Women and the war story / Miriam Cooke.

ISBN:

9780520918092

9780585081380

9780520206120

9780520206137

Title:

Women and the war story / Miriam Cooke.

Author:

Cooke, Miriam.

Personal Author:

Cooke, Miriam.

Publication Information:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 1996.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 367 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Subvert the dominant paradigm -- Culture degree zero -- Silence is the real crime -- Talking democracy -- Flames of fire in Qadisiya -- Reimagining Lebanon.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

War stories -- History and criticism.

War in literature.

Women and war.

Arabic fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.

Arabic fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

1996

Publication Information:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 1996.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
892.73609358 20	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes; the standard narrative--and with it the way we think about and conduct war--can be changed.

As the traditional time, space, organization, and representation of war have shifted, so have ways of describing it. As drug wars, civil wars, gang wars, and ideological wars have moved into neighborhoods and homes, the line between combat zones and safe zones has blurred. Cooke shows how women's stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions--home vs. front, civilian vs. combatant, war vs. peace, victory vs. defeat--that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary lite

Author Notes

Cooke Miriam :

Miriam Cooke is Professor of Arabic at Duke University. She is the author of War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1988) and coeditor of Gendering War Talk (1993) and Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (1990).

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

Taking up where her War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (CH, Jul'88) left off, Cooke (Duke Univ.) expands on her thesis that women tell The War Story (as she nominalizes the concept) differently than men, and that by their very presence in the process of war, women have completely changed the understanding of what war means. Her approach is cultural and narrative; she discusses how the world should view what she contends are now only postcolonial wars and how one must move beyond narrowly defined masculine pursuits and read war and the telling of war as a gendered concept. The literary focus is on the writings of Algerian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi women, populations traditionally silent and often mythically portrayed by male writers as having nothing to do with war. By writing as they do, creating a new space for women's voices, these women work toward social transformation, toward the "possibility of constructing a discourse that unsettles identities." Like Cooke's earlier book, this is a radical study, opening up a new field and a new perspective in war literature. Highly recommended for upper-division and higher; essential for women's studies collections. B. Adler Valdosta State University

Library Journal Review

Following up on War's Other Voices (Cambridge Univ., 1988), Cooke examines women's voices in the telling of the story of war. As women write themselves into the war story, she asserts, they undo the traditionally "masculine contract between violence, sexuality and glory." She describes how our concept, construction, and representation of war have changed in the last half of the 20th century. The nuclear age, not to mention media and film coverage, has altered our perception of war and thus war itself. She discusses the literature produced during the Algerian war of independence, the Palestinian uprising during the two periods following Israeli occupation (in 1948 and 1967), the Iraqi-Iran war of the 1980s, and the Lebanese civil war in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion. She examines how authors like Assia Djebar and Shar Khalifa portray the role of women in war, as warriors and as civilians. Cooke does not, however, pass judgment on the intrinsic literary value or merit of this work. Hers is an interesting study, recommended for those interested in war and gender studies and Middle Eastern literature.Roseanne Castellino, D'Youville Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

Library Journal Review