Resistances of Literature: Strategies of Narrative Affiliation in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Etel Adnan's novel on the Lebanese civil war, Sitt Marie Rose (1978), was written as a literary act of resistance to war. Based on a real event, the torture and murder of a Christian woman who betrayed her camp to defend the Palestinian refugees of Beirut, it denounces what Edward Said has called the embattled identities of postcolonial nationalism. Using Said's seminal essay Secular Criticism as its point of departure, this paper explores the ways in which Adnan's novel articulates a specifically gendered critique of filiation through a figure of affiliation: that of the Palestinian refugee. Marie-Rose's transgression of gender, national, and religious lines (as a Christian Lebanese woman who is sexually and politically involved with the Palestinians) paradoxically indexes the heterogeneity within the same, and advocates for the inclusion of the enemy other (the hostis that is the guest, enemy, and stranger) in the space of the nation. Yet as a literary text, the novel also complicates the militant message it has come to be equated with. Paying close attention to the discursive, narrative, and poetic strategies deployed in the text, I argue that the narrative form of the novel problematizes the very notion of resistance, pointing to the risk of reproducing filiative ties within affiliative communities. Following Jacques Derrida, I propose the notion of resistances of literature, in the double genitive sense of the term: Sitt Marie Rose constitutes an act of literary resistance; but it also resists discursive appropriation, leaving a remainder that cannot be excised to fit the frame of the national narrative.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".