Engaging the poetic to expand our imagination of Maghrebi literature in French

Poetry, as the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi describes it, is a form of dissymmetry that exposes readers to the unexpected, and to the possibility of a transformative encounter with the text. Drawing on literary, philosophical, theoretical, and theological texts in multiple languages and scripts, as well as on the visual arts, Thomas C. Connolly delves into the poetic works of Khatibi and six other major Maghrebi authors—Jean Amrouche, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Jean Sénac—as well as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, to think anew about the origins and legacy of Francophone poetry in the Maghreb. Instead of turning away from the poetic when it becomes indecipherable, A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature engages poetic texts on their own terms, allowing them to dictate the search for meaning, thereby expanding our understanding of what Maghrebi literature in French was, is, and might become.

THOMAS C. CONNOLLY is an associate professor of French at Yale University. He is the author of Paul Celan’s Unfinished Poetics: Readings in the Sous-Oeuvre.

“What makes Thomas Connolly’s book radically new is his focus on the poetic production of French-speaking writers from the Maghreb. The originality of this study is that it allows us to read works anew that we thought were ‘classified’ or saturated, and to create the space of a site that is capable of expressing its idiosyncrasy. What is certain is that we are dealing here with a border text—un texte-frontière—which will be a landmark through which we will have to go to fully read and teach poetic literature.” —Réda Bensmaïa, Brown University