Africa's golden age debunked: a study of the sources of select black African historical novels
- Authors: Ayivor, Moses Geoffrey Kwame
- Date: 1994
- Subjects: Mofolo, Thomas, 1875?-1948 -- Criticism and interpretation , Plaatje, Sol. T. (Solomon Tshekisho), 1876-1932 , Armah, Ayi Kwei, 1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Ouologuem, Yambo, 1940- , African literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , African literature -- Black authors -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2232 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002275 , Mofolo, Thomas, 1875?-1948 -- Criticism and interpretation , Plaatje, Sol. T. (Solomon Tshekisho), 1876-1932 , Armah, Ayi Kwei, 1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Ouologuem, Yambo, 1940- , African literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism , African literature -- Black authors -- History and criticism
- Description: The main thesis of this dissertation is that even a casual analysis of African writing reveals that contemporary African literature has and is still undergoing a distinctive metamorphosis. This change, which amounts to a significant departure from the early fifties, derives its creative impulse from demonic anger and cynical iconoclasm and is triggered by the mind-shattering disillusion that followed independence. The proclivity towards tyranny and the exploitation of the ruled in modern Africa is traced by radical African creative writers to an ancient source: the legendary and god-like rulers of precolonial Africa. Ouologuem's Bound to Violence and Armah's Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers hypothesize that past sins begot present sins. The legendary warrior heroes of the past, whose glory and splendour were once exalted in African writing, are now ruthlessly disentombed and paraded as miscreants and despots, who not only brutalized and sold their people into slavery but also ideologically fabricated their own legends and myths in order to maximize their tyrannical power. The preoccupation of these works is, therefore, to divest the ancient heroes of their false glory. contemporary critics tend to perceive this anti-traditional posture purely as a modern trend in African literature. The truth of the matter, however, is that the literary foundations of this anti-nativist/anti-Afrocentric literary tradition were laid by Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje, whose Chaka (1925) and Mhudi (1930) are the precursors. The five primary works in this study parody and veer away from the generally accepted traditional African epic heroism and recorded history towards a communal heroic ideal which celebrates the larger community instead of the single epic heroes normally romanticized in African legendary tradition. These novelists, while dismantling the European and African myths about Africa's Golden Age, also disfigure the often glorified ancient historical landmarks and the fabled heroes of Africa's oral and recorded history. The rationale behind this investigation is the fact that though these works have innovated, assimilated, and parodied the African oral arts, particularly traditional African epic heroism, no detailed study has been made to explore the literary transformation these texts have undergone as written works. Treating African texts only as appendages of Western literature may undermine the ability of the critical evaluations which go into the heart of these texts and unravel their deeper meanings. The outcome of this kind of approach is that pertinent issues of style and theme originating from negro-African metaphysics, oral traditions, and iconography could thereby be left unexplored. Besides, the bulk of the current body of criticism on African literature, particularly on colonial Africa, tends to concentrate on colonialist Christian values and Western literary production models. One of the overriding concerns of this research, therefore, is to veer away from merely rehashing Eurocentric pronouncements on European influences and literary modes parodied by these works, by taking a fresh. look at the texts from the perspective of Afrocentrism and in particular from the point of view of the traditional African oral bards. To this end, therefore, the dissertation is divided into six main chapters and a short concluding chapter: Chapter 1, A Survey of Black Representations of Pre-colonial Africa, functions as an introduction, sketches the European image versus the Black counter-discourse, and locates the study within the current debate on the concept of pre-colonial Africa's Golden Age. Chapter 2, Thomas Mofolo's "Inverted Epic Hero", the nucleus of the study I analyzes the anti-epic and ironic modes manipulated by the text and also maps out the epic generic framework which structures the whole dissertation. Chapter 3, Traditional African Epic Heroism Revised, discusses Plaatje's Mhudi, paying special attention to the text's deployment of the African epic genre as well as the caricaturist and the anti-heroic modes. In Chapter 4, Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence is examined under the title A World Trapped in an Orgy of Violence, Barbarism and Servitude. African oral art is used as the hermeneutic key in unlocking the complexities of Ouologuem's novel. Chapter 5, The African Anti-Legendary Creative Mythology, scrutinizes Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, highlighting, among other topics, Armah's daring innovative stylistic experimentation. Chapter 6, entitled The Akan Iconic Forest of Symbols, deals with Armah' s The Healers, concentrating on the Akan iconographic backdrop which shapes and informs this work. And finally, The Metamorphosis of Traditional African Epic Heroism, the title of the concluding chapter, sums up this dissertation.
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- Date Issued: 1994
The idea of gaiety in Yeats's lyric poetry
- Authors: Brady, Bronwyn
- Date: 1990
- Subjects: Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Lyric poetry -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2324 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015642
- Description: In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.
