ABSTRACT
This chapter invites a reading that would attend rather to the quiet narrative aporia surrounding a reticent Zahra, the challenge her will to be "look[ed] at [as] a woman in peacetime" presents to liberal feminist literary criticism in English, and what that all might have to do with the narrative conditions of war in Arabic. This chapter is intended for use in the classroom, to be read by students and their teachers in courses on women's writing, the Arabic novel, war literature, translation, and American feminism; and invites students and teachers to take The Story of Zahra as an opportunity for closer reading. The Story of Zahra offers a case study in which the hesitations of a piece of fiction both warn against the imposition of a reader's politics of feminism, and yet seem persistently also to stage those very critical tendencies.
