Revolutionary Flagellation

Barbara Harlow’s lavish celebration of the “prison text” The Shamed (MER 164-165) has considerably clouded her aesthetic judgment. “The Shamed presents itself as a novel at once realistic and allegorical, mobilizing social forces against each other,” she tells us, and then “Adel Amr’s prison text must also be read as a counter-novel, a cultural documentary and political manifesto, in which the traditional novel’s conventions and paradigms of romance and family are precisely those formulas that are manipulated by the Israeli state and its prison apparatus.”