الأطروحات اللغات الاجنبية

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The Morality of Fiction
(UNIVERSITY OF ALGIERS 2. Faculty of Foreign Languages, 2018) Adjout, Asma; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)
This thesis is an investigation into the morality of fiction, which consists in the exploration of the complex connection between art and ethics. The purpose it to consider the presence of moral discourse in creative writing and the importance of taking it into consideration in literary criticism. The aim of this study is to re-adapt the claims of ethical criticism to a growing complex modernity following the tenets of John Krapp’s responsible ethical criticism. Indeed, the latter developed a new approach to ethical criticism through avoiding an oversimplified and monological treatment of texts, and establishing a balance between the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions. This work thus provides a study of six novels from English, American and African literatures, ensuring thus a diversity of socio-historical contexts to provide our claims for morality in literature with a broader relevance.
African women’s search for [re]insription in modern Africa
(University of algiers2 Abu El Kacem Saad Allah جامعة الجزائر 2 أبو القاسم سعد الله, 2018) Azzoug, Fatima; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)
This thesis aims at dissecting the workings of the patriarchal ethos as denounced by the two African women writers, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta and the Algerian Malika Mokeddem. The corpus is selected on the basis of a variety of literary sub-genres: autobiography, fictional narratives and war novels. This corpus falls in the category of resistance literature as the novels selected portray women’s victimization by patriarchy and women’s attempts and ways to stand against it. Consequently, the study is backed up by the feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic tools of analysis that explain how the girl/woman is conceived of by the patriarchal society and how the woman inverts this image as both an expression of her rejection of this ethos and an articulation of her selfhood. This study is also based on the comparative approach. It highlights that though the two women writers belong to different countries and eras, they are similar in more than one aspect in their reflection of how patriarchy frames the girls’/women’s existence in the family and in society as a whole. The study also shows that Buchi Emecheta and Malika Mokeddem are different in the intensity of their refutation of patriarchy
The Concept of Nation-State in the African Novel
(University of algiers2 Abu El Kacem Saad Allah جامعة الجزائر 2 أبو القاسم سعد الله, 2015) Babkar, Abdelkader; Bensemmane, M’hamed (Directeur de thèse)
The idea of the nation in Africa has been widely dealt with in modern African literature, arising from the fact that writers are bent on expressing their concern about the future of their countries. Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Kofi Awoonor are some such writers, as witness their efforts at conceiving of Afrotopia, or at best viable socio-political systems in the wake of colonial situation. The present research work aims to examine closely these novelists’ ideological convictions as they are expressed in their fictions and often shown to be in opposition to the practices established by the state apparatuses in place. My study shows how the African situation has been characterised in African novels by both a common continental experience and a number of facts that dramatise the historical predicament of slavery, colonialism and a problematic independence. These representations carry dialogical voices which underpin the authoritative voice of the authors. The narratives of the nation are shown to be ambivalent, for they seem to act in defence of the novelists’ culture, yet they jettison its very quintessence in the sceptical view they reflect about its significance in modern times.
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.

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