Abstract:
The project will aim to widen the scope of the project from my dissertation, which looked at 2 short stories by Algerian women authors (Maïssa Bey and Assia Djebar) written in post-colonial times. This study looked at how the French language has been put to use in the post-colonial setting across the two short stories. It looked at the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and looked into minor literature. This project, however, was not big enough to look more in depth into the traits of such language and it did not cover the full meaning of what it is to be a minor literature and what this implicates. With this project the aim is to critically analyse each of the texts and look in-depth at the processes of deterritorialization, reterritorialization and what it means to be a minor literature. This project will focus on three novels, which were written either during or after the Algerian civil war (1992-2002). The corpus will be as follows: La Femme sans sépulture, Assia Djebar (2002), Mes mauvaises pensées, Nina Bouraoui (2005), L’Explication, Y.B. (1999). The corpus consists of Algerian and French-Algerian writers (both male and female) who make use of the French language in all four of the novels. It will be a close reading of all the texts in order to establish the difference in ways that the French language is being used in a post-colonial Algerian setting. The project will search to discover ways in which the language has been used which differs to normative French literature, and ways in which the authors use and manipulate the language as their own. The project will look at literary and linguistic techniques and attributes of each text, things such as autobiographical traits of the text, intertextuality, orality and lexical choice. The focus will be to look at the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization within each piece of literature. It will also aim to establish whether the corpus is a display of a minor literature, this will then lead to the question of power in literature, especially concerning political and collective value.