her account of

“the simple identification” and “passive empathy” may help explain this tendency of 247

some students’ use of the literary works to affirm their existing beliefs and positions.

Analyzing students’ response to reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus in an introductory course, Boler (1999) noticed that students did not identify with the oppressor nor the survivor, but with the son who did not witness the war. Boler concludes that, “Passive empathy absolves the reader through the denial of power relations” (p. 162). She adds that “empathy often works through reducing the other to a mirror-identification of oneself, a means of rendering the discomforting other familiar and non-threatening” (p.

177). Thus, readers’ sympathetic identification with characters in the novel could be seen as a way to dissolve alterity into sameness. The denial of power relations was also clear in Gwen’s reasoning of her identification with Fatima and her questioning of the label of

“privileged.”

Todd (2003) differentiates between projective empathy as putting oneself in the other’s shoes and identificatory empathy as putting the other into the self. Todd maintains that empathy, both projective and identificatory, “can provide an opportunity to learn about ourselves in relation to others, but it is not rooted in a learning from the Other.”

(p.62) She adds:

Empathy is thus very much an ego activity that involves unconscious elements, but whose ultimate lessons are derived from and serve the interests of the self. In this sense, while empathy may be constructive to self-reflection, it is not about respecting the singularity and uniqueness of the Other (p. 62)

One interpretation of Danny and Gwen’s strong identification with the novel’s characters could be that it allowed them space for self-reflection. However, it may have masked an avoidance to the challenge of encountering the other.

Amiel-Houser & Mendelson-Maoz (2014) challenge the concept of empathy as a basis of ethical reading. Following Levinasian ethics, they argue against the assumption

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that simulating the inner perspective of the other is an ethical process of reading. Instead, they emphasize the reader’s responsibility for the others encountered in literature and call for “a constant mistrust of the reader’s inclination to achieve an empathetic identification with the other” (p. 215). Amiel-Houser & Mendelson-Maoz’s conclusion means that an ethical reading is a reading that actively mistrusts and avoids empathy. However, empathy may be seen by many people as an important purpose for reading literature.

Todd (2003) explains that “empathy is often invoked in social justice educational discourse and practice as an indispensable emotion for working across differences”

(p.43). If this is the case, students may have been striving to reach empathy as a goal for their reading. The relationship between ethical reading and empathy as well as emotions in general requires further investigation.

With regards to how students transform their sense of self in their encounter with literature as other, part of the findings of the study address Ryding & Allen’s (2013) call for exploring the reading of Arabic literature in relation to “the formation, negotiation, and development of identities as a result of increased globalization and resulting synergies and tensions” (p. 154). They argue that “Arabic literature and cultural representation constitute a particularly rich and under-explored terrain for analyzing the dynamics of national, local and international conceptions of self and identity” (p. 154).

Findings from my study illustrates how the ethics of alterity can provide a useful framework for such exploration.

Research Sub-Question 3

How Does the Political, Historical, Geographical, and Cultural Context in Which

Students Read Modern Literary Arabic Texts Shape their Reading?

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During their discussion of several literary works, students took account of and sometimes questioned the context of their reading. This demonstrates an ethical stance to reading since, as Attridge (2004a) asserts, “Doing justice to a work of literature involves doing justice at the same time to who, where and when we are” (p. 64). The degree of cultural distance between students and the literary works varied. When the cultural distance was too far, students tended to resort to allegorical reading to find a universal meaning in the literary work. A closer cultural distance lead more to a stronger affective responses to the text and sometimes a political stance against the literary work. Dealing with the cultural distance, close and far, some students were eager to ask more questions to account for the distance, signifying a desire to do justice to the work.

Students understood how the time and place of the reading event shapes the meaning the literary work. Some raised issues with locally critical literary works being read in a global context. Others questioned the intended audience of said literary works, whether it was written for local or global consumption. In their debate over context, students raised questions about politics of literary production and consumption both within the Arab world and globally.

In her chapter about teaching Arab women writers, Cooke (2017) discusses challenges facing professors and students when reading feminist Arabic literary works.

