Towards an ethics of intersubjectivity : affective textures of empathy in modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film

Comparative scholarship of Israeli and Palestinian literatures has posited various forms of a relational literary space, often predicated on implicit hopes for empathy. While not disavowing these hopes, per se, this dissertation takes empathy itself as a starting point for a critical appraisal of the ethics and aesthetics of intersubjectivity. Analyzing Hebrew and Arabic literary and cinematic works from both within and beyond the geographical/epistemological spaces of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this dissertation is positioned at the intersection of comparative readings of Hebrew and Arabic, on one hand, and Empathy Studies on the other. Works considered include Ḥanān al-Shaykh's Story of Zahra and Hūdā Barakāt's Disciples of Passion (Lebanon), Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī's The Bleeding of the Stone (Libya), Sa‘ūd al-Sanʻusi's The Bamboo Stalk (Kuwait), Yoel Hoffmann's The Book of Joseph and Shira Geffen's Self Made (Israel), as well as S Yizhar's "Khirbet Khizeh," Emīl Ḥabībī's "Pessoptimist," and Ghassān Kanafānī's "Returning to Haifa." This dissertation first argues that the Question of Palestine, sui generis, played an outsized role in shaping the post-1948 aesthetics of empathy in Hebrew and Arabic literature and film writ large. In dialogue with the conflict, some works in Hebrew tended towards an ethic of shooting and crying (yorim ve-bochim), a position of collective victimization, while some in Arabic tended towards an ethics of commitment (iltizām) and resistance (muqāwama), or an externalization of aggression in the belief that action would lead to resolution. Such an understanding gestures towards the related yet divergent histories of emotion of Zionism and Arab Nationalism, respectively. However, it also renders visible the myriad ways in which subsequent authors and filmmakers in both linguistic spheres have come to resist the proscription of empathy by reclaiming the intersubjective. While the Middle East has long factored as a site of extreme conflict in the Metropolitan imagination, Empathy Studies as a field has paid surprisingly scant attention to the region's cultural production. By reading three distinct affective textures of intersubjectivity, including frightful, chastened, and ambivalent, this dissertation seeks to move the field of Empathy Studies beyond binaries of pro-empathy and anti-empathy, opening it up to considering the many affective textures of the intersubjective. Such an opening further informs and is informed by developments in the post-Arab Spring (post-2011) cultural spheres in Israel and the Arabic-speaking world that have rejected the ideological and emotional binaries of an earlier generation.