UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2:00 TO 3:15 P.M.

M.L.L. CONFERENCE ROOM
(MERRICK 210-01)



COURSE PARTICIPATION BY

ABDELLAH TAΪA

Abdellah Taïa is a young Moroccan writer and intellectual figure living in Paris and writing in French. He is the author of several novels, most recently L’Armée du Salut and Une Mélancolie arabe (Éditions du Seuil), the co-author with Frédéric Mitterand of the texts of a photography book entitled Maroc 1900-1960 (Actes Sud), and the editor and introducer of Lettres à un jeune Marocain (Éditions du Seuil), a collective volume to which 17 Moroccan writers, artists, intellectuals and university students have collaborated in defense of a new, liberal, open minded, and secular Morocco. As the first openly gay writer intervening publicly in Morocco itself (actually the first in the entire Arab world) and whose novels are distributed in that country, he has been ranked by the influential Moroccan weekly magazine Tel Quel as one of the three of contemporary Moroccan culture and society. He is also a vigorous defender of tolerance, cultural and civic openness, democracy and human rights in his native country and everywhere. Novels by Abdellah Taïa have already been translated in Spanish, Dutch and Italian, and Salvation Army just appeared in English, translated by Frank Stock and prefaced by Edmund White, at M.I.T. Press, in the Semiotext(e) series directed by Hedi El Kholti. Taïa’s “calmly transgressive work” has been recognized as a “major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora”, as it combines narrative and rhetorical complexity with the subjective genuine tonality of personal story telling and auto-fictional apparent confession. His Miami appearance is part of a tour which will feature him at universities (N.Y.U., Columbia, Harvard, U.C.L.A, U.C. Berkeley, University of Miami), bookstores and cultural centers in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Miami. This undergraduate course participation (in French) is open to all faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and interested outside persons. This event is co-sponsored by the Embassy of France in the United States and the M.L.L. Department Joseph Carter Memorial Fund, with the support of the French Cultural Services in Miami and the Miami Book Fair.

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