Walt Whitman And Si Mohand Ou M’hand : Free - Folk Voices

Résumé: The scholarship of oral literature has crossed academic boundaries to straddle many disciplines, ranging from aesthetics to linguistics, to communication, to psychology, to anthropology, and many more. In fact, Jack Goody (1919), Walter Ong (1912-2003) and others have tried to broaden the theory of Oral-formulaic. They have introduced the anthropological and psychological implications of the theory to include not only an oral mode of composition but also an oral mode of thinking and the processes of oral discourse in general. This paper introduces Si Mohand Ou M’hand's oral poetry from a wider perspective to treat it with the seriousness it deserves as a social, political and ideological literary text; and then, draw a comparative study with Walt Whitman's poetry. The aim of this study is to investigate the common tenets of these poets in relation to the notion of “liberty” despite their geographical distance and language differences. It is true that the experience and expression of freedom is actually quite different for the two poets given that Si Mohand Ou M'hand laments the loss of freedom and his beloved world - the one that had gone with the French colonial conquest - while Whitman who lived through the American Civil War crafts a new vision for America. However, the quest for liberty is an important notion in both poets’ poetries. Both poets transgressed rules in their choice of the topics dealt with in their poems.

Publié dans la revue: الممارسات اللّغويّة