Haneen Omari is a university lecturer (assistant professor) at the Institute for Area Studies.

More information about Haneen Omari

Fields of interest

Comparative literature, Modern and pre-modern Arabic literature and language, Palestinian literature, (Arabic) culture

PhD research

Unearthing Literature: The Case of Hussein Barghouti

Supervisor: prof. dr. Petra Sijpesteijn
Second supervisor: Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London)

This dissertation moves beyond the usually imposed representative nature of Palestinian literature by taking the works of the Palestinian author Hussein Barghouti (1954- 2002) as a case study. Many of Barghouti’s writings were seen as detached, individualistic, and unrelated to the harsh and pressing realities of Palestinian life. The argument that is proposed in this dissertation, however, is that Barghouti’s works exemplify a disruption of familiar expressions regarding notions of political engagement, illness and death, and literary innovation. The dissertation adopts the body as a thematic trope and a methodological framework for conceptualizing Barghouti’s calls for creative modes of writing and cross- generic experimentations.

Guided by the personal and literary circumstances that shaped Barghouti’s life and works, I look at the body through multiple dimensions: the physical body of Barghouti that is being threatened and invaded by cancer, the land of Palestine as it is similarly being threatened and invaded by occupation, and the body of the literary text, where the forms of genres and literary texts are being negotiated and contested. The dissertation uses the relation between the experiential body and the word as a way of investigating alternative modalities of thinking about literature.

CV