The Foundational Novel in Waciny Laredj Periodisation: The Late Style of the Algerian Novel

Abstract

This study examines the problem of periodising the Algerian novel and identifying its foundational beginnings through a critical reading of Waciny Laredj’s project, which seeks to move beyond conventional schemes of periodisation that have confined the Algerian novel within theoretical models and Western-centred historical frameworks. It interrogates the relationship between literature, history, and society, maintaining that the emergence of the Algerian novel cannot be reduced either to a chronological sequence or to a single model regarded as an absolute point of departure.The study highlights the importance of returning to early and marginalised narrative texts and rereading them within their historical, cultural, and social contexts to uncover the continuity and distinctive character of Algerian narrative. It also examines Waciny Laredj’s position, which challenges the designation of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab as the sole point of origin of the Arabic novel. In his view, such a conception has led to the exclusion of an earlier Arab and Algerian narrative corpus and has created a rupture with Arab narrative memory.Drawing on the perspectives of Edward Said, Paul Ricœur, Michel Foucault, Niklas Luhmann, and others, the study emphasises the need to reconsider the concepts of beginning, continuity, rupture, periodisation, and cultural memory. It concludes that Waciny Laredj’s project represents a critical attempt to reconstruct Algeria’s cultural and narrative history from within while freeing it from a mode of periodisation shaped by a colonial perspective. Such an approach makes it possible to restore due recognition to marginalised foundational texts and to foreground both the distinctive character of the Algerian novel and its historical development.