Doctoral thesis presented and defended with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of French Letters and Civilization

By

Céline NSULA wa NTAMBWE

Graduate of Higher Studies in French Literature and Civilization

Promoter: Bertin Makolo Muswaswa Professor Emeritus

Academic year 2021-2022

SUMMARY

This study reveals the idiosyncratic features of the French-language Congolese novel of the Second Democratic Republic of Congo (1976-2007). Starting from formal and thematic narratology or discursive narrative semiotics which aims to be of a binary or ternary logic, it led with its semiotic operators, that is to say, starting from theory (WANT-TO-KNOW) to practice (TO-KNOW), from induction to deduction, to generate the ideological meaning of the story. The semiotic devices of R. Barthes, G. Genette, AJ Greimas and SC Peirce allowed us to discover the ideologies of the stories through the five novels in our corpus.
The novel as a linguistic sign, contains thoughts, translates spatio-temporal and economic realities. Two ideologies coexist in the Congolese novel, one of the bourgeois minority (of the status quo) and the other of the majority of the impoverished (of change) behind which the novelists studied by us in this work are aligned. Ideology is an actantial structure that actualizes the life of the values it selects within the axiological systems. It is the Object of the quest of the Subject, the conjunction of the Subject with the Object.
We confirm that the semiotic signs of these novelists express the appropriation of the Object for the epistemic Recipient. The Object of their quest in narrative structures symbolizes the democratization of the republic through the awakening of collective and popular consciousness. This is true not only for the DR Congo, but also for sub-Saharan Africa.
Our research has shown that the Congolese novel heralds the sociopolitical ideology of denouncing dictatorship in favor of establishing meritocracy, good management of the public domain, and the living of egalitarian social values such as interracial marriage and conviviality. It seeks to convert social differences into factors of progress for egalitarian transindividual relationships and interests. It confirms the algorithm or predilectibility according to which the beginning of a narrative is the opposite of its end.