Against Autobiography

Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory

Lia Nicole Brozgal

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780803240421
• eBook ISBN: 9781496208989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The work of Tunisian Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi, like that of many francophone Maghrebian writers, is often read as thinly veiled autobiography. Questioning the prevailing body of criticism, which continues this interpretation of most fiction produced by francophone North African writers, Lia Nicole Brozgal shows how such interpretations of Memmi's texts obscure their not inconsiderable theoretical possibilities.

Calling attention to the ambiguous status of autobiographical discursive and textual elements in Memmi's work, Brozgal shifts the focus from the author to theoretical questions. Against Autobiography places Memmi's writing and thought in dialogue with several major critical shifts in the late twentieth-century literary and cultural landscape. These shifts include the crisis of the authorial subject; the interrogation of the form of the novel; the resistance to the hegemony of vision; and the critique of colonialism. Showing how Memmi's novels and essays produce theories that resonate both within and beyond their original contexts, Brozgal argues for allowing works of francophone Maghrebi literature to be read as complex literary objects, that is, not simply as ethnographic curios but as generating elements of literary theory on their own terms.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Of Authors and Archives: Albert Memmi’s Francophone Postcolonial
• 2 Writing Back to Whom? Novel Strategies of Ambiguity and the “Mark of the Plural”
• 3 Writing without Seeing: The Enigmas of Memmi’s “Denigration of Vision”
• 4 From Colonizer and Colonized to Decolonization and the Decolonized: Texts, Contexts, Paratexts
• Continuations: Albert Memmi in the Post-Francophone World
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index