رسائل الماجستير اللغات الأجنبية
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://ddeposit.univ-alger2.dz/handle/20.500.12387/1943
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item THE POLITICS OF IRONY AND SATIRE IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S A MAN OF THE PEOPLE, NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S DEVIL ON THE CROSS, AND WOLE SOYINKA'S THE INTERPRETERS(University of Algiers 2. Faculty of Arts and Languages, 2012) Ferache, Waheb; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)The guiding principle underlying this dissertation is to cast a critical eye on the politics of irony and satire prevailing in three famous African novels: Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, and Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters. These highly satirical texts expose, through different techniques of derision, the evils of authoritarian power that followed the departure of the white man from Africa. The tree novels mentioned apply derision to some of the contemporary power elites for betraying the promises of independence. Politics is kept by Machiavellian power-despots from being an arena of meaningful social relations and practices and becomes instead a hermetic ivory-tower where they have locked themselves and proved to be more corrupt, absurd, grotesque and brutal than their predecessors – the departed imperialists. My intention in this dissertation, via the three outstanding fictional works and other related texts, is to probe the game of politics and the way it is deconstructed in African literature. Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka employ diverse techniques of the satiric spectrum ranging from irony to ridicule through laughter and cynicism in order to blow the whistle on the growing crisis which is inflicted by the body politic. They exploit the gap between the exploiting “haves” and the exploited “have nots” which widens and bring to light uncertainty, dejection and bitter cynicism. Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka claim that African literature exists in a historical continuum. Neo-colonialism infected post-colonial Africa as a cancer or a severe form of imperialism where the neo-colonial hegemony assume a kind of power without responsibility or exploitation without restitution owing to the continuation and perpetuation after independence of economic, political and social practices established by the old-fashioned colonialism. It will be shown that the language of irony and satire is skilfully employed by Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka to express their bitter disillusionment and that of most African peoples and to denounce the shortcomings and flaws of contemporary Africa in its dealing with neo-colonialism. For this purpose, I shall resort to a variety of theoretical notions that will support my analysis of satire and show how this particular writing strategy has informed and enriched the post-colonial African novel. It has also provided a wealth of insights in what it means to write satire, to be ironic, and to surmise to satire’s social or political purpose. The three canonical texts of African literature selected, share a number of affinities at the linguistic, aesthetic, and ideological levels, as I will attempt to demonstrate. Chapter One will be devoted to the discussion of Achebe’s techniques of irony and satire in A Man of the People. In this novel, Achebe draws humorous and grotesque portraits of post-colonial Nigeria through his witty foreshadowing of the crisis of leadership facing it. His satire derives from the duality intrinsic to the Igbo world view and best illustrated in the Igbo proverb that advocates the idea that whenever something stands, something else will stand beside it, and 6 The Politics of Irony and Satire in Achebe’s MOP, and Ngugi’s DOC traditional modes of representation of derision constitute the essence of Achebe’s satiric spectrum, and in each of these, a norm is transgressed and a gap is constructed to strengthen the satiric intent. Chapter Two follows on with Ngugi, who introduces Religious Allegory, grotesque body and satire in Devil on the Cross as potential threats to Kenya’s mundane reality and most significantly to capitalism in a totalitarian state. In his ritual of anatomizing the monster capitalism in his novel, Ngugi’s satire is didactic and polemical to the point of transgressing the boundaries of conventional creative writing. He is particularly mocking the gullibility and insatiable envy of those members of Kenya’s capitalist bourgeoisie, thus he enters into a brutal and savage satiric exposure to disclose their inanities and immoral actions. Chapter Three will focus on the use Satiric Humor and Laughter in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters. The novel is, without question, a linguistically rich and sharp satiric representation of the new, hybridized culture of post-colonial Nigeria. In this polyphonic and highly rhetorical work of art, Soyinka juxtaposes existentialist philosophy and indigenous myths, creating thus memorable satiric passages fused with humor, sophisticated wit and memorable laughter. The ultimate objective of this dissertation is to