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The Meursault Investigation: A Contrapuntal Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2017

R. Radhakrishnan
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Abstract

How will the author teach Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation in an undergraduate class on postcolonial literature and theory? With this pedagogical perspective in mind, this essay attempts a contrapuntal appreciation of the intertextual relationship between Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. On the basis of Daoud’s novel, this intervention critically rehearses and reformulates the many crises and dilemmas that constitute postcolonial theory: postcolonial asymmetry and counter-memory, the predicament of secular nationalism, decolonization of the mind, humanism and the relationship of ontology to politics, and the future of third world literature.

Keywords

Frantz FanonEdward SaidFranceAlgeriaSelf-Other binarycolonialismintertextualitypostcolonial theorycounter-memorycontrapuntal critiquedouble-consciousnessdecolonizationnationalism
Type
Explication de Texte
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 440 - 456
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank and acknowledge Ato Quayson for inviting me to contribute this essay, my anonymous readers for their constructive comments and suggestions, and Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang for her ever gracious and timely help with the “post-production” of this essay.

References

1 I am referring, of course, to the famous lines from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

2 Daoud, Kamel, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2015)Google Scholar. Camus, Albert, L’Etranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942)Google Scholar.

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4 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children (New York: Modern Children, 2003), 38 Google Scholar.

5 Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, 1.

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