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Review Article|November 01 2015
The Poetics and Politics of Narrative Mourning
Atef Laouyene
Atef Laouyene is associate professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interests include Middle Eastern and North African literatures and cultures, critical theory, and postcolonial literary studies. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled "Exoticism and the Politics of Representation in Arab Diasporic Literature."
Cultural Politics (2015) 11 (3): 412-416.
Atef Laouyene; The Poetics and Politics of Narrative Mourning. Cultural Politics 1 November 2015; 11 (3): 412–416. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3342247
The publication of Nouri Gana's Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning brings to fruition the ensemble of Gana's decade-long reflections on literature and modern theories of mourning. While animated by a powerful impetus toward psychoanalytic (Freudian) and deconstructive (Derridean) analyses, Signifying Loss registers a noteworthy intervention in the intersecting fields of literary criticism and mourning studies by offering a close examination of the tropological configurations of "the work of mourning" (Trauerarbeit or travail du deuil) within a diverse body of modernist and post-colonial narratives ranging from James Joyce's Dubliners and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother to Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend and Elias Khoury's City Gates. By choosing to focus on prose fiction instead of poetry, Gana goes against the critical grain and challenges the predominant assumption in mourning theory that poetic language (especially insofar as...
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