study the discursive strategies stressed by Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka based on irony and satire, in order to generate an opposition to despotic abuses of power. Their crucial purpose is to move the African audience to scrutinize and denounce the flaws and shortcomings of post-independence politics.Item ON MOVING THE CENTRE OF NARRATION AND DISCOURSE(University of Algiers. Faculty of Arts and Letters, 2009) Chaabane Ali, Mohamed; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)This dissertation is intended chiefly to study Ngugi’s literary response to the Western culture of domination, which manifests itself in a set of hegemonic views about the non-Western communities generally, and the African in particular. While forming the ideological basis for the growth of classical European Empires overseas, this culture for him still continues to impose its standards on the global order, and thus on the post-colonial world. In his most proletarian novels, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, and Matigari, Ngugi has a “literarypolitical” project of “revisiting” the cultural and political authority of the imperial powers. This project is mainly intended to restore his people’s freedom of thought and action so as to resist the power of the hegemonic interests of Western-oriented international capitalism. Ngugi’s presently discussed novels, by bringing to the fore a set of heated issues bearing on history, culture, and the nation, reverse colonial binarisms in order to combat the hegemonic interpellations of the neo-colonial regime. In Petals of Blood, the idea of history is brought to prominence as Ngugi argues strongly for a radical reinterpretation of Kenya’s working people’s history. In fact, Karega, evidently the mouthpiece of the writer, stresses that the rewriting of Kenya’s history is an important undertaking, but by no means sufficient, to support what he foresees as the class struggle waged by the “wretched of the earth” against the neocolonial regime run by the new “bloodsuckers”. Similarly, Ngugi, through such characters as Nyakinyua and Abdulla, argues clearly for the significance of Kenya’s “oral history” and the heroic history of Kenyans’ resistance to the imperialist “marauders” for today’s struggle which, at all events, runs the risk of being overwhelmed by a false conception of Kenya’s both precolonial and colonial past that is touted by a corrupt ruling elite. In his next novel Devil on the Cross, however, much emphasis is placed upon the indigenous culture of the population, even though Ngugi is very often thought to prioritise political and economic struggles over cultural retrieval. This novel interestingly shows that we can never diminish the instrumental value of culture as a political weapon against imperialism it its neocolonialist stage. This study makes thus the claim that the indigenous culture of the masses can be used in the very definition of the downtrodden classes, to say nothing about the use of such aspects of folk culture as songs, proverbs, and traditional stories as a means of communication with the audience, of whom the “illiterate” masses form the majority. In addition, DOC displays a concern for certain forms of cultural hegemony exercised by such institutions as the school, the media, and the Church. In this novel, indeed, my contention is that the neocolonial ideology is supported in part by the imposition of the Western cultural 7 models on the African people. Consequently, Ngugi’s disapproval of the white culture is an explicit attack on the whole system of the neocolonial power. But, at the same time, nowhere in his novel is there any explicit call for the return to some pristine pre-colonial culture. In Ngugi’s opinion, this atavistic view is not founded at all. Ngugi’s first novel in exile, Matigari, solidifies Ngugi’s immense project of “de-centring” the Western hegemonic political discourse by expressing the felt need for the regeneration of the post-colonial African nation. Ngugi decries violently the currently established Kenyan nation because of its degenerate state that manifests itself clearly in the falsity of foundations upon which it is based. Matigari, the hero of the narrative, represents the daunting challenge of the establishment of an egalitarian society, and the fact that he ultimately falls back on a military action indicates strongly that the nation cannot be “regenerated” unless an armed rebellion of the masses, similar to the epic Mau Mau insurrection, breaks out once again. In general, Ngugi’s literary -and political- project of redefining the narrative discourse about Africa in the post-independence era has to be envisaged within the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and the political framework of his Marxist-based ideology. Ngugi revisits in his works a number of crucial concepts, which include history, culture, nation, with a very clear objective in mind: the political, economic, and cultural autonomy of the Africans and the non-western people at large. This objective has to be achieved, as indicated, whether explicitly or implicitly in all his “popular” novels, as they have come to be called, by the downtrodden people’s resort to armed resistance.