Among these challenges was the question of cultural, political and social context of literary works. Cooke points to the tension between situating the text in its context of production and directing students to the aesthetics of the text. She asks, “How much context should be provided?” (p. 47). She also asks: “Can literary texts be left to tell the story of their culture, its politics and economics, without becoming sociological tools

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whose sole purpose is to access cutltural information?” (p. 47). One of the ways my study addressed this challenge was by assigning students the role of presenters who research and provide the cultural information of the texts for their colleagues. This strategy allowed students to utilize their academic research skills in their reading and take turns playing the role of the expert in each class session, ecnouraging them to learn from each other. It also raised their awareness of the importance of the texts’ context as part of their meaning making process. As shown chapter 6, students asked questions and used information about the authors and the culture of the texts’ production to speculate about the intended audience of the texts and their political messages. When presenters failed to do the task of providing cultural, social and political context of the literary work, as in the case of flash fictions, other students in class inquired about this information, which demonstrates their awareness of its importance in understanding the text.

Cooke (2017) explains that without cultural, politicl and social context of the literary work students’ reading of the text will resort to “the familiar realm of preconceived knowlwdge” (p. 47). Cooke’s concern is evident in the findings of my study, and more visible in students’ reading of flash fiction, a genre that heavily rely on shared cultural, social and political context. As Cooke (2017) predicted, FL students slipped back into the realm of the familiar to make meaning of flash fictions and resorted to a universal reading. The tension between the local and the global when reading Arabic literary works was also one of the challenges that Cooke (2017) discussed. She calls for an ethical reading that is attentive to both contexts:

Students must learn to live with contradictions and not try to resolve them. Difference and sameness need to be kept in a fine balance. An ethics of reading texts about and by Arab women will always remain attentive to how local and global issues shape their lives. (p. 47)

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As chapter 6 illustrates, students had to grapple with situating the text in its cultural context vs. reading it as a universal literary work. Attridge’s (2011b) conceptualization of cutlural distance may help both teachers and students reflect on this challenge and conciously strive to accommodate the cultural distance in the process of reading.

Research Question

How Does Engagement with Alterity in Modern Arabic Literature U.S. College Class

Inform the Understanding of Ethical Reading?

Ethical and creative reading was a result of a collective endeavor throughout the semester. Through their deliberation over their interpretations of literary works, students collectively challenged each other’s reading. While some welcomed the change, others preferred to stay within the realm of the same. Yet collectively, they witnessed the encounter and the challenge even if they decided to not respond. They realized how the questions we ask as well as our interpretation of the literary works reveal our cultural backgrounds and ways of thinking. There were changes in the way students thought of themselves and others, as well as their understanding of Arabic language and culture.

One major change was an understanding of the openness of the text and of reading as aiming to “resist the temptation to close down the uncertain meanings and feelings that are being evoked” (Attridge, 2004a, p. 40). By the end of the semester, students no longer looked for a specific meaning to literary works, but rather they sought to respond to the challenge these works posed and learn from them.

Ethical Possibilities in Foreign Language Education

The FL Classroom as a Community Open to Difference

Findings of the study demonstrated how the dominant culture in FL programs is characterized by an aversion towards difference. Foreign language classrooms are 252

organized around placing students according to their proficiency level, which means a preference for similarity in the classroom rather than difference. This aversion to difference is also demonstrated in FL programs tendency to weed out academically weak students (Glynn & Wassel, 2018). Throughout the study, students demonstrated how their proficiency level affected the way they perceived themselves, and the way they were perceived by colleagues and teachers in the language program. Danny’s experience of alienation in his study abroad program, Gwen and Madeline perception of their low proficiency level as a disadvantage and deficit, Rania and Majid’s feeling of not belonging and being silenced in their previous Arabic language and literature courses due to their high proficiency level, all illustrate students’ experience and internalization of FL program culture.

