Political Transformation in the Tunisian novel

Abstract

Just prior to and shortly after Tunisia’s revolution, many Tunisian novels came out addressing social, economic, and cultural transformations. This study selects four of them which specifically deal with transformation. It uses the many aspects of transformation to reveal an image of the worsening political situation in the country and the ensuing social and economic crisis. A problem of method however arises that concerns the link between the structure of the novel and the social and economic conditions that generated it. This article addresses this problematic by relying on the method of genetic structuralism elaborated by Lucien Goldmann on the basis of prior theorists of the novel such as György Lukács. In this way, the dialectic of structures and what this results in, replaces the theory of reflection and the marginalization of the art of fiction and the texts of novels it results in, in a narrow circle that goes no further than the historical function of reality.