LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

j. kristen urbanis, as a contextualised human being). Literature facilitates this exploration byimaginatively varying different aspects of human beings and through itsnarrative, in drawing its readers into the decision-making processes of day-todaylives. The reader finds herself engaged in a dialectic between self and other,wherein the sensibilities of self are subject to redefinition as she is exposed toalternative ways of understanding. Possibilities for self-understanding as well asunderstanding the cultural other are thus expanded through the creativeimagination of the artist.Nussbaum’s goal is, among other things, to affect approaches to problemsolvingat the level of public policy and to broaden options for governments inaddressing questions of social justice. 13 Rooted in Aristotelian definitions of ‘thegood’, her own concern is to promote an agenda which locates ‘human flourishing’near the top of the list of policy concerns. What is puzzling for a politicalscientist in this, is that the project is to be undertaken by means of re-perceivingalone, and relies wholly upon fostering a generosity of spirit among those in keydecision-making capacities. This is in fact a criticism Elaine Scarry makes whenshe argues that the complexity of lives presented to us within novels or poemsenhances difficulties in imagining the other as a contextualised human being:Presented with the huge number of characters one finds in Dickens or in Tolstoi, onemust constantly strain to keep them sorted out; and of course their numbers are stilltiny when compared with the number of persons to whom we are responsible inpolitical life. (1996: 104)It is challenging enough generously to imagine friends, let alone enemies orfaceless ‘others’. Scarry asserts that, ‘The action of injuring occurs preciselybecause we have trouble believing in the reality of other persons’ (102). Suchscepticism can be applied to peace-making approaches at the internationallevel, like the Harvard Negotiation Project of Herbert Kelman, which has seenmisperceptions and misunderstandings between Palestinians and Israelis ascentral to the maintenance of their conflict; 14 likewise, the techniques used byLeonard Doob in Northern Ireland and Africa focused on the need to reimaginethe other. 15 But the generous imaginings required to promote solutionsresonant with the values of social justice have been largely absent from thisapproach even at the scholarly level – let alone in the practical arena of politicsitself. As Scarry observes, Nussbaum’s ‘cosmopolitan largesse [which] relies onthe population to spontaneously and generously “imagine” other persons, and todo so on a day-by-day basis’ is incomplete, in that it ignores the overtly politicalaspects of the conflict, elements often themselves maintained through structuralrealities. Scarry’s solution is to ‘solve the problem of human “otherness” throughconstitutional design [which itself seeks to] eliminate altogether the inherentlyaversive structural position of “foreignness”’ (98), since under democratic— 92 —www.taq.ir