The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels

The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels PDF Author: Nuha Baaqeel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527536769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.

The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels

The Kaleidoscope of Gendered Memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Novels PDF Author: Nuha Baaqeel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527536769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
Through its unique kaleidoscopic lens, this book analyzes the work of Algeria’s first postcolonial woman writer to publish a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi. Her novels Memory in the Flesh and Chaos of the Senses return to the trauma of the Algerian War of Independence to address the lingering anxieties of national belonging and memory in postcolonial Algeria at a time when the nation is caught between two forces: entrenched bureaucratic-political elites and populist Islamists, who imagine a return to a pre-modern, utopian past. This book argues that Mosteghanemi’s polyphonic narratives reveal that national narratives are always multiple—“unity” is not one, all-encompassing narrative, but instead an ever-evolving Bakhtinian dialogism accommodating multiple perspectives, memories, and stories. The study interprets Mosteghanemi’s metaphor of the bridge as a powerful device for exploring tensions between reality and imagination, exile and belonging, and traditional concepts of gender in ways that reimagine nationhood and gesture towards a new, collective future.

Memory in The Flesh

Memory in The Flesh PDF Author: Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774247347
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This prize-winning novel, the first to be written by an Algerian woman in Arabic, is set against Algeria's struggle against foreign domination as well as its post-independence struggle with itself and the fate of revolutionary ideals in a post-revolutionary society. The story, spanning more than four decades of Algerian history, from the 1940s to the 1980s, revolves around a love affair between Khaled, the middle-aged militant who turns to painting after losing his left arm in the struggle, and Hayat, the fiction writer and young daughter of his friend the freedom fighter Si Taher, all brilliantly told through Khaled's voice. It was features such as this convincing embodiment of a male voice alongside narrative techniques in which the author subtly joins the achievements of world literature with that of local storytelling and traditional modes of narration that particularly impressed the judges who awarded this novel the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Chaos of the Senses

Chaos of the Senses PDF Author: Ahlam Mosteghanemi
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
ISBN: 9789774160981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Ahlam Mosteghanemi's second novel picks up where Memory in the Flesh left off, with the story of love set in the battered and bruised Algeria of the1990s. Mosteghanemi takes her readers through the streets of suspicion and suspense, and the ups and downs of a forbidden love affair, through a story within a story, as a writer stuck in a loveless marriage to an important military man inadvertently writes what eventually comes true. She begins--after a period of not writing--by penning the narrative of a mysterious man who courts the object of his desire through deceptive words, then she helplessly follows the path of her fictitious character only to find that the mystery man exists and it is he who has led her to his door and into his life. One twist leads to the next, as the question remains of which man the writer was destined to meet and fall in love with--the mysterious artist or the doomed journalist. This lyrical adventure teases the reader with facts for fiction and fiction for facts. The backdrop of political chaos creates a sense of foreboding and fear for two powerless lovers. But where is reality and where is fantasy?

Chaos of the Senses

Chaos of the Senses PDF Author: Ahlem Mosteghanemi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781408857724
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Love always sits in a seat other than the one we were expecting it to, right alongside the place where we expected love to be'In the midst of the Algerian civil war, Hayat is a young novelist trapped in a loveless marriage. While her husband, a high-ranking officer, preoccupies himself with politics, Hayat finds freedom from her highly regimented life in the world of her writing. There she weaves a passionate story for her characters. But the line between fiction and reality blurs when she falls for a man who seems to have walked straight out of the pages of her notebook, a man who seduces her, instead of her heroine, with his silence.As love on paper becomes a forbidden love lived out in the dark corners of a broken city, Hayat's country convulses with political upheaval. In a place where those who dare to write the truth are made to pay a heavy price, she and her characters will discover that no one can truly be the author of their own destiny.The second novel in the international bestselling trilogy from 'the literary phenomenon' (Elle), Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses is a powerful story of love, identity and liberation.

Gendered Memories

Gendered Memories PDF Author: International Comparative Literature Association. Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authorship
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description


Gender and Memory in the Postmillenial Novels of Almudena Grandes

Gender and Memory in the Postmillenial Novels of Almudena Grandes PDF Author: Lorraine Ryan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367655235
Category : Collective memory in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"This book aims to illuminate the unique character of Grandes's major postmillennial novels by examining the heretofore unexamined themes of perpetrator and gender memory, as well as reconceiving her representation of the memory of victimhood"--

The Dust of Promises

The Dust of Promises PDF Author: Ahlem Mosteghanemi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408866269
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The final novel in the international bestselling trilogy from "literary phenomenon" ("Elle") Ahlem Mosteghanemi.

Transfigurations of the Maghreb

Transfigurations of the Maghreb PDF Author: Winifred Woodhull
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816620555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This work presents a critical perspective on many of the best-known texts of Algerian literature in French. It also discusses Maghrebian immigration into France; contemporary French writing about the Maghreb; and "nomadic" poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity and sociality. Woodhull offers a thorough and detailed exploration of the historical context and the ways in which femininity has been represented in the texts of North African and French writers since the mid-1950s. She aims to provide an important corrective to some (male) models of anticolonialist ideology. Through informed readings of texts by "metropolitan" writers such as Le Clezio, Tournier, Cardinal, and Sullerot, Woodhull challenges the sterile dichotomies which continue to occur in the institutional organization of French departments - namely, the separation between French and Francophone literatures and cultures. In her refusal to allow nationalist concerns to take precedence over the needs of women, Woodhull breaks away from traditional Marxist readings of literature. "Transfigurations of the Maghreb" reveals how Maghrebian texts challenge the very existence of a repressive paternal law, while also attending to the historical contexts from which Maghrebian writing emerges, and the national and global conflicts that encumber its efforts to displace restrictive identities of sex, class, race, nationality and language.

Beirut Blues

Beirut Blues PDF Author: Hanan al-Shaykh
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307831132
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
With the acclaim won by her first two novels, Hanan al-Shaykh established herself as the Arab world's foremost woman writer. Beirut Blues, published to similar acclaim, further confirms her place in Arabic literature, and brings her writing to a new, groundbreaking level. The daring fragmented structure of this epistolary novel mirrors the chaos surrounding the heroine, Asmahan, as she futilely writes letters to her loved ones, to her friends, to Beirut, and to the war itself--letters of lament that are never to be answered except with their own resounding echoes. In Beirut Blues, Hanan al-Shaykh evokes a Beirut that has been seen by few, and that will never be seen again.

Our Riches

Our Riches PDF Author: Kaouther Adimi
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228169
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
The powerful English debut of a rising young French star, Our Riches is a marvelous, surprising, hybrid novel about a beloved Algerian bookshop A Library Journal Best Book of the Year Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize Winner of the French American Foundation Prize Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.