 Women, memory, and the archives of Lebanon’s Civil War When official history falls silent, who remembers the war? This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply contested part of Lebanon’s past. Lebanon has had no comprehensive state-led truth commission or national reconciliation process, and the Civil War remains largely absent from the official history curriculum. Memories of the conflict therefore remain fragmented across communities, families, political affiliations, and generations. But silence does not mean that the past has disappeared. When official history falls silent, other forms of remembering emerge. Novels, poems, paintings, films, photographs, and testimonies become archives of experiences that institutions have failed—or refused—to preserve. Arab women, including the Syrian novelist Ghada al-Samman, the Lebanese-born poet, novelist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, and the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, have created some of the most powerful alternative archives of the Lebanese Civil War. They refuse to let the conflict disappear into historical silence. Their works expand what it means to remember war. Sometimes, remembering means recording a nightmare, preserving a fragment, painting a ruined landscape, or making people laugh in the face of sectarian violence. When everyday life becomes an archiveGhada al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, written during the Civil War, takes us away from the conventional battlefield and into the intimate space of a woman’s home. The protagonist is trapped in Beirut during the siege. Snipers, shelling, hunger and fear transform the apartment from a place of safety into a prison. Yet the novel does something more than document the violence surrounding the protagonist. It records what war feels like in the body: insomnia, terror, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant anticipation of death. Conventional histories of war tend to privilege battlefields, political negotiations, military leaders, and armed combatants. Yet Al-Samman asks us to look elsewhere. The protagonist’s manuscript, written under siege, becomes an alternative archive, preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. The home becomes a site of resistance, while the female body becomes a record of a war that official narratives cannot fully capture. When a broken story tells the truthEtel Adnan approaches the problem of remembering differently. Her Sitt Marie Rose, The Arab Apocalypse, Of Cities and Women, and her visual art refuse to offer a single, coherent version of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Adnan gives us fragments, contradictions, symbols, and ruined, blood-red landscapes. Her work captures the experiences of living through violence when the familiar structures that make life intelligible—home, city, community, language, and identity—are themselves fractured. In Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan recounts the story of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian educator who worked with Palestinian refugees. Marie Rose’s commitment to crossing sectarian boundaries places her in direct conflict with the patriarchal and sectarian logic of the war. Her murder exposes how women’s bodies and choices become battlegrounds for competing ideas of community, loyalty, and nation. In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan takes fragmentation even further. Language itself seems to break apart. Words, images and symbols collide, while recurring suns and ruined landscapes replace the orderly historical timeline we might expect. In Of Cities and Women, Adnan reimagines Beirut through personal memory and encounters with the city, challenging the idea that its history fits into a single narrative. Her attention to women, displacement, and place offers a gendered reimagining of the city and its histories. Adnan’s visual art performs a similar archival function without relying on documentary representation. Landscapes and abstract forms become traces through which loss, destruction, and memory remain visible. These works create another way of remembering. Adnan’s fragments resist the demand to make war appear coherent, reconciled, or safely contained in the past. Her art keeps the wounds visible. The result is an archive without the appearance of an archive: no official monument, no single narrative, no authorised voice. Memory survives instead through images, fragments, landscapes and voices that refuse to settle into one version of history. Can humour remember war?Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? takes yet another approach. The film is set in an unnamed Lebanese village divided by sectarian tensions. Its women are determined to prevent the men from turning those divisions into violence. But they do not confront the men through conventional political power. Instead, they destroy radios, manipulate religious symbols, hire Ukrainian dancers to distract the men, and even drug their meals to keep weapons out of their hands. The scenes are absurd and often genuinely funny. But the humour conceals a serious question: who carries the responsibility for remembering what war does to a community? Labaki’s women know what another cycle of violence will cost. While their interventions are acts of care, they are also acts of historical resistance. They try to prevent the past from becoming the future. The film therefore turns women’s everyday labour—mourning, caring, organising, persuading, protecting—into political action. Its unnamed village also transforms the story into a wider reflection on communities divided by violence: what happens when neighbours become enemies, and when the wounds of one generation become the