The desire for history [Ressource électronique] : Algerian historical fiction in the 1980s / by Seth Corcoran Jameson

Ph. D. : Comparative literature : Los Angeles : University of California : 2009

Bibliogr. p. 227-231

This study proposes a reading of the writing of history by several Algerian novelists working in the 1980s. It focuses on novels-written in French by Kateb Yacine, Malika Mokeddem, Rachid Mimouni, Tahar Djaout and Assia Djebar, and in Arabic by Wasinl al-A'raj-that attempt to re-conceptualize the representation of Algerian history during a historical moment fraught with pessimism and dissatisfaction. The work of these writers displaces and subverts official state historical narratives on the level of content but more importantly through formal experimentation that calls attention to the problems of representing this history, as it is rewritten. These new forms reconfigure the use of myth to express historical consciousness, subvert notions of progress and underline the fictionality of historical narrative, rather than simply propose alternatives to the official state conceptions of history. The first chapter explores the ways in which Malika Mokeddem and WasTnT al- A'raj re-conceptualize the use of myth to understand history. Mokeddem's novel Le Siecle de sauterelles and al-A'raj's Arabic novel Nawwar a-lawz fictionalize the process by which myths are created out of a collective desire to pass down the meaning of exceptional historical moments to future generations. Myth here is dynamic and vibrant, born in order to memorialize or celebrate the heroic actions of normal, everyday people. These new visions also contest and subvert the official narrative of history and promote a hope for the future by broadening definitions of the nation. Chapter two examines the form of the novel Tombezaby Rachid Mimouni as a virulent critique of several statist conceptions of Algerian history. Mimouni subverts the image of heroic revolutionary through through his depiction of the eponymous title character as a collaborator and opportunist whose life parallels the creation of the independent state of Algeria. Mimouni's representation of the Algerian war of liberation itself questions the dominant narratives that assert the importance of the revolution as signaling a new age of progress, justice, and freedom. At the same time, the novel's formal experimentation imbricates modernist, subjective experience and realist representation of historical events and temporality. Chapter Three argues that Assia Djebar and Tahar Djaout employ historiographic metafiction as a means to question the epistemological nature of history and historical writing. The work of the two novelists discussed in this chapter becomes a poetics of history, in different ways referring to the fact that only through language is historical knowledge constructed.