Underlying the dominant culture in FL programs that prefer similarities rather than differences is the economic understanding of the process of education as meeting students’ needs (Biesta, 2005; Strhan, 2012). It makes sense to group students with similar proficiency levels which will indicate having similar needs. Since heritage learners will have different needs than FL learners, weak students will have different needs than average or stronger students, the tendency is to focus on similar needs in the class and marginalize those who are different. Even with recent calls for merging heritage learners and FL learners’ classes, heritage learners are perceived as a resource for teaching. In his discussion of the advantages of mixing heritage learners and FL learners, Golfetto (2020) mentions heritage learners as “useful resource in class for the teacher” to teach Arabic variation. He adds that heritage learners can support FL students

“through peer tutoring in simple dialogical and communicative settings or more complex

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language tasks” (p. 106). This attitude towards heritage learners as a teaching assistant was one of the reasons heritage learners in my study felt alienated and excluded in Arabic language classes, as discussed in Chapter 7. The ethics of alterity made it possible for this study to challenge the current practice of utilization of heritage learners in FL classrooms as representation of their heritage culture and as aid to FL learners. Through embracing their differences, students engaged in a thoughtful dialogue with the literary works and with each other, making the class a meeting point or as one of them described it a “hub.”

Additionally, an ethics of alterity can help reconceptualize learning as

“responding to what is other or different, to what challenges, irritates and disturbs us”

(Biesta, 2005, p. 62) rather than learning as acquiring knowledge or skills. Consequently, embracing a framework of alterity entails reconceptualizing teaching as exposing students to otherness, to difference that challenges and demands a response (Biesta, 2005, p. 64). Findings of the study supports the transformative power of alterity as a philosophical framework in FL education. As demonstrated in Chapter 7, students’ reflections and interviews all attest to how much they came to value their differences throughout the course.

Translanguaging

Another underlying concept that leads to aversion towards difference in the FL classroom is the native/non-native dichotomy. Despite being challenged over the past two decades, the concept of “native speakers” continues to be widely used as a model, norm and goal to teach foreign and heritage languages (Doerr, 2009). The view of non- native speaker as deﬁcient language speaker continues to prevail despite being contested by researchers (Doerr, 2009). Though it is beyond the scope of this study to offer more 254

in-depth analysis of native/non-native dichotomy and the possibilities for a new framework for foreign language education, this study provides a successful implementation of translanguaging in FL pedagogy and its findings support the current calls for “translanguaging-based pedagogy” in FL education (Duarte, & Günther-van der

Meij, 2020).

Utilizing translanguaging to design the course for this study has proven effective in introducing students to an upper level literature course and bridging the division between lower- and upper-level courses. It addressed the gap in students’ proficiency levels and allowed for a more inclusive culture in the classroom. García, Johnson, and

Seltzer (2017) explain the main purposes of translangauging are to support students’ engagement with complex texts, provide students with opportunities to develop linguistic practices for academic contexts, make space for students’ ways of knowing, and support the development of students’ bilingual identities. T hrough helping students develop a bilingual identity and perceiving them as emergent bilinguals rather than failing native speakers, both FL learners and heritage learners can find a space in the FL language classroom. Although this was not one of the stated goals of the course, it was clear through the students’ reflections and comments on their experience that translanguaging allowed them to be part of the class. Although the hierarchy of Native/heritage/non- native continued to dominate students’ perception of themselves and their colleagues, utilizing translanguaging allowed each student to develop and share his/her singular understanding of the text and destabilized the monopoly of meaning that heritage learners tend to have in FL class discussions. Findings of the study speaks to current literature on translanguaging. Fu, Hadjioannou, and Zhou (2019) call for embracing a translanguaging

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pedagogic model as an openness to difference in schools. They stress the importance of translanguaging model of education:

The translanguaging model transcends language and national borders, and transforms relationships between teaching and learning, and between teachers and students. Translanguaging sees languages as action—something we do—rather than treating it as a structure that locks us into a certain group, a certain nation, and a certain way of speaking, viewing and being. Translanguaging, grounded in cosmopolitanism, liberates us, connects nations and cultures, and embraces the world as a whole. Translanguaging is needed more than ever in our classrooms today to cultivate our children’s minds with democratic values, a social justice outlook, and a global competence for our 21st-century interdependent world. (p. 111)

Translanguaging challenges monolingual ideologies that dominate FL education. By thinking of language as action, translanguaging allow students to develop their bilingual identity and find their voice in the language they are learning. Reconceptualizing language from a multilingual perspective, translanguaging can open FL education to difference.

