Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison

Lionnet, Françoise

doi:10.1002/9781444342789.ch24

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In meeting others, we find ourselves, Khatibi suggests, not merely by identifying with others, but we find ourselves in others, dissolving the rational, corporeal divide of beings into an affective network of shared feelings, perspectives, and mutual definition-two parts of a larger bricolage unity and not two separate nodes held at bay in discrete austerity. 45 Lionnet notes that Khatibi's belief in the "radical potential of open exchange" 46 projects an air of utopianism: "Khatibi's gesture toward a knowable and attainable future has a quasi utopian dimension congruent with his belief that openness to heterogeneity, heteroglossia, and heterophony […] holds a promise and is 'le signe d'un advenir dans un monde à transformer' [the sign of a future yet to come, of a future becoming in a world in need of change] (Khatibi 1985: p. 63)."…”

Section: Poetics Of the Orphan To Ethics Of Encountermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Early Work

Reeck

2017

JFFP

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Like many North African, Francophone, and world writers whose lives span the historic divide of independence from colonialism, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s work focuses in large part upon the idea of encounter, or, in French, “rencontre.” In this paper I focus upon the figure of the orphan in La mémoire tatouée and Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste, two of his earliest texts. By focusing upon the orphan as a multivalent term, and by following Khatibi’s emphasis upon language, literature, and even life itself as a game or experiment, we can see how Khatibi creates an ethics of encounter that derives its meaning from recuperating a negatively connotated word and transforming it into a term of positive value. With the term “orphan,” he shows how through encountering the Other, by extending beyond into the unknown, by exceeding the circumscriptions of ancestry, identity, and national culture, the individual rises into a new status of free living. Moreover, it is equally through the practice of writing that life redounds with life; writing for Khatibi is never a mimetic representation of life per se but a space for experimenting, for discovery, and for exceeding the parochial nature of an individual’s physical placement in the world. In this sense, the orphan status of his writing shows itself through his aggressively restless, polyphonic, and ageneric writing that uses the localization of genre only as a hinge to push against in the quest to articulate a new relation to the world.

show abstract

Section: Poetics Of the Orphan To Ethics Of Encountermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…63)." 47 But it would be hard to argue that Khatibi's poetics of the orphan ascends to the status of utopian reverie for, at the very least, the reason that the violence each person must wreck upon the self makes it far from an easy feat. The realization of the multifaceted self is a sort of life's work.…”

Section: Poetics Of the Orphan To Ethics Of Encountermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Early Work

Reeck

2017

JFFP

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…She deploys the musical indication, "Quasi una fantasia," from Ludwig van Beethoven's Sonata for Piano as a title for the third section of her autobiographical novel, L'amour, la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade], gesturing at the improvised, free character of the writing that follows. In a radical move, she then juxtaposes Beethoven's notion of fantasia to the traditional fantasias performed by North African cavalry prior to engaging in battle.18 The author dedicates two of her works, the film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua Djebar's effort to accommodate multiple perspectives and voices through increasingly elaborate narrative forms has led critics explicitly to call her writing contrapuntal (Lionnet, 2011) and polyphonic (Rice, 2006). Interestingly, Djebar herself has commented on the unfortunate lack of polyphony in North African music, which she sees as all the more regrettable in light of research that suggests that the extent of polyphony in a culture's music indicates the democratic potential of that society.19 By structuring various forms of contrapuntal exchange into her fiction, Djebar takes steps to remedy this absence.…”

Section: Counterpoint and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Borrowed Forms

Lachman¹

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk 4 Opera and the Limits of Representation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Contents Contents I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view-I am, after all, a novelist.-Orhan Pamuk Borrowed Forms considers the impact of musical forms on late twentieth-century literature. The book looks closely at four musical concepts that have significantly influenced the novel and critical theory: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, interdependent voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of the diverse possibilities contained within a single theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Although these musical forms took shape in the European Renaissance and Baroque, novelists have appropriated them as literary strategies because they open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms. In our cultural moment, novels circulate more widely than any other literary genre, and possess an exceptional plasticity that readily accommodates multiple perspectives, languages, styles, and registers. Not surprisingly, the novel has emerged as the privileged literary vehicle for expressing plurality and difference. How the novel reflects this increasingly transnational consciousness, and more precisely, how novelists and critics deploy musical forms to respond to new ethical and aesthetic demands, are among the principal questions this book addresses.

show abstract

“… 8 As Lionnet (2011: 400) has commented, ‘[Khatibi’s] insights, in 1970, already herald Gayatri Spivak’s now classic formulation “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), while also anticipating responses to her work regarding the need for the dominant to learn to “listen”.’ …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Art and the ‘Arab Spring’: Aesthetics of revolution in contemporary Tunisia

Shilton

2013

French Cultural Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A striking proliferation of artwork has emerged in response to the Tunisian Revolution, following decades of censorship under the former president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who was forced to flee the country on 14 January 2011. Certain visual representations of the Tunisian Revolution employ the iconic language that has been utilised in revolutions in diverse historical and geographical contexts. However, many seek to avoid what the photographer Jellel Gasteli has dubbed ‘[des] icônes de l’exotisme révolutionnaire’. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article argues that a still emerging corpus of artwork reveals an alternative ‘aesthetic of resistance’ with which to communicate the complexity and diversity of Tunisia. Such artwork forges a third way between totalising internal and external visions of the country. It presents a nuanced engagement with the Revolution, allowing – in distinctively visual or multisensorial ways – for ‘untranslatable’ voices or ‘unrepresentable’ visions of democracy in a universal sense.

show abstract

Counterpoint and Double Critique in Edward Said and Abdelkebir Khatibi: A Transcolonial Comparison

Cited by 20 publications

References 14 publications

The Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Early Work

The Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi's Early Work

Borrowed Forms

Art and the ‘Arab Spring’: Aesthetics of revolution in contemporary Tunisia

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About