Browsing by Author "TOUBAL, Zina"

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    The Carnivalesque in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King (1954)
    (2014) TOUBAL, Zina
    This research work is concerned with the comparison of two outstanding writers from two different countries but almost of the same period of time: Ralph Ellison (1914- 1994) an African- American writer and Camara Laye (1928-1980), a black author from Guinea. This dissertation has demonstrated that both Ellison and Laye wrote their novels from a carnivalesque perspective. To explore the carnivalesque forms and themes, we have borrowed Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the cornivalesque developed in his book Rabelais and his world published in 1965. Two chapters are devoted to this issue; the first one deals with the analysis of the carnivalesque forms and themes in Ellison’s Invisible Man and Laye’s The Radiance of the King. It explores the grotesque imagery, the language of the marketplace and the comic aspects of the characters’ behavior in the novels. It also studies the theme of invisibility and the picaresque journey that requires the carnivalesque forms to depict the experience and the adventures of the alienated protagonists. The second chapter considers the role of the carnivalesque in relation to some ideologies and some previous written texts with which the authors enter in polemics by focusing on parody to show oppositional views. The present dissertation is grounded on the assumption that common experiences and contexts can lead authors belonging to distinct geographical areas to write in a similar way and discuss the same themes. The major goal of this comparative study is to investigate Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Laye’s The Radiance of the King (1956) by foregrounding their resemblances. It has demonstrated that Ellison and Laye were inspired mainly by the philosophies of Negritude and the Negro Renaissance which celebrate blackness and the uniqueness of the Blacks’ experience.