Formes héritées et transformation littéraire dans les nouvelles d’Assia Djebar

Abstract

In the short story collection Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Assia Djebar presents the ‘inherited’ form of her childhood’s language and the ‘inherited’ image of an Algerian woman, while simultaneously striving to transform them. The result is her very own language which combines French with elements of dialectal Arabic and Berber language. She integrates orality into the written text and merges this approach with the transformation of an ‘inherited’ form of the traditional Algerian society – the female oral tradition of history and stories to subsequent generations.
This article elaborates how Djabar’s short stories pursue this tradition by focussing on aspects of orality and acknowledging the presentation of traditional as well as modern women who have overcome strict roles – like the author herself. Finally, the contribution takes the title of the congress’s 12th section into consideration and examines whether the short stories can be described as ‘War Writing’.