Pedagogical Implications

Working with Unpredictability

Throughout the course, I learned to work within a framework of unpredictability, which the encounter with the other necessitates. This unpredictability could be seen “as the generative potential for moving beyond the systemization and organization of teaching and learning into discrete elements” (Todd, 2016, p. 409). Students’ responses to each literary work and to the course as a whole were unpredictable. Each literary work provided opportunities for different conditions of alterity to surface. I have engaged with the unpredictability of the encounter with otherness in the classroom as well as the unpredictability of an ethical, responsive and creative reading. As Attridge (1999) explains, “Only a new, unpredictable, singular, creative act, as an inventive event in its

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turn, can do justice to a literary work as literary work” (p. 27). The value of the literary work, according to Attridge (2016), lies “in the changes it brings about in its reader’s grasp of the world and these changes vary from reader to reader and are not predictable or controllable” (p. 230). While as a teacher I worked to create an open space for the encounter with alterity, I could not foresee how students responded to the encounter. In order to foster trust in the unpredictability of reading, I cultivated a fluid structure for class discussions, working to open conversations to all possibilities of meaning.

Compromise

Despite my true passion about Levinas’s philosophy, creating the course felt like betraying it. While being open to the unpredictability the encounter with otherness throughout the course, I had to create learning outcomes, using the famous statement, “by the end of this course students will be able to . . .” Biesta (2005) argues that to suggest that “learning outcomes can be known and specified in advance is a gross misinterpretation of what education is about” (p. 61). Adopting a Levinasian perspective,

Biesta argues that learning always entails a risk and lead to unexpected change, and that defining the learning outcomes beforehand is to suggest that education can be risk free.

Despite agreeing with Biesta’s argument, I had to develop learning outcomes or course objectives to prove the seriousness of the course to both the department and students. It also provided structure for course activities and a basis for the grades by laying out expectations from students.

I believe the tension between working within the system and pushing against it was productive. Students’ reflections indicate they recognized that the course was pushing against the current state of systematized education. The course did not feel like a regular course to them. For example, Rania decided to keep all the readings and not 257

throw it away like what she does with her academic readings, Xiao called it an unconventional course, and Danny wrote, “I feel that I am in an adult lecture series where the point is to learn without the stress of worrying about grades and due dates.” Despite having to abide to university rules and expectations, students felt the course was different. They did not see the course as a means to an end. Students stated that they felt the need to come to class having read the texts not for the grades but because they felt responsible to their peers during the discussion. For students, notions of responsibility replaced accountability.

The way I taught the course also entailed compromising with some aspects of the instrumental approach to education. For example, I had to give up the requirement to speak Arabic only in literature classes in order to sustain students’ relation to the literary text and each other. Additionally, I had to design course assessment in a way that aligns with the philosophical framework of the course. This meant no tests. I used single-point rubric to grade students’ reflections and papers. The rubrics explained my expectation of assignment components, while its open-ended nature aligning with the unpredictability of students’ responses allowed me to further explain where the papers met, did not meet or exceeded expectations. I allowed students to submit drafts of their papers for feedback first. For the reflections that students wrote before every class session, I only used the rubric for the first couple of reflections to make sure students understood the expectations. After that, it turned to an online dialogue with students. I read each reflection carefully, corrected any misunderstanding of language or the plot, and asked more questions. Often students would revisit their reflection and respond to my comments and my questions. I never took points off their reflections for

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misunderstanding the plot or the language of the work. Generally, my orientation towards assessment in the course allowed students a space to make mistakes without getting punished. This was important to open the classroom space for students to respond to literary works genuinely. They did not have to compete for the best answer to get a good grade. The result of this approach was inflating the grades. This does not mean that every student in class received an A. It only meant that students did not miss grades for inaccurate interpretation, they were allowed to redo the work for a better grade, and they only missed grades when the work was not completed or very late. My judgment as a teacher was that lenient grading would allow the space for students to take risks in their encounter with literary works. It was my response to Todd’s (2003) questions:

What do students risk in encountering a story, an idea, an other? What do they risk in forming a symbolic relationship to knowledge, and to curriculum, more generally? And what are our responsibilities to students as teachers in asking them to read and, indeed, to respond? (p. 18)

As Todd’s questions demonstrate, in their endeavor for an ethical reading and their forming of a symbolic relation to a text, students are already taking huge risks. To ask students to read with an openness to otherness, listen to the unpredictability of the other, and respond to the other, both teachers and students need to break free from the dominant instrumentalist paradigm in education.

