EXPRESII ALE LITERATURII POSTCOLONIALE: ROMANUL CA PROIECȚIE A TENSIUNILOR ȘI ASPIRAȚIILOR IMAGINARULUI EUROPEAN

Abstract

This article is a thematic and conceptual analysis of the novel L’Art de perdre (2017) by the Algerian-French writer Alice Zeniter. As a presence in the current landscape of French literature and as an expression of the „changing civilizational balance of the planet”, the novel of emigration is part of the tendency of contemporary French art (and beyond) to renegotiate the foundations of the human and the possibilities of written culture to define and project the tensions, contradictions and aspirations of the European imaginary. Circumscribed to this mosaic, transnational and extra-alucid vision of the aesthetic, the novel of emigration contrasts the frustrated discourse of political and economic calculations with the intimate drama of exodus, of hope and despair, of hostility and fraternisation, of loss and reinvention of self, which exiles, nomads, refugees and castaways bring with them to the old European continent. L’Art de perdre is the novel of an absent country, a forgotten language, an ignored religion and unknown origins, whose quest overlaps with the French odyssey of identity, reinventing the mythical route back to Ithaca.