inheritance of the next? Beyond preserving the pastWhat connects Al-Samman, Adnan, and Labaki is not simply that they write about the Lebanese Civil War, but how they remember it. Al-Samman records the war through the female body and the domestic space. Adnan fragments its history through literature, symbols and visual art. Labaki transforms remembrance into tragicomedy, showing women attempting to interrupt the repetition of violence. Together, their different forms create what I call “alternative archives”: cultural memory that exists outside official institutions and challenges the silences surrounding the conflict. They challenge official institutions’ authority over what counts as history and reshape our understanding of feminist resistance; for these women are not simply adding women’s experiences to an established history of the Lebanese Civil War. They question how history is produced, showing that women’s fear, grief, survival, creativity, care and resistance are not secondary to the “real” history of war; rather, they are history itself. A monument can preserve a name; a textbook can preserve a date; an archive can preserve a document. But a novel can preserve a feeling; a painting can preserve a wound; a film can preserve a gesture; and a woman’s testimony can preserve what an official history leaves behind. When official history falls silent, remembering becomes more than looking backwards. It becomes a struggle over who has the right to tell the story and, ultimately, who has the right to imagine what comes next. Feature image: by Michael Starkie on Unsplash. 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 Getting lost in revision Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it. I introduce new errors, garble sentences or paragraphs that once seemed clear, and add whole paragraphs that I later decide to cut. Here’s what I’ve noticed myself doing: Making new typos. When I see something that needs to be fixed, I type what I think will fix it, often glancing down at the keyboard. Then I move on to the next problem, forgetting to proof the correction and thus introducing new problems. I need to slow down. Overlooking the obvious. Autocorrect catches the most egregious typos, like “fpor” for “for” or “teh” for “the.” But it does not correct word substitutions, for example when you type “work” for “word.” Errors may be almost too simple to notice because you are reading what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote. You might miss a substitution like “iconically” for “ironically” or “principle” for “principal” (or vice versa). I once mistakenly referred to The Elements of Style authors Strunk and White as Stunk and White, an error overlooked by the copyeditor and proofreader as well. We were all processing the word we predicted to be there rather than what actually was on the page. Trying to satisfy everyone. In terms of content, I sometimes make things worse when I forget who my audience really is and try too hard to satisfy particular comments by reviewers, editors, or beta-readers. This can result in my over-explaining certain points or adding tangential asides. When I re-revise, I find myself wondering, Why did I add that? It helps to keep your eventual ideal reader in your head (or at least over your shoulder) and resist the impulse to go along with every suggestion. Fussing too much with syntax. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed myself revising a sentence to (try to) make it clearer but leaving in an extra word or ending from the earlier version that turns the new version into word salad. Writing about early twentieth-century scientists’ speculation about the Martian canals, I wrote that they were once believed to be “a means for transporting water.” My revision read that they were believed to be “a means for Martians to transporting water.” Oops. When I revised the phrase “the study’s aim is to clarify perceptions of dialect,” my revised version read “the aim of the study is to undercover the average person’s perception of dialect.” I had “undercover” rather than “uncover.” And when I try to resolve the reference of vague pronouns by adding in names, I sometimes forget to double-check the spelling, so Schultz becomes Shultz, and Carlsen becomes Carlson. Understanding strengths and weaknesses. Over the course of my career, I’ve noticed that my writing gets more convoluted when I am expounding on a theoretical or technical point as opposed to when I am narrating a story. So now I pay particular attention to clarity in places where I write about abstractions rather than about people and actions. Make a list of your own strengths and weaknesses and use it to focus your revisions. Two suggestions. The track changes feature looks messy, but I suggest leaving it on as you revise so that you can do targeted reproofing of your revisions and corrections. Or better yet, read your work aloud so you don’t fall into the trap of seeing what you think you wrote. What you think you wrote may not be there. