Texte remanié de: Master--Lettres modernes--Picardie. / Bibliogr., p. 147-154.

Yasmina Khadra tente dans sa trilogie constituée des Hirondelles de Kaboul, L’Attentat et Les Sirènes de Bagdad de dissiper le malentendu entre Orient et Occident. La voie royale pour ce faire est d’entreprendre une recherche de la vérité, non seulement de ces deux entités ou de l’une d’elles, mais de l’homme en général et du monde tel qu’il est perçu, senti, conçu et intériorisé. Mais comment peut-on adhérer à une telle entreprise en sachant pertinemment la dimension fictionnelle de ces textes ? Toute l’originalité, tout l’intérêt de cette recherche, qui n’est pas seulement menée par l’auteur mais qui devrait aussi se poursuivre dans l’acte de lecture, est justement dans cette conception et cet abord du roman comme lieu dédié à la connaissance du vrai en investissant des formes diverses de savoirs et des puissances humaines en provenance de la raison et de l’imaginaire, du corps et de l’esprit, exprimant la rigueur et la fantaisie, l’ordonnancement et le chaos qui caractérisent l’existence dans toutes ses manifestations. / In his trilogy The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad, Yasmina Khadra has tried to settle down the misunderstanding between the East and the West. The royal path for this end is to take up a quest for truth not only for one or both of these entities, but for Man in general and for the whole world as perceived, felt, conceived and internalized. But how can we adhere to such an enterprise in spite of the fictional load of these texts? This framework that lie all the originality and interest of this research Ŕ which is led not only by the author, but should be pursued in the act of reading as well Ŕ is in fact in the conception and perspective of the novel as a locus for knowledge and truth by exploiting a variety of types of knowledge and human strengths evolving from reason and imagination, on body and spirit, expressing rigour and fantasy, order and chaos ; matters which characterize existence in all its various manifestations.

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.

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.

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>