Teaching as Conversation

My understanding of teaching has evolved as I read Levinas’s philosophy of alterity through my day-to-day pedagogical encounter in the classroom. In Totality and

Infinity, Levinas (1969) describes the retaliation to the other as a conversation, he explains that “insomuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching” and adds,

“Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more

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than I contain” (p. 51). It was transformative for me as a teacher to live Levinas’s notions of teaching as conversation and a relation to otherness in the classroom.

Learning through conversation allowed each of us to be a teacher and a learner at the same time. As Strhan (2012) explains, “Teaching, for Levinas, is the space of encounter with the Other in which subjectivity is revealed as ethical” (p. 20). The feeling that I described earlier of failing as a teacher marked a moment in which my understanding of teaching changed. Welcoming the alterity of my students entailed a new mode of relationality beyond what our institutional roles prescribed. I asked myself questions similar to what Strhan (2012) posed in her reading of Levinas’s work in education:

After reading Levinas, what could it mean for me as a teacher to view my students as “bringing me more than I contain”? Might it lead to a radical understanding of the possibility of equality in educational institutions and in our attitudes towards knowledge? (p. 36)

If the teacher encounters the alterity of her students, this means learning from her students and allowing students, to use Levinas’s expression, to bring her more than she contains. Teaching then is not transmitting knowledge or helping students arrive to a predetermined destination through Socratic maieutics. It is not, as Biesta emphasizes, facilitating students’ acquisition of knowledge or skills. Teaching is the conversation and the encounter in which we listen attentively and respond ethically to the other.

How I made sense of my day-to-day encounter in the classroom was by thinking of myself as a reader and engaging with other readers in the conversation. This meant being open to change my opinion about both the language and the literary works, just like anyone else in the classroom, through the discussion. It meant being vulnerable to the challenge of the text and the other readers and being responsible for and to them. The

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responsibility I felt towards this class was more intense than any I have felt towards any group of students I taught in the past twenty years of my career.

Recommendations for Further Research

During data analysis, I briefly noted a number of themes that were beyond the scope of this study but would benefit from further investigation. Among them was the issue of politics in FL education which emerged in several moments in the study.

Students’ motives for learning a language like Arabic, which is deemed critical by the

U.S. government for diplomacy and national security, suggest a political attitude towards the language and its cultures. Additionally, the treatment of news about and from the

Middle East in of US media further complicates the situation. The sheer presence of

Arabic language and literature in area studies rather than modern language departments for world literature means that politics will inevitably be involved when teaching Arabic literature in the US (Al-Nowaihi, 2001; Ben Amor, 2017). When conducting interviews with students to learn more about their background with Arabic, it was interesting to observe the contrast between a politicized relation to the language and culture embraced by the majority of FL learners and the nostalgic feelings of heritage learners. Facing this contrast reminded me of the politics of knowledge production in academia. The issue of

American hegemony in the Middle East came up in students’ discussion of a number of literary works. The issue of being Arab and Muslim in the U.S. also came up in heritage learners’ reflections and discussions. I believe further research exploring students’ positionality in relation to what they read is needed. Additionally, further research exploring what Levinasian ethics can offer the teaching of Arabic in the U.S. may be transformative to the field.

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The issue of representation within Arabic curriculum was raised by heritage learners who appreciated that we studied literary works from their home culture. Ben

Amor (2017) summarized a number of biases in the choice of literary texts taught at the advanced level or featured in textbooks and anthologies. The prevailing regional bias tends to be “Egypt-centric with occasional additions from Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and seldom from Iraq. The rest of the Arab world is almost completely ignored” (p. 98). The issue of geographically biased curriculum is well known in the field of teaching Arabic not only in choosing literary texts, but also textbooks and dialect choice. Further research exploring the reform of Arabic language and literature curriculum is needed.

