Sumario: | The work of Tunisian Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi, like that of many francophone Maghrebian writers, is often read as thinly-veiled autobiography. Questioning the prevailing body of criticism, which continues this interpretation of most fiction produced by francophone North African writers, the author shows how such interpretations of Memmi's texts obscure their not inconsiderable theoretical possibilities. Calling attention to the ambiguous status of autobiographical discursive and textual elements in Memmi's work, the author shifts the focus from Memmi toward theoretical questions. This book places Memmi's writing and thought in dialogue with several major critical shifts in the late twentieth-century literary and cultural landscape. These shifts include the crisis of the authorial subject; the interrogation of the form of the novel; the resistance to the hegemony of vision; and the critique of colonialism.
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