“Pour une littérature-monde”: Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir

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Notes

Notes

1 I thank Eleanor Morgan Albert for her help with the translation of citations from the French original to English.

2 The category of “world literature” is itself the subject of great debate, for the yardstick by which a text is measured in order to be inducted into such a canon is, of course, subjective and entirely dependent on the very value system that perpetuates such a notion. However, in this reading of Partir, I argue that littérature-monde could be understood as being focused on transnational relations.

3 This is a debate that quite clearly has a long history in the US academy as documented in the 1993 double volume of Yale French Studies co-edited by Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman as well as, more recently, in a 2003 issue of the same journal. See in particular Sandy Petrey's contribution and the diametrically opposing views taken by Lawrence Kritzman and Tom Conley on this question.

4 In “Le Dernier immigré,” a wonderful, if foreboding, parable, Ben Jelloun foregrounds the extent of métissage between Arabic and French languages and cultures: when the last immigrant from North Africa is sent back “home,” the French find themselves bereft of all words of Arabic origin such as orange and café.

5 The term brûler la route, literally “to burn the route,” has become common parlance to mean clandestine crossing (mostly into Europe).