The Novel as a Laboratory of Reality Mustapha Benfodil and Samir Toumi

Résumé

Since the dawn of the 21st century, Algerian literature has distinguished itself as a field of aesthetic renewal and universal thought. It evokes the memory of conflict, the search for identity, and globalization, offering innovative writing styles where multilingualism, fragmentation, and metatextuality serve as dynamic means of expression. This contemporary era, characterized by a dual tension – an adherence to a complex historical and linguistic memory – and access to a globalized, deterritorialized, and digital world, leads us to ask: how does contemporary Algerian literature revolutionize our vision of writing, the subject, and the world, and what is its contribution to the international literary landscape? This suggests that contemporary Algerian literature embodies an aesthetic revolution where language is transformed into a field of experimentation, where memory plays a poetic role, and pluralism represents a universal perspective. Therefore, we attempt here to examine how contemporary Algerian literature alters the perception of reality through an analysis of the works of Mustapha Benfodil and Samir Toumi. In this context, the novel is no longer simply a reflection of society; it becomes a laboratory of reality, a kind of platform for linguistic, media, and existential experimentation. For Benfodil, writing is transformed into performance and urban polyphony; while for Toumi, it is expressed through introspection and the clinical study of erasure.Comparing these two approaches, the analysis reveals how the contemporary Algerian novel creates a new aesthetic of the world, simultaneously local and universal, which updates narrative formats and the modes of authorial involvement.