SOFT TRANSITIONS: FROM BIOGRAPHY TO NOVEL

Abstract

Clément Moisan criticizes historical practices as interpretive practices incapable of confronting representations of systems and structures as complex systems. He argues that researchers have burdened themselves by devoting most of their effort to questioning historical interpretation without paying sufficient attention to heterogeneous texts. The greatest functionality of systems, in his view, lies in revealing the interweaving of the functions of literature in bourgeois society within history, together with the history of normative or codifying treatments of literature aesthetically. This organization cannot be understood except through an understanding of the literary system within the representational systems of society. The concept of multiple systems—the literary and artistic canon involved in the formation of novelistic production—will reveal a reading of what lies inside and outside the model, through which some of the cultural formations of the history of the Algerian novel can be uncovered, while also bringing to light many of the historical matrices used in periodizing the Algerian novel. In discussing the model and the canon, the ways in which literary form operates and genres are transformed become visible, as does the contribution of these transformations to the shaping of collective consciousness and to the construction of Algerian narrative identity.