To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib

This dissertation proposes a broad reading of the work of the Algerian francophone writer Mohammed Dib, some 30 volumes of novels, poetry, stories, and nonfiction writing published between 1952 and 2003. It reads a tension in Dib's work between the visible, the immediately given details of life and transmissible structure of meaning, and the invisible, larger structures or processes that link disparate elements without being themselves describable. Such a tension can be translated into the languages of Islamic mysticism, phenomenology, or a philosophy of history, all discourses that guide the investigation of Dib's work. The dissertation proposes that for Dib an acknowledgement of the invisible as an underlying unity connecting its various manifestations, a flux of experience not divisible into separate categories of object and subject, or a course of events exceeding the control and grasp of definable actors does not lead to escapism or rejection of reality, but to a return to the visible, to increased attention to the details of everyday life and the observable world. The act of writing, for Dib, involves holding to the world, even though the words that link writer and reader are only shadows of the events they witness or the processes that produce them. The dissertation's first half focuses on Dib's writing technique and influence, situating him in 20th-century French and francophone literary theory, tracing his adoption of Arab-Islamic, North African, and Sufi literary and aesthetic traditions, and analyzing how conscious experience forms and dissolves in his presentation of landscape and in childhood. The second half turns to his treatment of historical events, mainly those of Algeria through the colonial period, the war of independence, the post-independence period, and the civil war of the 1990s. Dib's commitment to the perspective of the marginalized, search for a way of presenting history that does not condemn the details of everyday life to insignificance, and attention to the role of imagination lead to criticism of colonial, bureaucratic, and apocalyptic attitudes as attempting to escape the given world, and searches for a use of history that undoes, rather than reinforces, physical and symbolic acts of exclusion.

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