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" Rebellion and nihilism in the works of Leïla Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul "
Peter Bartles Stranges
B. Aresu
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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54948
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TL24902
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3168142
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| Main Entry
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Peter Bartles Stranges
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| Title & Author
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Rebellion and nihilism in the works of Leïla Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul\ Peter Bartles Stranges
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| College
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Rice University
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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237
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| Abstract
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This study proposes that Leïla Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul, two widely-read contemporary novelists, intuitively understand Albert Camus' idea of revolt, using it to legitimate their non-essentialized, transcultural models of individual and collective identity. This dissertation views an Algerian teenager's rendezvous with Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul in Les Carnets de Shérazade as a magical portal through which Leïla Sebbar allows us to see her fiction as a subversion and a reappropriation of the liberal philosophical principles underlying V. S. Naipaul's novels and travel journals. Although they interpret the increasing visibility of cultural, racial, and religious fundamentalisms in Western and non-Western societies as signs of a gathering nihilistic storm, neither Sebbar nor Naipaul believe that these epistemologically bounded ideologies of revolt are invincible. Instead, both depict rebellion, an epistemologically open-ended and altruistic form of revolt, as the exclusive means through which post-colonials across the globe can experience individual and communal wholeness—liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace—amidst the eponymous mixing of different peoples and truths in the late twentieth century. Chapter One explores the concepts of rebellion and nihilism in Albert Camus' The Rebel and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. It also investigates the uncanny philosophical and thematic parallels in Leïla Sebbar's and V. S. Naipaul's works. Chapter Two analyzes the theme of the returned gaze in Sebbar's Shérazade and Le Fou de Shérazade. It shows how Shérazade, Sebbar's title character, resists Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy in a rebellious manner. The Algerian teenager challenges the “master's” desire for supremacy without denying his or her dignity. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between Sebbar's fiction and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, her correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston. It demonstrates that Sebbar's formulation of exile as a hybrid, contingent identitarian space in Lettres parisiennes is coterminous with Camus' notion of rebellion. Chapter Four is a detailed study of Shérazade's encounter with V. S. Naipaul in southwestern France in Les Carnets de Shérazade. Using Anne Donadey's model of mimicry, it claims that Sebbar subverts the British-Caribbean writer's representations of the ex-colonized's subjectivity and revalidates his underlying faith in rebellion.
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| Subject
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Language, literature and linguistics; Algeria; Naipaul, V. S.; Nihilism; Rebellion; Sebbar, Leila; Trinidad and Tobago; Romance literature; Comparative literature; Literature; Caribbean literature; 0298:Literature; 0295:Comparative literature; 0360:Caribbean literature; 0313:Romance literature
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B. Aresu
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Rice University
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