ABSTRACT
One text which addresses the very particular circumstances of intellectocide' then engulfing Algeria is Tahar Djaout's Le Dernier t de la raison. The work reflects on the impact of a totalitarian culture on reading, literature, and the imagination. Djaout was depicting an all too pressing social reality in Le Dernier t de la raison: the civil war backdrop against which he was writing involved a military government without a democratic mandate and a number of armed Islamist groups, including the GIA, the Groupe Islamique arm. The subject matter of Djaout's novel, the history of its composition, and the fate of its author thus form a very specific and arresting historical nexus. The drama in Djaout's Le Dernier t de la raison revolves, around a disturbing sociality and the private dilemma this triggers. Mohammed Dib's Les Terrasses d'Orsol, part of his Nordic cycle of novels spanning the period from the mid-1980s into the 1990s.