The theoretical framework of the study did not allow much space to study students’ affective responses to literature in a sufficient manner. Todd (2003) states,

“Levinas does not directly deal with the question of feeling” (51). Yet, the range of affective responses of students experience and its relation to their ethical stance of being for the other or learning from the other demands further investigation. The need to address emotions in pedagogy has been highlighted in scholarship and is gaining more attention (Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Porto & Zembylas, 2020; Schultz, Kumm, Legg, &

Rose, 2020; Zembylas, 2003, 2007, 2015). I believe that it would be illuminating for the field to put ethics of alterity in conversation with emotions in pedagogy.

The perception of the classroom as a community of difference was an important part of bringing Levinasian ethics to the classroom. Participants in this study reflected on very positively on having colleagues from different backgrounds in the class. Foreign language students valued the insider view that heritage learners brought to class discussion, and heritage learners valued the fresh eye and outsider view that FL learners

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brought. Both views enriched students understanding of the texts and were mutually respected. This also allowed all students to understand the concept of cultural distance and its impact on reading. Namaan (2011) wrote about the “cultural divide” between the curricula and teaching of Arabic literature in the U.S. and in the Arab world. It would help to explore the possibility of bridging this divide and provide an opportunity for FL readers and Arab readers to read together.

Students’ reflections on the alterity of Arabic language and the different attitude towards reading when presented with the English translation alongside the Arabic poem of Lilith, indicate the need for further investigation of the difference between reading a text in its original language and reading it in translation. Additionally, while different scholars work on politics of translation and reception of Arabic literature in the West, like

Amal Amireh, Hosam Aboul-Ela, Nancy Coffin, and Therese Saliba, further research is needed to explore whether teaching Arabic literature in translation in higher education takes this scholarship into account, as well as research to explore pedagogical approaches that does not mask the process of translation as a political process.

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Appendix

Interview Protocol

Semi-structured Interview-I

1. What is your background with Arabic---where did you begin your study of the

language?

a. Why?

b. Tell me about your academic background?

2. Why did you decide to take Arabic literature class?

3. Did you read Arabic literature before? Do you read literature in your language?

Or in other languages?

4. What do you think you will benift from this class?

Semi-structured Interview-II

1. What do you think about the novel we are reading now?

a. What did you like the most about the novel?

b. What didn’t you like about it?

2. Do you feel like you relate to any characters in the novel?

a. How/why

3. Which character in the novel do you feel distanced from you the most? And why?

a) not feeling affinity with the actions of the character,

b) feeling the character is unreal?, or

c) feeling the character is so strange that they feel distance and a lack of connection.

4. Do you feel any challenges in reading this novel?

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a. Probe:

i. Language/accessibly

ii. Thematic relatability

iii. …(these are themes potentially from your study)

5. Do you feel any challenges during class discussions?

6. Tell me about a time during reading or discussion of the novel when you felt

uncomfortable.

Semi-structured Interview-III

1. Reading as an encounter with otherness:

2. In which of these texts did we encounter something new, different? What was it

and how do we feel about it?

3. What ideas in these readings challenged you or questioned your views?

4. How did you feel about the characters in the story?

i. Which ones you can relate to and why?

ii. Which ones you feel distanced from and why?

iii. Which character feels unreal? Which character you can

5. A difficult reading:

Some texts get under our skin and find their way to the fragile raw material of carefully concealed self. Novels can provoke from us intense gut reactions and irrational emotional outbursts. Some content presses our buttons. We shut the book vowing never to return (Tarc, 2015, p.81).

Does any of the texts of this week constitute a difficult reading? Why?

6. Reading as dialogue with an other who teaches:

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When reading, we can temporarily ruin and renew a sense of ourselves in thoughts of each other…In reading, “two strangers, without speaking to each other, intimately communicate, teach, and learn and make meaning. (Tarc, 2015, p.39).

7. In your conversation with the literary works you read, what did you learn? What

did the text say to you?

8. What other texts/works of art did this text evoke/recall? What do they share?

What do you think about the conversation between these works?

9. How did your conversation with other readers in the class alter/enrich your

reading of the text?

10. What do you think the author of this text is trying to convey to you as a reader?

11. what is it about this text that challenges your preconceptions? How does it expose

you to ways of thinking and feeling that are new to you?

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