Literary Discourse and the Reactivation of Consciences. The Case of Afghanistan in Contemporary Literature: Yasmina Khadra

Abstract

While the overmediatization of violence seems to have triggered a decline in sensitiveness in postmodern readers and viewers, literature is, more than ever, "making sense". Notably, plot setting and inner focusing enable an author such as Yasmina Khadra to conjure up the horror ofAfghanistan conflicts. Thus, bridging the geographical and cultural gap that used to dissociate the Western reader from Afghans, , literature confronts us with the abject, not so much in order to resist the world’s abjection as to force us to acknowledge its existence. Basically, literature is a response to the temptation to deny the abject that takes hold of the "doxa" when it is brought face to face with this phenomenon. As a result, literature has to "elaborate" on the abject, to put it into words and shape it, "defuse" and "eviscerate" it, flaunting it in the reader's face, against his/her "superego", as Julia Kristeva puts it.