Imaginaire identitaire/identité imaginaire dans Meursault, contre-enquête de Kamel Daoud: question(s) de démêlés…

" Identity is approached from the perspective of the genre of literary counter- investigation, in the wake of Laurent Demanze’s study Un nouvel âge de l’enquête. In post-colonial Algeria, the motif of spectrality is bound up with an imaginary of grief and impossible mourning, typified by Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête. In this context, identity is synonymous with alienation. Like his predecessors Camus and Assia Djebar, Daoud is conducting his own quest for freedom, promoting the relational and ethical value of the imaginary as a universal network of images that counter the narrow enclosure of nationalist and fundamentalist discourse in a fundamentally dynamic encounter with the world and the other."

La traduction dans L’amour, la fantasia d’Assia Djebar: une tunique de Nessus.

One of the interesting features of L’amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar is that it tries to combine historiography and autobiography by confronting both genres with the stories of Algerian women. More concretely, the author joins different textual sources in one multilingual palimpsest: the written text is based on oral texts and the French is based on Arabic, but also on English, Spanish, Turkish and German. The interrelations between the different components constitute as many translational stages, in a literal and in a figurative sense, at the heart of Djebar’s historiographical and autobiographical project. However, the explicit references the narrator makes to the communication problems between the French and the Algerians, draw our attention to the difficulty and pain involved in such an enterprise. L’amour, la fantasia is a novel based on the intertwining of sources of a different nature and from different languages, but all attempts at communication between the different cultures break down, and all the interpreters’ or translators’ efforts are doomed to fail.

Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

Decolonizing Memory

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance—their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.

(Dé)montrer en (dé)montant : recadrage des identités narratives dans L'Avenir de Camille Laurens et Vaste est la prison d'Assia Djebar

L'Avenir [The Future] by Camille Laurens (1998) and Vast is the Prison by Assia Djebar (1995) are two novels characterized by their absence of linearity on a narrative level as well as a chronological level. This article focuses on the articulation between I and she, auto and fiction, present and past, literary language and cinematic language. It seeks to show how this dual structure provides a shape-shifting, transmedial aspect to the novels being examined, out of which emerges an oxymoric, hybrid narrative better able to reflect the complexity of the female identity. The cinematic language is not simply used to enhance the literay quality of the writing. On the contrary, it plays a significant role in making the narrative more complex and, by doing so, not only replicates at the micro level (content) the dialectics that can be observed at the micro level (form or narrative structure), but also contributes to (re)framing narrative identities. The cinematic language therefore delimits the range of the camera in which the female subject is evolving. At the same time, the reverse angle shot, which acts as a counter-narrative, enables the female subject to reflect on her past self while heralding what is left outside the scope of the camera and is yet to be seen.