L'ALGÉRIE NATALE ENTRE DÉSENCHANTEMENT ET NOSTALGIE: ÉCRITURES PLURIELLES DE L'EXIL

Native Algeria between disenchantment and nostalgia: plural compositions of exile The aim of this research is to study the evolution of Algerian Francophone literature after independence proposing a new classification criterion which goes beyond the concept that North African literature in French only consists of authors whose mother tongue is Arabic or Berber. The panorama of Algerian Francophone literature is indeed characterized by an extremely heterogeneous variety of productions: it is not only Arab and Berber authors who produce a remarkable literature, but Jewish and Pieds-Noirs writers as well. This study focuses on the plurality of the Algerian Francophone literature, highlighting the characteristics of every single cultural-specific production, i.e. the Arab-Berber, the Jewish and the Pied-Noir one, and asserting that each one has an overall consistency. The analysis is actually based on the hypothesis that every literary production presents specific thematic and stylistic levels, so that no one is reducible to another. The examined corpus consists of six novels written in French by writers born in Algeria during the colonization and exiled in France after 1962, each of them belonging to a specific cultural group: the Jewish writer Albert Bensoussan (Frimaldjézar, 1976, and L’échelle de Mesrod, 1984), the Pied-Noir novelist Alain Vircondelet (Maman la blanche, 1981, and Alger l’amour, 1982) and the Arab writer Mohammed Dib (Dieu en barbarie, 1971, and Le maître de chasse, 1973).