The Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Dhar El Mehraz in Fez is organising, on 15 and 16 November, an international colloquium on the theme "New writings, new approaches".

"New writings, new approaches" is the generic theme of an international colloquium scheduled for 15 and 16 November 2016 in Fez, at the initiative of the Research Laboratory on Literary and Artistic Expression of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Dhar El Mehraz in Fez (Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University). This international colloquium will focus on several research axes such as the state of literature at the beginning of the 21st century, the analysis of a theme of the new generation of writers, questions of literary theory in relation to these new writings, fragmentary writing and the limits of the genre, new writing/new approach, the teaching method of this new writing, etc. The colloquium will also analyse the literary experience of certain contemporary writers, such as Mohamed Loakira, Habib Mazini, Mohamed Hmoudane, El Mostafa Bouignane, Youssouf Amine Elalamy, or even Fouad Laroui. According to the organising committee, innovation in literature is an indisputable fact that is often noticed at key moments in the history of peoples to react against constraining realities. This takes diverse manifestations such as positioning in relation to colonisation and power and questioning the values and customs of a civilisation. Indeed, it is indicated, modern or postmodern writing sees the development of a conception of literature based essentially on the principle of the heterogeneity of voices. Heterogeneity declined in various ways in the approach to literary space, in its imaginary as well as in its aesthetics which takes, among other aspects, the form of hybridity, fragmentation, the association of the verbal and the iconic (pictorial, photographic), or even the reproduction of ancient documents in the body of the text. Moroccan Francophone literature of the last fifteen years, it is stressed, is freeing itself from the "Souffles" paradigm and the colonial paradigm which nevertheless persists among certain authors. This liberation contributes to the emergence of new voices and a new way of writing: one now writes like any writer in the world, without the constraint of culture, space, and predecessors.

In this perspective, it is added, we are witnessing a movement of overcoming the stereotypes that a post-colonial critique, still well established to this day, has imposed on the Francophone text of the Maghreb. New ways of seeing the world and conceiving the act of writing characterise the new Moroccan and Francophone literary corpus, such as the insertion of the police investigation, the freedom of characters who are no longer under the effect of religious or cultural determinism, the shifting of genre boundaries in the narrative, but also in the poem.