Les fonctions argumentatives des récits de vie : un exemple de construction ethotique chez Laurent Gbagbo

• Main Author: Dorgelès Houessou
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Récits Cultures Et Sociétés 2015-10-01
• Series: Cahiers de Narratologie
• Subjects: life narratives; ethos; argumentation; epidictic; narrative manipulation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/narratologie/7227

This contribution intends to systematise life narratives as constructions bearing ethotic arguments, i.e. as constructions presenting a meliorative image of the speaker which reinforces the support of his audience to his theses. In such a context, to show the modes of the argumentative process in the autobiographic genre amounts to inquiring into the narrative genre and into its didactic potentialities as well as into the narrative structure of life narratives. Social markers, i.e. the set of values shared by the audience, which contribute to build up a consensus through life narratives, point to the dissymmetry of an epidictic mirror which discloses the ethotic patterns whereby self and other are narrated at the same time. However, the adulation of the other by the speaker is done with the expectation that the speaker will be even more adulated by this other, his interlocutive pole. The latter is indeed the object of an argumentative and a persuasive endeavour developed through a narrative process which configures both ideological identities, as claimed by the speaker-narrator, and axiological categories materialized in narrative-discursive terms. Our case study is former President of Côte d'Ivoire Laurent Gbagbo's inaugural address of the "Gotiwa" association on September 12th 2009. In this inaugural address, the clauses expressing power and the handover of power are intrinsic to the legitimation effect aimed by the speaker.