Time signatures

de Alison Rice

This book engages the readers in a close study of the autobiographical writings of three contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb: Assia Djebar, Helene Cixous, and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Alluding to music not only as a "theme" pulsing throughout these writers' works but also as a means of comprehending their unique, improvisational writing styles, Alison Rice offers readers a new and beautifully constructed way of reading these authors' texts by demonstrating that the form adopted to address topics of concern is as significant as the content itself. The voice of Jacques Derrida intermingles with the timbres of these three writers in fruitful contrapuntal passages, serving as a source of inspiration for conceptualizing language and communicating the self in an unprecedented manner. Time Signatures demonstrates that these individuals write the "self" in French as influenced by sensitivities acquired during their early experiences in a multicultural, multilingual "colonial" environment in which their ears were trained, and their minds tuned, for translations to come.