Kuntz, Jane Theresa

"Assia Djebar and ""La Ville Blanche"": Writing in and on the *City"

Kuntz, Jane Theresa

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Title: "Assia Djebar and ""La Ville Blanche"": Writing in and on the *City"
Author(s): Kuntz, Jane Theresa
Issue Date: 2002
Doctoral Committee Chair(s): Accad, Evelyne
Department of Study: French
Discipline: French
Degree Granting Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name: Ph.D.
Degree Level: Dissertation
Keyword(s): Language, Modern
Language: eng
Abstract: I demonstrate how Algiers itself, by virtue of its historical double-ness, serves as cipher for the double subject. In addition, the geophysical configuration of Algiers, with its steep streets and stairways, and its ubiquitous view onto the Mediterranean, becomes complicit with the characters' yearning to tumble down the slope and take off over the water, a recurring image in a number of Djebar's novels. This deployment of Algiers stands in contrast to much Algerian literature, which tends to depict the city as an alienating and hostile space, or with regard to much colonial literature, as a paradise of innocent pleasures. For purposes of condensation, I identify the movement of the subject through the city as starting in the Casbah, embodiment of Algiers past, continuing down the hillside to the modern city and ending at the port, a site that Djebar revisits in several of her works, and which serves as the interface between self and other.
Graduation Semester: 2002
Type of Resource: text
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/86261

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