Les interférences sémantiques dans les oeuvres d'Ahmadou Kourouma et de Mongo Beti: essai d'étude comparative

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the works of two well-known African Francophone novelists, Ahmadou Kourouma from the Ivory Coast and Mongo Beti from Cameroon. The objective of this study is to look at the influences of African oral traditions and analyze the literary transposition of semantic structures from African languages and cultures into the French language. I utilize Chantal Zabus' explanations of how the process of indigenization leads to relexification, the process by which the authors seek to display their linguistic innovation by attempting to merge their local African languages with the French language. Chapter one introduces the language policies in the Ivory Coast and Cameroon during the colonization and in the post-colonial Africa. It establishes the relationship between the dominant European languages and the local African languages and examines the question of rehabilitation of the African languages. Chapter two examines the impact of the African oral traditions and the use of orality as a writing strategy. Chapter three aims to analyze the process whereby words of African local languages and cultures are semantically incorporated through Les Soleils des Indépendances (1968) and Allah n'est pas oblige (2000) by Ahmadou Kourouma, and Ville cruelle (1954) and Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000) by Mongo Beti. Chapter four examines the use of stylistic features associated with local African languages by comparing the earlier works of the two authors with their later literary production in order to establish whether there is continuity or not in their writing style.