Nesse, Erik Daniel (Ph.D., French and Italian) Vanishing in the Present: Disappearance in the Mediterranean French Novel Thesis directed by College Professor of Distinction Warren F. Motte, Jr. This dissertation examines the ways in which postcolonial Francophone novels use the concept of disappearance to make sense of contemporary experience. I study that trope with the aim of understanding how the political pasts of Algeria, France, and Morocco, changing notions of subjectivity, new, globalized socio-economic realities, and unstable forms of individual and social identity contribute to a present-day “structure of experience” where disappearance defines one’s mode of being in the world. My dissertation investigates four novels—Georges Perec’s La disparition (1969), Mahi Binebine’s Les funerailles du lait (1994), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2006), and Assia Djebar’s La disparition de la langue française (2003)—in order to outline the nature and consequences of that mode of being and its connection to contemporary issues such as migration, trauma, the body, memory, and sexuality, and nation.

Vanishing in the Present: Disappearance in the Mediterranean French Novel

Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) has been hailed since its inception as a unique achievement, primarily because of its incredible formal conception and the sprawling range of its contents. The daunting set of arbitrary rules and self-imposed constraints that stipulate the text's raw materials catch the writer up in what strikes one as a neurotic net, an intricate artifice that stretches his intelligence to its ludic limits. Seemingly disinterested in re-presenting any single situation or extant state of things, Perec uses a "hyperstructural conception" to weave a text out of components existing in a "universe of lists" (Hartje, Magn6 and Neefs 30). From this standpoint, Life A User's Manual is an emphatically anti-mimetic text. Yet this self-contained literary invention generates a distinctive texture; by a kind of exfoliation, from a text determined by these lists and plans there emerges a visceral feeling for the little things in life. This pre-text or user's manual of life does not represent life; rather, it instantiates the real. Instead of reflecting the world by imitation, Perec manufactures the sense of the real by copying, generating in the process a form of what I will call second-order mimesis, an entirely different register of realism in literature.

The invention of forms: Perec's Life A User's Manual and a virtual sense of the real

According to accepted critical standards, a good essay is one which manages both to elucidate and justify its title. I have therefore chosen a rather inexplicit heading in order to have the opportunity for immediate clarification that at the same time will permit me briefly to identify and contextualize the subject-matter of this essay. Anyone who is even somewhat familiar with computer technology knows that numerous hours of practice are required to learn how to use computer software, be it for the manipulation of a text or of a spread-sheet. In many cases this apprenticeship is facilitated by what might be called a para-program: an electronic file called README.DOC. The label has become generic and is found as an introductory file on numerous software diskettes in France and in the United States. This preliminary document should be consulted before actual use begins. README.DOC is in some respects the computer version of the old "Preface," "Publisher's Note," or "Foreword," with which we are so familiar from (our present) book culture. However, it is even better rendered by the phrase "Directions For Use" [Mode d'emploi]. My linking the terms "Preface" with "Directions For Use" might come as a surprise to some since we usually associate "Preface" with a literary work and "Directions For Use" with a common household appliance. And one might legitimately ask what connects a novel of Balzac's with a food processor. On the face of it, nothing. However, recent French experimental literature provides such a connection since it relies on preliminary remarks (or what is now called the "paratext" [paratexte']) that are much closer to "Directions for use" than to the traditional "Preface." It is for just this reason that an apparently straight-forward title, such as "Prefaces," would have been inappropriate for this essay. Until now, the conventional utterances that precede a literary text have appeared in the form of declarative statements designed to direct the reader. Authors or their representatives set up boundaries and landmarks aimed at

Lee Hilliker

Papers

README.DOC: On Oulipo