Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices
Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared with the Moroccan one. What is more, this comparison helps to understand the consequences of some choices taken by the Tunisian writers, choices that established diverging directions of literary quest and the ambivalent aspiration of belonging both to the Arabic and the French linguistic and cultural zone. This basic ambivalence is treated in the article as introducing an essential fissure and a kind of fractal principle, conducing to the proliferation of minor voices, in stead of a synergistic pattern of development leading to the synthesis of cultural contradictions. Some of these voices, such as Abdelwahhab Meddeb, try to inscribe themselves in the universalist, gallicized context, while others, such as the emigrant Arab-speaking writer Hassouna Mosbahi, find in the translation a chance of reaching new readers and the promise of escaping the status of minor or emergent writers.

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