Before his assassination in 1993, Algerian novelist Tahar Djaout wrote: "If you speak up, you die. If you don't speak up, you die. So speak up and die!" Reflecting the country's painful history, the modern literary landscape of Algeria is a topography of reification, exile, and erasure. Algeria was a French colonial possession from 1830 to 1962; in 1954 an eight year war of independence started that took approximately one million Algerian lives; since 1992 the country has endured an unspoken but deadly civil war in which over 100,000 people have died and over 7000 "disappeared." In this class we will examine the politics of representation in literary and visual texts of Algeria from the colonial period to the present. We will examine the creation and erasure of the colonial subject, the plurality and suppression of language, the fabrication of national myth, the writing of trauma and narratives from exile that attempt to piece together the broken bodies of a nation. Readings include works by the following authors: Assia Djebar, Anouar Benmalek, Kateb Yacine, Albert Camus, Emmanuel Robles, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Fares, Malek Alloula, and Jacques Derrida. Conducted in French. Requirements: active class participation, postings on Blackboard, two short papers, an oral presentation and a final 15-page paper. Prerequisites: French 109, 110, 111 or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 10).