LITERARY PORTRAYALS OF PALESTINIAN LIVES

Mohamed Anis Ferchichi & Shanee Stepakoff, PhD Students, English

Most universities offer few if any opportunities for students to learn about the past century of Palestinian lives in a way that truly engages with complexity and diversity and that fosters meaningful insight. In contrast to the methodologies most commonly used in the social sciences, literary fiction provides a unique path toward hearing lesser-known voices, excavating buried stories, and attuning to subtleties. This grant makes it possible for the co-recipients – Shanee Stepakoff and Mohamed Anis Ferchichi, doctoral students in the Department of English – to research, design, and implement a pilot course focusing on literary portrayals of Palestinian lives and to compile a manual to build capacity among instructors who may wish to teach a similar course in the future. Under the guidance of faculty advisor Martha Elena Rojas, Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English, Stepakoff and Ferchichi will devote the summer of 2021 to extensive reading of pertinent literary works, consulting with other faculty, and selecting the novels and short stories to be included, and create the syllabus, with the aim of gaining curricular approval to co-teach a 10-week course for interested URI students during the summer of 2022. The course will be firmly grounded in literary studies and the humanities. Also, the possibility of cross-listings with other programs/departments  – such as History, Arabic Studies, International Studies/Diplomacy, Anthropology, International Relations, Justice/Law/Society, and Nonviolence/Peace Studies – will be explored. The texts under consideration explore a diverse range of experiences, with variations across gender, social class, religion, geographic location, and the urban-rural divide, and cover a wide range of historical periods from the early twentieth century to the present. The co-instructors will draw on rich, sophisticated literary portrayals of Palestinian lives in a manner that makes it possible to wrestle with moral complexities, historical trauma, and psychological truths. By drawing on the power and range of the human imagination and capacity for empathy, the co-instructors will aim for depth and eschew oversimplification and caricature. The choice of texts and teaching methods will be grounded in the principle that literature can make it possible to see, hear, and recognize other people whom one might not otherwise encounter and to imagine new and more hopeful possibilities.