Sayed Kashua's journalistic chronicle: self-irony and satire in an unpretentious negotiation between ethnicity and nationality in Israel

• Grant number: 11/51631-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Effective date (Start): December 01, 2011
• Effective date (End): November 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Nancy Rozenchan
• Grantee: Juliana Portenoy Schlesinger
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The research project to be developed in the post-doctoral studies consists in the literary analysis of journalistic chronicles written in Hebrew by the Muslim Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz since 2005. These texts are selected due to their wealth of content and use of rhetorical strategies such as self-irony and sarcasm to expose the conflicts through which passes the "I of the chronicler" portrayed by the author. This analysis will rely on theoretical assumptions of Cultural Studies and the "New literary paradigms," tools that will enable to study the journalistic chronic as a literary text. Since journalistic chronic is considered an ambiguous genre, which comes between nonfiction and fiction and, between journalism and literature, the traditional nomenclature should be reviewed and dubious analysis tools that support dualities and conflicts should be used in this analysis: chronic will join the story, the journalist the author, the author the narrator, the non-fiction the fiction, fugacity the perpetuity, fun making the strangeness, the public the unique experience and the private, the scholar pretension the spontaneous and unpretentious, and finally the funny making and colloquial language join controversial themes. In these chronicles, in a non-pretentious way, coming from the subjective experiences and family topics, with self-irony and in a satirical way, Kashua will report the experiences of an Israeli Arab who lives in a clash over his dual loyalty and conflicting ideologies, reflecting a negotiation between his ethnicity and his nationality. The chronicle, in this context, is considered the appropriate location for Kashua's writings: the ambiguity of the literary genre and the urge for confrontation of the pairs already described above - so that it can become the object of research - are similar to the necessity of breaking dualities in Israeli society to understand and to be acquainted with the "I of the chronicler" of Sayed Kashua. (AU)