Abstract:
This study critically reflects on Kourouma’s use of linguistic expressivity to generate or induce laughter, meant to expose socioeconomic and political ills which threaten sustainable human development in post-independence African states. Tragic as these ills are, they require serious reflections and drastic attentions. Kourouma however chooses humour and laughter as an appropriate vehicle through which he draws attention to the need for Africans to reexamine their situations in a more sober manner in order to unearth the real causes of their developmental challenges so as to proffer the requisite solutions to them. The study therefore examines the various stylistic techniques Kourouma deploys in two of his award winning novels, Les Soleils des Indépendances and Allah n’est pas obligé to achieve these objectives. It is based mainly on textual data gathered from these two novels and analyzed in the conceptual framework thematic discourse analysis. It concludes that Kourouma’s language in the two literary texts is effectively expressive through the imagery it evokes. These imagery result from Kourouma’s successful combination of various literary techniques such as incongruous comparisons and proverbs, semantic deformations, lexical accumulations and acrimonious repetitions, ungrammatical syntactic structures, intrusion of vulgar Malinke lexical items and scatological expressions to provoke laughter and critical reflections
