UC Riverside

My dissertation engages with the problem of how authors and literary theorists who experience marginality, migration, diaspora, and sexual and social non-normativity can articulate forms of political engagement without a grounding in stable representations. To do this, I focus on récit, a mode of writing that includes multiple interlocking strands of narrative and reflection within the same work that allow for digression, detours, splitting, and even a certain degree of non-coherence rather than building toward a common conclusion. Récit, by employing methods such as suspending personal, temporal, and spatial deixis, text-metatext, and polyvocality, enables those people who are outside society’s norms to create new forms of experimental writing that function as a political means to resist the dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, religion, and colonial identities. The significance of récit is differential rather than comparative or categorical: it emerges from spaces of difference that know no convergence and therefore signifies difference. In order to describe the genre and its characteristics more clearly, I have drawn on My Walk With Bob by American New Narrative writer Bruce Boone, The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, a modern Iranian writer, and Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar, an Algerian writer to show how the very resistance to definition, in place of fixed meanings and expectations, allows these authors to seek and create flexible new ways of relating to the social and political context in and against which they write. My dissertation brings these authors writing in English, Persian, and French together to illustrate how their use of the formal affordances of récit converts their marginality into a creative site of cultural production and transforms their experiences from personal concerns into potential sources of social knowledge. Their chosen form’s inventiveness enables them to bring into focus multiple simultaneous dimensions of embodied (inter) subjectivity in an effort to keep their representations mobile, exploratory, and engaged with social realities.