Albert Cossery et la derision: Ou la marginalite comme reponse a la modernite.

摘要

This dissertation is a study of the works of the late Egyptian novelist Albert Cossery. The goals of the dissertation are four-fold. The first part of the dissertation is a historical study of Egyptian franco-philia. The aim is to show the deep impact of the cultural and linguistic French presence in a country that was never officially colonized by France. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the specificity of Cossery's hybrid writing -- his 'French' texts being inhabited by vernacular Egyptian Arabic. This part of the dissertation shows the originality of his work against those of his Egyptian Francophile contemporaries. By looking at concepts such as inter-lingua and bi-lingua, I argue that Cossery's writings offered, as early as 1936, an intricate model of linguistic hybridity due to the intermingling of spoken Egyptian Arabic and written French. The third part of the dissertation is a theoretical examination of the Francophonie model found in French studies. By showing the double limitation within current debates of Francophonie and (post)colonial studies, I argue for a more malleable and fluid model based on a spatial configuration; in so doing, I introduce two critical concepts, 'lisiere' (selvage) and (para)colonial, that offer a way out of what Emily Apter calls "a disciplinary negation." The fourth and final part of the dissertation is a series of close readings of Cossery's most important texts, his collection of short stories, Les Hommes oublies de Dieu, and his two main novels, Mendiants et Orgueilleux and La Violence et la derision . By looking at marginality as a central theme, by examining the depiction of his characters' relationships to spoken and written language, this part of the dissertation shows that his texts offer an answer to the pressing question of Egyptian modernity and modernization through the marginal figure of the Dandy.;By following Cossery from his rewriting of Baudelaire to his writing of his own tableaux egyptiens, by exploring the various stances against what his characters call the "imposture universelle", this thesis argues that the persistence of the very concept of marginality in Cossery's works is his answer to Egyptian society's French (para)coloniality.