Body as Test Narrative Structures and Gendered Identities in Three Novels by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Date of Award

2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Van Tuyl, Jocelyn

Keywords

Postcolonial Francaphone Literature, Metanarrative, Gender Performance, Identiry Practices

Area of Concentration

French

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the role of narrative structures on reformulations of embodied identity in three novels by Moroccan-born Francophone author Tahar Ben Jelloun (L�Enfant de sable, La Nuit sacr�e, and La Nuit de l�erreur) where bodies, gendered identities, and texts themselves are subject to narrated reinterpretations. Dominant ideologies, founded upon binary dichotomies, are challenged and subverted in these texts through narrative mediation and renewal. In Chapter One, I examine the role that narrative structures such as metanarrative, ontological instability, and the dominance of orality play in the interrogation of traditional conceptions of text, with a particular emphasis on the role of the halqa (the circle surrounding the public storyteller). In Chapter Two, I analyze how, using the ontological alignment of the female body with the text, Ben Jelloun questions, in turn, similar issues of the stability and integrity of the body, and revels the body to be, like the text, fluid, unstable, and actively constructed through narrative mediation. Chapter Three demonstrates how the performed nature of all bodies applies to their accompanying gender roles and is held against the essentialist doctrines which dispossess the (female) other in patriarchal discourse. Finally, I conclude with a brief analysis of how Ben Jelloun�s treatment of gendered identity serves as an allegory for postcolonial identity.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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