Life in chaos in works of el-Sheikh and Chedid
Abstract
Lebanon, after the beginning of its civil war in 1975 and up to the present, has witnessed and is still witnessing the emergence of war literature. This dissertation is a study of two war novels: Hanan el-Sheikh's Hikayat Zahra (1980) and Andree Chedid's La maison sans racines (1985). In my analysis I have recourse to two scientific concepts: entropy and chaos theory. These concepts generate a number of interpretive categories that prove useful in elucidating the peculiar effect produced by the civil war in Lebanon. Both novels relate events that occur before the war as well as events that occur during the war. Hence, in the first chapter, I analyze the theme of roots and the issue of the return to the homeland. These themes establish the background against which the later chaos of Lebanon is written. To analyze this chaos, chapter two explores the popularity of the concept of entropy in various fields, including literature. The analysis is in three parts, including an explanation of the concept of thermodynamic entropy and a demonstration of how this concept evolves from a thermodynamic law to a statistical one. Entropy is a useful concept, but it is not in itself sufficient to account for what happens in the Lebanese war. Chapter three, therefore, presents an overview of the two branches of chaos theory. The first section deals with Ilya Prigogine's theory that he presented in Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. The second section deals with the branch that has been popularized by James Gleick in Chaos: Making a New Science. The last section is a survey of essays on chaos theory and literary theory. In chapters four and five, I show that the concept of entropy in general, with its various manifestations and corollaries, can be applied to el-Sheikh's and Chedid's novels. Such an application helps the reader capture the mood of the war as well as understand the various reactions of people during the war. Those same chapters use chaos theory to underscore the dynamics and some of the paradoxes of daily life during the war.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Ross, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|Middle Eastern literature|Middle Eastern history|Literature
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