ABSTRACT
The literary text has often been allocated a privileged relationship with the city. The modern novel has been inextricably linked to the urban. This chapter focuses on the relationship between cityness and the novel as a paradigm for teaching contemporary Arabic literature in the cultural context of the American academy. It explains the use of "cityness", and argues that the novel is an especially privileged mode for reflecting upon and producing cityness, as well as making meaning of urban space. The chapter shows how a reading of two canonical novels from the Lebanese civil war focused on the dialectical relationship between literary and spatial practices and understandings can shed new light on canonical texts. It briefly discusses the advantages of incorporating this potentially multidisciplinary approach into the classroom. The chapter also focuses on the city can enable new interdisciplinary networks to be made within and across academic departments which may invigorate teaching, learning and research.
