The Space of Literature and Lebanese Wars

Abstract

The engagement of Lebanese writers with the everyday realities of the ‘Lebanese wars’ is of crucial relevance to research involving the geography and spatiality of the wars. Often seen as a form of place-writing, the Lebanese war novel records a certain character of space in a particular moment of history. With the vague boundaries between reality and fiction and the common tendency of Lebanese writers to provide names of actual places in the city to mark the background and spatial settings of their works, these works can be looked at through the lens of Ed Soja’s third space – his proposal of a space that extends beyond the binary of real and imagined, bringing a blended form and introducing a possibility of an active relationship and productive exchange between architecture and literature.