L’Autorité dissimulée – l’autorité manifeste. L’écriture de la violence chez Yasmina Khadra. (Dissimulated authority – manifest authority. Yasmina Khadra’s representation of violence.)  This study examines the representation of violence in two novels by Algerian author Yasmina Khadra (1955 - ): Les Agneaux du Seigneur (1998) and À quoi rêvent les loups (1999). The narrative techniques employed in these texts and, more directly, the assertions made by the author in interviews and autobiographical works give the impression of a writer aiming to impose on the reader a specific view of the Algerian civil war (1992-1998) while at the same time asserting that the novels are objective representations of the same historical period.   This authoritative position, it is argued, is surprising in the light of two discourses. According to the first, events of extreme violence are fundamentally inexpressible and therefore any work of art dealing with such events must find a way to express this inexpressibility. Secondly, many historians, journalists and writers argue that the civil war in Algeria was particularly ungraspable, and eludes being rendered affirmatively in any work, fictional or not.   The study aims to explain how Yasmina Khadra construes his authority in the fictional texts and via his performance in the media. The concepts of a dissimulated authority and a manifest authority are conceived in order to elucidate the ambiguous discourse created by Khadra in which we find both a need to convince the reader of the legitimacy of his rendering of the violent events and a tendency to explicitly take control of and guide our interpretation of the novels.   The final chapter of the dissertation argues that Khadra’s prolific use of animal vocabulary at once dissimulates and makes manifest the idea of an author wanting to impose certain ideas and ‘truths’ on the reader. In the conclusion it is suggested that the violence of the novels extends beyond the subject matter into Khadra's very approach to writing: that the two novels do not so much reflect the idea of the violence as a creator of chaos, but rather, in browbeating the reader into a passive role, end up imitating the very forcefulness and single-mindedness of violence itself.   The methodological approach of the study consists of a close reading as well as a thorough contextualization of the novels. The classical narratological concepts established by Gérard Genette are used to examine the dominant narrative modes of the stories. In explaining the ways in which Khadra proceeds to persuade the reader of the truth-value of the texts the theory on realistic discourse developed by Philippe Hamon constitutes an important reference.

Based on three novels by the contemporary Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra, the study discusses didactic and aesthetic features of the literary text. While essentially set in the Arab world, Khadra’s fiction links to western encyclopaedia and journalistic discourse. In relating to this part of the reader’s experience, the novels produce an impression of proximity to the peripheral real, and a sense of responsibility. It is suggested that this interdiscursivity be viewed not as a deviation from literature but as inherent to literary discourse itself; the text comments and constitutes simultaneously. Emphasising the hybridity of literary means and didactical drive, the study proposes that Khadra’s work be labelled “didafiction”.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Using as example twelve novels by Robert Bober, Michel Houellebecq and Yasmina Khadra, the dissertation discusses the aesthetic and pragmatic implications of integrating didactically historical reference in fictional narrative and personal theme. Rather than reducing the works of Bober, Houellebecq and Khadra to tendency novels sculptured to pass on a predetermined message, the study discusses the aesthetic values created by didactical play. Not only does historical reference form the setting of the novels but the feelings and ideas expressed by the characters also point outwards, challenging journalistic discourse and historical fact. After underlining the obvious heritage from social realism, littérature engagée and Tendenzliteratur, the study points to the possibility of a reading mode that uncannily marries self forgetting imaginary and historical learning. Finding no comprehensive description within existing theories of genre, the thesis proposes the neologism “didafiction” for a subcategory to the novel that, by systematic interdiscursive play, call for engagement without subscribing to pre-existent doctrines. The lessons given by this literature, rather than operating through a traditionally pedagogic rhetoric, work through sophisticated artistic procedures that integrate encyclopaedia and ethics in a personal theme structure.

<p>This thesis argues that <i>Morituri</i> by Yasmina Khadra and <i>White Masks</i> by Elias Khoury use the genre of the detective novel as a pretext for social and political critique of Algeria and Lebanon respectively. This thesis links the generic (crime fiction) and the conceptual (Political and Social Critique in Modern Arab World). While the detective novel is traditionally thought of as a non-academic, entertaining part of popular culture, the use of the genre to critique the failure of nation building after colonization elevates the genre and transforms it from mere entertainment to a more serious genre. Both novels are emblematic of a shift in the use of the detective and crime novel to address the political disarray in their respective states and the Arab world as a whole. As modern examples of detective novels in the modern Arab world, <i>Morituri</i> and <i>White Masks</i> transform the genre through their complex interweaving of aspects of the popular genre of detective fiction with the more serious political novel. The historical and political context of both countries at the time of the novels’ settings are an intrinsic part of understanding the crimes and the obfuscation of the perpetrator. In both of these novels, the technical and generic aspects are connected to the thematic, and the detective novel structure is not just there for suspense and entertainment. Instead, this structure points to the neocolonial system, benefitting the most powerful and the most affluent at the expense of the weak, poor, and disadvantaged.</p>