Modern African Literature Revisited: A Study of Literary Affinities in Selected Early Novels by Achebe, Feraoun, Kateb, Ngugi, Armah and Mimouni
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Date
2014-01
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri
Abstract
This thesis revisits a representative example of early Modern African Literature with
reference to six outstanding authors, notably Mouloud Feraoun, Chinua Achebe, Kateb
Yacine, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Rachid Mimouni. These authors
constitute a particular constellation. Their productions have been marked by experiment
at the level of both form and theme. One of the major arguments is that they constitute a
site for the interplay of orality and writing, one of the consequences of which is the
production of the glocal discourse. Taking our theoretical bearings from a comparative
poetics, giving as much emphasis to the oral tradition in which the writers were brought
up as to the Western culture in which they were educated, we have sought to demonstrate
that the six writers’ attitude to orality spans the whole gamut from preservation marked
reverence through refinement to revision. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Feraoun’s La
terre et le sang, for instance, provide a pertinent example of hybrid intellectuals who
have been exposed to Western cultures, but managed to maintain their basic African
identity. Their novels’ hybrid discursivity has been articulated through the blending of the
realist mode of writing, ethnographical and historical discourses, which are expressed in a
formulaic oral style.The two writers’ attitude to their culture is that of preservation; they
celebrate it while, at the same time, acting as cultural critics all the while. As regards
toNgugi Thiong’O’s A Grain of Wheat and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, the attitude shifts
from preservation to cultural refinement within the theme of revolution where African
Epic narrative forms and modernist mode of writing blend. Kateb and Ngugi’s novels
provide an interesting paradigm of intersection between experimental textual strategies
with which both authors grappled with the complexities of the written expression. Their
novels are marked by a quest for style where in some elements from African oral tradition
are more subtly deployed. A similar confluence of discourses and genres is alsodisplayed in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Rachid
Mimoun’s Le fleuve détourné. These two writers deploy textual “outbreaks” that erupt in
vehement but subtle denunciations to put forward a vision of societies that emerged from
cruel times of colonialism to be engulfed in neocolonialism. Both of them use verbal
indirection and signifying oratory as deviation tactics to revise their cultures. The devices
derive from the African verbal expression of implicit meaning akin to the African
trickster tradition and are uttered in the grotesque mode of writing where satire and
character type become the appropriate mode for social criticism. Armah and Mimouni
express their dissident thoughts in a distinctive artistic way through their dialogic
narratives.
Description
444 f. ; 30 cm +( CD-ROM)
Keywords
Englis (Literature), Africa
Citation
Literature