Ironie et discours social dans les romans d'Ahmadou Kourouma

This thesis is devoted to the analysis of literary discourse as a discursive construct of the social through the work of Ahmadou Kourouma (Les soleils des indépendances: 1968, Monnè, outrages et défis: 1990, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages: 1998, Allah n’est pas obligé: 2000 & Quand on refuse on dit non: 2004), focusing on the concepts of irony and social discourse.  Ahmadou Kourouma owes much of his originality to the mixture of the heterogeneous genres of fiction and orality (tales, epics, myths, legends ...), and to the use of an innovative writing marked by a double subversion at the level of content and form. This subversion, which runs through all the novels of the author, has given rise to innumerable scientific works, but the documentation at our disposal has enabled to note that there is very little criticism on the use of laughter and irony devices, which reflect an aesthetic of distancing and heterogeneity, yet omnipresent in the work of this author.  This research is based upon the hypothesis that Ahmadou Kourouma’s writing sorts into the multitude of historical facts to construct its meaning. It is for this reason that our thesis attempts to show that the novels of Ahmadou Kourouma, involved in this study, criticize and parody the historiographical, literary, artistic and political discourses held on Africa from the colonial conquest to the Civil wars of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries. The reflection aims at exploring how Ahmadou Kourouma uses irony to deconstruct these discourses and ideologies, thus initiating the history of the African novel. Ahmadou Kourouma’s aesthetics of distancing is materialized by the use of laughter and irony as tools of unveiling social discourses and dominant ideologies crossing the African space. The novels adopt a critical posture through parody, satire, humor and irony that destabilize these discourses. The figures of distancing used by Ahmadou Kourouma discharge the dominant discourses and ideologies of their contemporary value in modern Africa. They allow the reader to detect the hypocrisy and satirical character of these discourses, and to construct another meaning of the text. Such texts loaded symbolically open themselves to multiple interpretations, and words no longer bearing a univocal meaning serve as a means of criticizing the ideas of African society. Methodological approaches such as socio-criticism and the notions of polyphony and carnivalesque writing are used to study the sociality of the dominant discourses and ideologies in the above-mentioned novels of Ahmadou Kourouma. Reading these novels in this methodological lens allows us to analyze the enunciative strategies adopted to criticize African ideological discourse. Indeed, the Kouroumian novel presents itself as a discourse that builds a society of reference appearing under the form of an ideological construction of the text. The stylistic modalities of irony, paradox, humor, parody and satire structure what is said and written in modern African society. The texts that form the corpus of this thesis present a number of characters and various narrators involving a plurality of voices, resulting from several fragments of texts of social discourse. This plurality of voices refers to the notions of polyphony and carnivalesque writing, including the grotesque used throughout the novel of Ahmadou Kourouma to devalue and ridicule by the comic of words, body and situations, characters (colonizers, dictators, griots, interpreters, marabouts, nuns, princes, kings, sorcerers, etc.), as well as the ideologies they represent and defend.  Thus, socio-critical approach, polyphony and carnival aesthetics reveal the subversive character of the novels of Ahmadou Kourouma, strongly imbued with the dominant discourses and ideologies in Africa.

Keyphrases: Roman francophone, Ahmadou Kourouma, Satire, African literature, Francophone novel, Carnivalesque writing, Irony, Humor, Parody, Orality, Polyphony, Social discourse, Socio-criticism