Generic ideologies: The intersection of empire, the epic and the novel in French West African and Latin literatures.

Abstract

This dissertation explores how a combination of the epic and novel genres in primary texts is able to create a formal critique of empire. Through genres' ties to imperial ideologies and an examination of the function of orality in primary texts from Francophone West Africa and 1<super>st</super> and 2<super>nd</super> century Rome, I locate how texts subvert dominant imperial ideologies in order to create alternate interpretive communities that critique empire. In the Francophone African literary tradition, the novel is linked ideologically to colonization, while the epic became designated by the Negritude movement as a means to reach back to pre-colonial, chthonic African traditions. In the Roman context, epic was linked to empire while the novel emerged from the colonies and disrupted the link of politics to literature. The Guinean author Camara Laye's texts form the basis of my second chapter, and demonstrate critique of both colonialist discourse and Sekou Toure's post-independence government through their appeals to the ideological connections of genre to empire. The Malian authors Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hamp&acirc;te B&acirc;, in my third chapter, destabilize the bases of genre and orality and require an individualized hermeneutic. Ouologuem explodes discourse through his denigration of genre and orality and exposes the construction of the metanarratives of colonization, Negritude and interpretation. Hamp&acirc;te B&acirc; shifts the focus of these debates from the national to the familial and similarly requires a personalized hermeneutic. Petronius' <italic>Satyricon</italic> creates a Bakhtinian carnival, which parodies every aspect of the late Julio-Claudian period. The epic genre, so tied to the Augustan project of the early empire, is parodied and located within novelistic prose, which demonstrates how imperial goals had become denigrated at the end of the 1<super>st</super> century. Finally, Apuleius' <italic>Metamorphoses</italic> emphasizes storytelling and inverts themes and quotations from major epics. In so doing, Apuleius emphasizes the margins of the empire, with the implication that imperial values perhaps do not extend that far. I finish with an understanding of how texts manipulate interpretive communities. I emphasize alternative interpretive communities that are empowered in response to intersections of ideology created by the combination of genres in these particular primary texts.