Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

Rice, Alison

ISBN 10: 0739112902 / ISBN 13: 9780739112908

Published by Lexington Books, 2006

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003824540

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0739112902
• ISBN 13: 9780739112908
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Time Signatures engages in a close study of the autobiographical writings of three contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb: Assia Djebar, HZl_ne Cixous, and AbdelkZbir Khatibi. Alluding to music not only as a 'theme' pulsing throughout these writers' works, but also as a means of comprehending their unique, improvisational writing styles, Alison Rice offers readers a new and beautifully constructed way of reading these authors' texts by demonstrating that the form adopted to address topics of concern is as significant as the content itself. The voice of Jacques Derrida intermingles with the timbres of these three writers in fruitful contrapuntal passages, serving as a source of inspiration for conceptualizing language and communicating the self in an unprecedented manner. Time Signatures demonstrates that these individuals write the 'self' in French in ways influenced by sensitivities acquired during their early experiences in a multicultural, multilingual 'colonial' environment in which their ears were trained, and their minds tuned, for translations to come.

About the Author

Alison Rice is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University for Notre Dame.