Literature
Modern Algerian literature, split between Arabic and French, has been strongly influenced by the country's recent history. Known poets in modern Algeria are Moufdi Zakaria, Mohammed Al Aid from the middle of the 20th century, and Achour Fenni and Azrag Omar in the late 1980s. Famous novelists of the 20th century include Mohammed Dib, Albert Camus, Kateb Yacine, and Ahlam Mosteghanemi, while Assia Djebar is widely translated. Among the important novelists of the 1980s were Rachid Mimouni, later vice-president of Amnesty International, and Tahar Djaout, murdered by an Islamist group in 1993 for his secularist views. In philosophy and the humanities, Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, was born in El Biar in Algiers; Malek Bennabi and Frantz Fanon are noted for their thoughts on decolonization; Augustine of Hippo was born in Tagaste (modern-day Souk Ahras); and Ibn Khaldun, though born in Tunis, wrote the Muqaddima while staying in Algeria.
Algerian culture has been strongly influenced by Islam, the main religion. The works of the Sanusi family in pre-colonial times, and of Emir Abdelkader and Sheikh Ben Badis in colonial times, are widely noted. The Latin author Apuleius was born in Madaurus (Mdaourouch), in what later became Algeria.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Algeria
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“The calmest husbands make the stormiest wives.”
—17th-century English proverb, pt. 1, quoted in Isaac dIsraeli, Curiosities of Literature (1834)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)