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 I had to look (them up) When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching. For example, a writer discussing literary criticism was complaining about “smarty-pants intellectuals.” I could see why the genteel author chose “smarty-pants” rather than “smart-ass intellectuals,” but why is the seat of smarts in the seat of the pants? And where do “smarty-pants” and “smart-ass” come from? “Smarty-pants,” it turns out, is attested from the early 1900s as a term for a know-it-all and “smarty” (sans pants) goes back to the mid-1800s. It shows up in Mark Twain, for example, where Tom Sawyer refers to a “St. Louis smarty” who thinks too highly of himself. Smart-ass comes later, arising in the mid-twentieth century and similarly referring to a smug display of knowledge. Perhaps it comes from the earlier smart-alecky, which was used in the 19th century. In another book, a thriller featuring a lawyer who gave up her career as a mixed-martial artist, I fixed on the phrase “cleaned my clock.” It’s a bit of American slang referring to a thorough physical thrashing, and by extension any overwhelming defeat. Since we talk about the face of a clock, the underlying metaphor here is clear: a sound defeat, say in the boxing ring, could involve having one’s features rearranged. The phrase sometimes showed up as “fixed one’s clock” or “stopped one’s clock”, and the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1895, describes an avicide: The man approached the bird and struck it a deadly blow with the stock of his gun…‘Old Frank [sc. a heron] ha’ done me out of many an eel—the warmint—but I ha’ cleaned his clock now.’ The present-day meaning is thankfully less fatal. In a review of another noirish suspense novel, I spotted the phrase “hard-bitten,” used to describe a world-weary protagonist. Is it supposed to refer to someone who has been bitten hard by life? It turns out that “hard-bitten” was first used of dogs that were resolute in their biting, a usage from the 17th century. By the early 19th century, the phrase could refer to people who were “tough,” “resolute,” “hardened by experience,” or “cynical.” A citation from 1819 refers to “Some hard-bitten fellow [who] assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole ’em’,” and another from 1857 described some cricket players as “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding [sic] as to the result of the morrow’s match.” Hard-bitten carries a sense of having been chewed up by life, and I wondered how it compared with “hard-boiled.” That phrase, of course, originated with eggs, and has been used that way since the late 16th century (and later in the 19th century to refer to hard-boiled peas, hard-boiled pudding, and hard-boiled dumplings). In the early 19th century, we find ideas referred to as “hard-boiled” and, by the late 19th century, people as well, including those who were tough, cynical, ruthless, or callous. By 1928, we find examples like this blurb from Century Magazine: “A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all nations.” I think of the contrast this way: hard-boiled is cynical toughness and a world-weary detachment; hard-bitten is a toughness arising through struggles. One final puzzler (for now) is the phrase “eat your heart out.” Cannibalistic zombies aside, it can be a boastful expression (“eat your heart out, bro”) or can be used to indicate actual grief. In English it originally meant the latter: to suffer pangs of longing, regret, and envy, a usage that goes back to the 16th century and seems patterned after a Greek expression. So we find this from 1651: “A man that eats out his heart with worldly cares, will never sleep an happy sleep.” And in this example from 1707, without the out, we find: “He eat his valiant Heart to see the Prey He thought his own, so bravely snatch’d away.” By the late 1950s, a U.S. variant had emerged indicating that the addressee is likely to be annoyed or envious, as in this from 1958: “The boy, after noting my pained expression after his good run, yelled over to me: ‘Eat your heart out, coach.'” The meaning and point of view of the phrase has shifted from an indication of anguish to an expression of triumph. A productive afternoon’s research. Featured image by Aashish Chandra via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Binomial expressions The term “binomial expression” sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x3 + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x2 − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2. But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did. English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called “Studies in Irreversible Binomials”) and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, “Binomials and Pitch Accent,” looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called “Word Order”) proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, “The Chicken or the Egg.” Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in “it’s right there in black and white,” gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go? In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in “We were looking at new tables and chairs” rather than “new chairs and tables.” But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned “chairs and tables.” And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song “Piano Man,” with its barfly “making love to his tonic and gin.” The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with “the regular crowd shuffles in.”
Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression “eat your cake and have it too” rather than the more common “have your cake and eat it too.” That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture. Some frozen binomials are best left alone. Featured image by Ling App on Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions. What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing. In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.” One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom. The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture. Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937. The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature. In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s. Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous. Featured image by Alexander Popadin via Pexels. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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