Maghreb and Melancholy
A Reading of Nina Bouraoui
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250527 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marina Van Zuylen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 84-99 |
| Publication date | 2003-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/ral.2003.34.3.84 |
| OpenAlex | W2082003429 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 1 |
An astute critic once said of Flaubert that he could find happiness only in a perfectly crafted sentence. Only in the clean, pre-sterilized realm of language could he indulge in levels of purity unthinkable in real life; his quixotic concern for immateriality, his quest for a sphere untouched by contingency, all led to the cult of a type of art exemplified by Kafka or Mondrian, artists who would practice extreme levels of abstraction and nonreferentiality. 1 Flaubert's pronouncement—"Je voudrais faire des livres où il n'y eût qu'à écrire des phrases" 'I would like to write a book made up only of sentences' 2 —suggests that only art can provide contentment, only the rigor of a sentence can make up for the inevitable compromises of life. One of the great queries in Nina Bouraoui's La voyeuse interdite is how writing, and more precisely the writing up of melancholy, can assume the function of a cure. Bouraoui adds a crucial dimension to what theoreticians of melancholy (from Aristotle to Freud, through Starobinski, Kristeva, and Agamben) have considered the fundamental relationship between loss and the work of art. In this case, the connection between pain and writing helps in diagnosing and treating a threefold case of exile (linguistic, psychological, and political). This essay focuses on the remarkable way in which Bouraoui's protagonist teaches us how depression can become a counterculture powerful and secret enough to become art
Aesthetics · Art · Epigraph · Happiness · Linguistics · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Sentence · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · North African History and Literature · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2019 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |