Névine El Nossery

Rewriting History: Between Fiction and Testimony

Since the outbreak of violence that started in Algeria in the 90s with the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, Algerian women authors have coped with an unsettled and unbearable reality through a form of writing that is called today ‘urgency writing’. Moreover I am interest in fictional and testimonial texts aiming to demonstrate how fictional writing can embody reality and be considered as authentic piece of History. Furthermore, if Algerian History is omnipresent in the texts written by women, still other stories are interlaced; notably personal and even mundane ones. Thus, the meeting of the individual and the collective constitutes an intrinsic characteristic of these women’s rewriting of History and can offer a revision of the historiographical discourse.

Névine El Nossery is Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature in the Department of French and Italian. Her research focuses on women’s writing and historiography, exile, migration French Canadian literature and Middle Eastern literature and culture. She published several articles and book chapters in international journals on Assia Djebar, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Malika Mokeddem, Amin Maalouf, Nancy Huston. El Nossery (University of Cairo (BA), University of Cairo (M.A), Universite de Montreal (Ph.D.)) has translated Nancy Huston’s essay, Nord perdu (Losing the North) into Arabic and was published in 2005