Algiers - Vilnius - Algiers, a study in minor literature

grantor: University of TorontoThe works of Algerian author Assia Djebar and Litvak writer Icchokas Meras lie at the centre of this study. In it I consider the texts of Djebar and Meras as texts of minor literature, using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 'Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature' as my starting point. Both Djebar and Meras write in the language of the other, and I argue that it is their simultaneous being inside and outside of language (and community) that defines them as writers of minor literature. These writers deform and disrupt language, making it stutter and infusing it with new meaning. While stuttering language is one result of the ever-present tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization that is at the heart of minor literature, I have tried to show that this process happens not only in language (as in Djebar), but in the narratives that communities tell about themselves (as in Meras) as well. The collectivity of minor literature--the fact that minor literature is always written by many hands--has led me to a reading of its texts as rhizomes and as assemblages. This rhizomorphous reading is a reading across texts and genres. It is a reading process that allows for multiform texts, as rhizomes are always multiple and continually becoming. In addition to the adoption of language, another common thread ties the texts of this study together: the memory of war, violence, and loss. It is the simultaneous struggle to honour the memory of disappeared loved ones, and to free oneself from the past in order to let old wounds heal that links not only Djebar and Meras, but which opens their texts out to a much larger assemblage, or collection of rhizomes. It is this contradictory impulse--to hang on while letting go (to reterritorialize while deterritorializing)--that is at the centre of minor literature.Ph.D