Literary Studies: Literary topics, forms and figures
In volume one the author studied French literature and the literary works of francophone authors from the Maghreb, such as Rachid Boujedra, from Algeria and Mohamed Kheireddine from Morocco, and the Tunisian novelist Mustapha Tlili. He depicted the special features of their works which rejected conventionalism under the influence of modernist Western figures as illustrated by texts of the 1970s, when creative works challenged dominant literary conventions. Indeed, in the author’s opinion, literature and arts are instruments to defeat the forces seeking to crush men and violating their dignity.
In the context of literary practice, those literary works, according to the author, combated autocracy and the phenomena of extremism and patriarchal behavior, and defended the values of liberty and citizenship. To prove his point, Mr. Bouguerra started out from the Algerian experience in the 1980s and 1990s, when “religious extremism” led to a civil war, and the texts of Rachid Boujedra, Kateb Yacine and Rachid Mimouni rather than being art works designed merely for esthetic pleasure, were instrumental in criticizing economic, political, social and colonial crises.
Volume two is devoted to Proustian studies and literary art. Literary works are so many explorations of masterpieces and their relation to the human comedy, as well as the myth of literary creation and its esthetic dimensions, and the process of the search for lost time in the work of Marcel Proust, a French novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
