What does it mean for writing from the former French imperial territories of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) to become Maghrebi literature? How does literature come to count as belonging to or appertaining to a particular place? Today, in the international spheres of the university and the literary market, the Francophone novel has become the avatar of literary modernity in the Maghreb. This apparently natural birth of a new literary genre and the subsequent emergence of a field of study around it is belied by the multiplicity of relations among the texts that form the corpus of Maghrebi literature to the territory of the Maghreb itself. This dissertation studies novels from within that corpus that interrogate the relation of writing to geopolitical and linguistic territories. Collectively, they suggest that, insofar as there may exist a Maghrebi novelistic corpus, it crystallizes through a practice of literary ex-centricity, or non-correspondence with the territory called the Maghreb, to which it is said to belong.', 'Previously, scholars have linked the modern Maghrebi novel (be it in French, Arabic, or other languages) to its engagement with European literary models and to the politics of decolonization and nationalism, with their attendant questions of language and identity. This focus on formal and historical contingencies has placed Maghrebi literature in a double bind that overdetermines its relation to territory. To enter into the increasingly global, but also increasingly uneven, literary arena, Maghrebi novels must perform their difference from the self-styled universality of European literary paradigms by insisting on their specificity as Maghrebi. Faced with the injunction to be about this nation or that history, I read both canonical and lesser-known texts that unfold other places and times. Part One examines temporal displacements, from a re-writing of Maghrebi colonial history that fragments it from within in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985) to distant pasts whose vision of the future does not coincide with the Maghrebi present in Jamel Eddine Bencheikh’s Rose noire sans parfum (1998) and Driss Chraïbi’s La Mère du Printemps (1982) and Naissance à l’aube (1986). Part Two focuses on spatial displacements through Hubert Haddad’s Le Peintre d’éventail (2013), a novel set in rural Japan that investigates the modes of relation between art and place and reconfigures the geography of Maghrebi literary modernity and European modernism alike. Each of these texts shares in its fundamental gesture of opening a gap between text and territory. This relation always remains to be determined, allowing virtuality to come to bear on actuality by asking how literature, even as it is always already being drawn into linguistic or national horizons of thought, may also be elsewhere or otherwise.

Last modified

• 11/19/2019

Creator

• Matthew Thomas Kerper Brauer

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-rc87-0x13

Subject

• French and Italian

Keyword

• Novel
• Maghreb
• Modernity
• Territory
• Nation
• Japan

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright