A Study of the New Poetics of Return in the Contemporary Maghrebi Novel

A Scriptural Singularity

Résumé

This article examines the poetics of return in several Maghrebi novels published between 2014 and 2016. The analysis is fundamentally based on a corpus consisting of three works: Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi by Fouad Laroui, 2084: La Fin du monde by Boualem Sansal, and Le Corps de ma mère by Fawzia Zouari. It therefore appears particularly useful, in light of the aesthetic and thematic revolution that the Maghrebi novel has undergone over the past two decades, to identify the scriptural singularity that predominates in the narrative construction of the contemporary period through a multidisciplinary approach combining thematic, narratological, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives.The present article thus forms part of a broader reflection on the aesthetic and thematic transformations of the contemporary Maghrebi novel and aims to analyze the new scriptural strategies that underpin the poetics of return within the previously defined corpus. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that the Maghrebi novel no longer seeks solely to fictionalize reality, but rather to present a new literary product that invites reflection, deconstructs, and poetically reshapes the traditional and conventional structure of the novel. More specifically, this study examines the ways in which certain authors renew the Maghrebi novelistic form by reworking the poetics of return through innovative scriptural strategies that assign new orientations to Maghrebi novelistic aesthetics, while accounting for the complexity of the sociocultural context and the revolutionary movements in their respective countries.