Abstract
What began as a pragmatic and, as she would claim, amateur reading practice-employed by a reader simply wishing to access the work of Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and others-evolved into a critical practice that transformed her work with the English language. According to Dalgamo, Woolf ultimately "shaped for herself a position more like that of an explorer than a university professor." Even as Djebar understands this challenge as unique to Maghrebian culture, Dalgamo finds precedence for this resistance in Woolf's work-an inheritance that informed Djebar's "agonizing decision to represent her mother tongue and culture in the language of the colonial occupier" (187).