...Erin Twohig Copyright © 2015 The Trustees of Columbia University 2015 Erin Twohig INVESTIGATING A DISAPPEARANCE: MULTILINGUALISM AND LANGUAGE ERASURE IN ASSIA DJEBAR'S LA DISPARITION DE LA LANGUE FRANCA1SE T he title of Assia Djebar's 2003 novel La Disparition de la langue fran~aise...

... would have to flee. Both men were preternaturally alert in the spring and summer of 1942 when people were constantly disappearing, being denounced, arrested, tortured, shot. The police rounded up French Jews for deportation to the death camps in August. The persecution of foreigners grew fiercer...

... D'EMPLOI 509 both "flight" and "theft") is a particularly Perecquian one: the search for a character who disappears. When indirectly invoked in the context of Perec's work, this motif recalls La Disparition and also takes on autobiographical significance (the disappearance of the author's parents...

... of becol11ing but of forlnlessness." What counts in Inaroonage, then, is the disappearance of a black culture which is projected onto a totality defined by sacrifice and lack. The structure of the arglunent is not always clear to the reader. Even though the chapter titles suggest a conceptual coherence...

..., Vache committed suicide, taking his unwitting friends along. In 1920, Arthur Cravan disappeared on a boat promenade, and it was never clear whether it was a suicide or an accident. The interpretation of their deaths constituted one of the founding myths of Dada and surrealism - suicide as the ultimate...

... is not a nlatter of becol11ing but of forlnlessness." What counts in Inaroonage, then, is the disappearance of a black culture which is projected onto a totality defined by sacrifice and lack. The structure of the arglunent is not always clear to the reader. Even though the chapter titles suggest a conceptual...

... herself from her mirrored reflection, her (almost) antisymmetrical self, Odysseus, also exiled for twenty years, except she claims not to share his desire to listen, chained to the mast, to the Sirens, the women fighters, like Zoulikha.11 Zoulikha's partial disappearance stands as a counterpoint...

..., by unseen sentries; beyond it, the tension of walking alongside a patrolled minefield disappears, and with it any orders to remain silent. By now, the river has changed its course several times; the Marillais church tower has disappeared behind poplars; the low slopes that border the wet meadows are edging...

..., effects of narrative framing and narrative voice intensify the erotic overtones, as well as the play between appearance and disappearance of bodies and desire. These narrative effects overarch the thematic elements. They repeat those of the Dominga episode, but as the photographic negative repeats...

... pointed out the following year in "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur those critics who heralded the death of the author had perhaps not fully measured the consequences of his disappearance. For they continued to rely on the equally problematic category of the work, failing to grasp that the logic of this category...

... to the embattled status of French in Algeria at a time when journalists and intellectuals who wrote in French, along with other public figures, were targeted by Islamist militias. On this reading, Berkane, who has lived in Paris for several decades, symbolizes the French language under threat of disappearance. Yet...

... of the work. It is represented to a certain extent by what Blanchot calls the eclipse of the work, namely its sudden disappearance, a reminder of the gaze of Orpheus. The Orpheus myth in Blanchot's text speaks about Eurydice as the "extreme" to which art points. Orpheus' work is about looking back to see...

... are the daughters of Zoulikha, the "woman without a tomb." Djebar herself appears as a thaumaturgist in her elegy, Algerian White. But it can also refer to us, her readers, mourning the disappearance of the author, absorbed by the works she left behind for posterity. It can even refer to the very act of reading...

... of the palimpsest in Vallès’s urban imagination after 1880. The montage of successive past and present representations sometimes draws the Tableau in the direction of regrets and nostalgia, when the writer resuscitates those who are no longer alive and whose disappearance he laments. However, the chronicle most...

... a possibility that it may be one and identical in all. (206; emphasis added) Maupassant himself, writing three years after On the Basis of Morality was translated into French, penned an 1882 article entitled "Les Foules," which worriedly describes the disappearance of individual judgment into the "arne...

... tenure on the editorial board. Gravdal first appears on the masthead at the beginning of 1992 and remains there through the end of 1994; the issue that includes Sigal and Coats falls right in the middle of Gravdal's time on the board. Starting with the first issue of 1995, Gravdal disappears from...

..., possible to see in the dazzling array of appearances (and, ultimately, disappearances) that Marie's story offers something still more radical than reciprocity: namely, an alternative to the diagrammatic violence of system tout court? Such an alternative would not only continue the radicalization of Burns's...

... a je sais. When Barthes puts all of French literature before 1848 into the same, known, basket, a similar move is accomplished: the rupture of '48 transforms the writing that precedes it into an "on sait," and what Riffaterre calls "uniqueness" disappears. My focus here however, is to ask another...

... story from 1813 by Adelbert von Chamisso, L'Etrange Histoire de Peter Schlemihl, in which a man loses his shadow. For Chaouat, the loss of the shadow is akin to the disappearance of the "other" in ultra-liberal Western societies in which all restraints or taboos have supposedly been left behind...

..., unrest, and possibly freedom for the respective narrators. It is to the 7. "Creolite Bites" 153. 8. "Creolite Bites" 154. 9. "Creolite Bites" 151. 10. Teresa Kak Kyung Cha, Dictee (New York: Tanam Press, 1982). 11. "Order" 12. TRANSLATING GRIEF 279 disappearance and death of these students...