الرسائل والأطروحات الأكاديمية
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يسمح هذه المجموعة الأعمال الأكاديمية بالحفاظ والأرشفة واسترجاع والوصول الى كل الرسائل الجامعية وأطروحات الدكتوراه المجازة في جامعة الجزائر 2 ؛ وتشمل كل تخصصات الجامعة الحالية والمستقبلية
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Item The Search for an Ideal Society in the African Novel(University of Algiers. Faculty of Arts and Languages, 2007) Babkar, Abdelkader; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)The subject treated in this dissertation is about Ayi Kwei Armpah and Ngugi wa Thiong‘o as novelists writing in order to raiuse the consciousness of their respective societies or nations in relation to what went wrong and has generated the present anomy as far as the socio-political and economic conditions are concerned. The latter is characterised by oppression at the political level and the disintegration of the tradtional African societal organisation which used to emphasise the common good. This social organisation has been shaped now after the modern trend of individualism and the Western commodity culture. Armah and Ngugi begin first by depicting the status quo in Ghana and Kenya respectively ; in their respective endeavours, they express their dissociation from this very status quo to project a vision, stemming from their ideologies, of an ideal society whereby the mode of conduct would be to contribute to the common well-being. Thier ideologies are a synthesis of their traditional thought (the Akan in the case of Armah and the Gikuyu in the case of Ngugi) and the Western world view, though Armah quite singularly, tends to deny any Western value that would influence positively his society. Armah’s ideology of the ‘way,’or reciprocity, could be considered as the oppositional voice to Western hegemony. He claims it to be superior to the Western view or the ‘gleam’ as he calls it in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Ngugi’s ideology for its part combines traditional culture that clings to land and the Western philosophy of Marxism which, contrary to Armah’s belief, can share a common ground with the African communalistic spirit. At the narrative level, Armah and Ngugi’s narratives, because of their version of the novel genre that straddles the oral as well as the print tradition of storytelling, are meant to seek, following Fredric Jameson’s demonstration in his The Political Unconscious, resolutions of a contradiction of the social organisation in Africa. Thier narratives resist, yet at the same time benefit from the Western form of storytelling. This also reflects the writers’ resistance of the nation-state political form and yet, because of its Janus-face, accepting it and defining their nations in accordance with. Also, following Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, the writers ideologies are, like utopias, incongruent with the status quo. Thus they constitute an ideal that is meant to be approximated because they embody the form of society wished for. Although Armah’s depiction of the status quo in his first three novels The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest ? give the impression of disillusionment, they incorporate an attempt at explaining and analysing the African situation and the African psyche. Both at the narrative and the ideological levels, in Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, Armah seems to be engaged in the rendition of the primal wisdom in his society and the creation of new values, a new perspective incorporated in his ideology of the ‘way.’ Ngugi adopts a similar approach in his later novels Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross, by depicting the unsatisfying situation in Kenya and analysing at the same time the underlying causes that led to it. Meanwhile adopting his society’s traditional culture (shedding light especially on the resistance movement) and Marxism as an ideology, he sketches characters who are involved in raising the consciousness of their fellow citizens about the ideals of a communalistic self-contained Kenyan nation.Item THE AFRICAN JEREMIAD AND THE PROPHETIC ARCHITECTURING OF THE FUTURE IN THE WORKS OF NGUGI AND ARMAH(University of Algiers. Faculty of Arts and Languages, 2010) Haddouche, Fethi; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)This dissertation is about the jeremiadic discourse that underlies the works of Ngugi Wa Thiong’ O and Ayi Kwei Armah. The recurrent African predicaments, from slave-trade and colonialism to neo-colonialism, have made an urgent appeal to the public role of these African intellectuals. Their manifest awareness of the destructive consequences of the scriptural narratives brought by Muslims and Christians to Africa led them to attempt a spiritual decolonization through a typological reproduction of biblical narratives in their works; these narrative reproductions are part of a deconstructive reading of the scriptures, a reading that can be termed “hermeneutics of revolt”. Narrative adaptations and subversions of biblical accounts are performed through typology, parody, irony and satire. While Armah’s fictions tend towards the typological, those of Ngugi are more ironic and satiric. Due to the crisis of leadership in Africa, Ngugi and Armah have endowed their protagonists with prophetic characteristic features. In The Beautyful Ones, Armah expressed his disillusionment about the possibility of the emergence of a committed leadership in Africa. However, in his later novels, he opts for the figure of the prophet as a suitable form of leadership in a community in crisis. While Armah supports this idea through his retelling of the biblical story of the Exodus in Two Thousand Seasons, he warns against the false prophets and charlatans who intend to lead Africa and its people astray. Ngugi offers a powerful representation of leaders who become prophetic saviours as a result of the popular imagination. He points to the importance of hearsay in the construction of the authoritarian personae. The Ruler, in Wizard of the Crow, is a dramatization of the process of deification of leaders by the community. Likewise, in A Grain of Wheat, Mugo, in spite of his act of betrayal, becomes a prophetic saviour in the eyes of people. Prophecy constitutes the central part of the religious discourse that informs the works of both novelists. Being a persuasive rhetorical device, the prophetic language informs the narratives of Ngugi and Armah with authority mainly because of its power to endow their protagonists with authenticity. Knowledge of the future makes the prophet the transcendental person that he might become. In Two Thousand Seasons, Anoa becomes a prophetess only after the fulfilment of the first part of her prophecy, namely the one thousand season of slavery. To fulfil the second part of this prophecy, Armah makes use of what Thomas Merton has termed the “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”. Although this kind of prophecy is mainly rhetorical, it can be fulfilled without divine intervention. This prophecy is hypothetical in the sense of convincing people to work for a possible future utopia. Ngugi also opens his novels with prophecies that are to be realized in the course of the events of their stories. The plots of The River Between and A Grain of Wheat are part of this proleptic narrative scheme. The prophecies that shape Armah’s and Ngugi’s plots define African history as a necessary apocalypse for a coming Afrotopia. The latter can never take place before a redemptive chaos that redeems the evil committed by blacks against themselves. This redemptive interpretation of African history shows Armah’s and Ngugi’s conviction about a metaphysical form of social justice, a justice that makes blacks worthy of the future one thousand years. This millennialist thinking is also part of Ngugi’s worldview. Ngugi considers popular revolts as the necessary Armageddon for a classless socialist heaven.