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- Date Issued: 1990
An analysis of the structural use of music, song and dance in certain novels by West African writers in relation to concepts of time
- Authors: Baxter, Marion
- Date: 1988
- Subjects: Music and literature
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2174 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001825
- Description: The topic of this thesis is time in the West African novel in English and French, and the key approach is that West African time is readily grasped through a study of West African music. Though Western time is not exclusively or only linear, mechanical and exploitative, and African time not exclusively cyclic, synchronic and experiential, yet there is a characteristically African view of time and preferred modes of its employment in West African fiction. The novelists considered here wrote in European languages, yet each was a member of a specific cultural group and concerned to portray the aesthetics of his inheritance, an important aspect of which is the predominance of repetitive formulae, both in music and in oral literature. The Introduction offers an historical survey of some of the main notions of time that have been manifest in the West, and compares them with notions of African time. Chapter One examines the structural use of rhythm and repetition in the novels of Camara Laye. Chapter Two discusses the griot and other traditions of oral literature in the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah and Yambo Ouologuem, novels which are concerned with the griot 's continuing role in the creation and dissemination of historical perspective. Chapter Three analyses Chinua Achebe 's portrayal of the values of pre-colonial life in Igbo society where the role of music is to limit behaviour through the structures of ritual which thus create static/cyclic time. Chapter Four describes the syncretic art-form, 'highlife', as used by novelists such as Wole Soyinka, which, because it is transitory and always changing, underscores the ironies of modern city life. The thesis concludes that the authors discussed above are aware that music, because it is predominantly social in Africa, is a powerful medium for achieving a healing synthesis between the traditional past when communalistic values were binding, and the urban-orientated present with its insistence on individuation and material enrichment.
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- Date Issued: 1988
The poetry of Guy Butler
- Authors: Van der Mescht, Hennie
- Date: 1981
- Subjects: Butler, Guy, 1918-2001 -- Criticism and interpretation , South African poetry (English)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2256 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004387 , Butler, Guy, 1918-2001 -- Criticism and interpretation , South African poetry (English)
- Description: This study of ButIer's poetry proceeds chronologically in accordance with the dates of composition of his poems. The first task has, therefore, been the compilation of a chronology of his poems. Butler rarely dates his poems; nor does he keep a diary. Yet there are several criteria which make sensible dating of his poems possible. The first is the date of publication of individual poems. Many of the poems which appear in one or more of the five collections were published earlier in army magazines, student newspapers, and the like. A work which can be traced back to one of these early sources may be assumed to have been written fairly soon before its date of publication. Another criterion is subject. It is possible to discern periods in the poet's career in relation to the subjects of his poems. The most obvious example is the War Period. Allied to subject is the criterion of theme. To use the War Period again, poems written during or immediately after the war years all treat the theme of man's dehumanisation. Both subject and theme are linked with biography. It is often possible to ascertain Butler's location from details in the poem; knowledge of his movements thus enables one to date such a poem. Butler's style is the most significant criteion. This study is based on the observation that his style develops as time passes. The Butler of the Sixties is different from the Butler of the Fifties as far as style of writing is concerned. A poem which defies dating on all other grounds cannot escape this ultimate test. Each of these criteria - date of publication, subject matter and theme linked to biography, and style - has limited reliability as a guide to dating the poems. But combined they are a meaningful instrument to assist in the structuring of a chronology whose most valuable source was the poet himself who was kind enough to search his memory for dates. The fact that Butler rewrote or revised a number of his poems several times does of course raise the question: Is the first version merely a stage in the development of the poem, or a poem in its own right? This study is based on the opinion that a poem is a poem, regardless of the number of versions which precede or follow it, provided it is a complete statement. Each version should, in fact, be regarded as representative of the poet's thoughts, feelings, and skills at the time he wrote it, and is lndependent of subsequent versions. For the purposes of this chronology, poems have been placed at the time of the experience from which they grew. This thesis does, however , take cognizance of the ehanges in style or theme later versions may reveal.
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- Date Issued: 1981
From novice to master craftsman: a study of Athol Fugard's plays
- Authors: Hogge, David Somerville
- Date: 1978
- Subjects: Fugard, Athol -- Criticism and interpretation , Dramatists, South African -- 20th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2302 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012328 , Fugard, Athol -- Criticism and interpretation , Dramatists, South African -- 20th century
- Description: Athol Fugard was born in Middelburg, Karroo, on the 11th June; 1932, his mother an Afrikaner, his father an English-speaking South African, possibly of Irish descent. When he was three years old, the family sold the small general dealer's store in the village and moved to Port Elizabeth, which has been his home ever since, though he has lived at various times in Europe, America, and other parts of Africa. After schooling at Port Elizabeth Technical College, he went to the University of Cape Town in 1950, where he read philosophy and social anthropology, supporting himself by working in the vacations as a waiter on the South African Railways. Chapter 1, p. 1.
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- Date Issued: 1978