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Abstract
This dissertation examines the intersection of aesthetics and politics through the prism of the uneasy relationship between formal literary experimentation and the notion of engagement in French and Algerian novels written during the politically turbulent period framed by the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and the events of May 1968. Situated in the context of literary debates around the question of engagement, this dissertation reveals the transnational character of mid-twentieth century departures from the aesthetic of realism, espoused by the proponents of politically committed literature. Bridging the continental divide, this project shows that all of the writers and activists under consideration embrace what I call the aesthetics of impersonality to probe the limits of literary and political representation of the subject. In their turn to formal experimentation with narrative structure and narrative voice, the works of my central writers displace and depersonalize the subject of enunciation and in doing so reveal tensions between figurations of individual and group subjectivity.
The withdrawal from pragmatic politics visible in these works and the turn to narrative formalism describe, I argue, a provisional act of disengagement that reveals a profound rethinking of the relationship between the individual and the collective, between the "I" and the "we", with the goal of rethinking the category of the subject.
Each of my four chapters is devoted to the work of a particular writer to unfold the complexities of these figurations. Combining the structural fragmentariness of Western modernism with Maghrebian storytelling and myths, Yacine's work catalogues obstacles to the emergence of post-colonial subjectivity; in Djebar, the confrontation of the historical narrative with individual and ancestral memory produces a site of resistance to national allegory and the category of national subject; Guyotat's syntactic and grammatical displacements mimic the disintegration of interpersonal relations and the destruction of personhood, offering linguistic cues for the restructuring of social and political ties; in Duras, the substitutability of the characters and the increased importance of dialogue give rise to a figuration of collective subject, imagined as a singular encounter in which bodies and voices come together to partake in an ephemeral community.
