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Art, A Simulacrum of Reality — Problems in the Criticism of African Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Solomon O. Iyasere
Affiliation:
Department of English, California State College, Bakerfield

Extract

Of all works of literature, the novel is the most referential, the most discursive, and the most elusive. According to Philip Stevick's analysis, the novel, more than any other genre, is capable of containing large, developed consistent images of people, and can give form to a set of attitudes regarding a particular society, history, or the general culture of which it is an important part.1 David Daiches is accurate in pointing out the closeness of this relationship between the novel and its milieu: ‘Civilization is the attitudes and actions of people, and fiction uses these… as the raw material out of which to construct the kind of pattern we call a novel. No other art does this quite so directly.2

Type
Africana
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

Page 447 note 1 Stevick, Philip (ed.), The Theory of the Novel (New York, 1967), p. 3.Google Scholar

Page 447 note 2 Daiches, David, ‘Fiction and Civilization,' in Gerald, J. and Goldberg, Nancy M. (eds.), The Modern Spectrum (Englewood Cliffs, 1962), p. 114.Google Scholar

Page 447 note 3 Langer, Susan, Problems of Art (New York, 1957), p.53. She adds on p. 176Google Scholar: ‘The meaning of a work of art has to be imaginatively grasped through the forms it presents to the sense to which it is addressed; and, to do this, the work must make a forceful abstraction of “significant form” from the concrete stuff that is its medium’.

Page 447 note 4 Hagopian, John V., ‘Symbol and Metaphor in the Transformation of Reality into Art’, in Comparative Literature (Eugene, Oregon), XX, 1968, pp. 4554.Google Scholar

Page 447 note 5 Wellek, René, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 238–9.Google Scholar

Page 447 note 6 de Maupassant, Guy, ‘A Presentment More Striking than Reality Itself’, in Stevick, (ed.), The Theory of the Novel, p. 397.Google Scholar

Page 448 note 1 Quoted by Killam, G. D., The Novels of Chinua Achebe (London and New York, 1969), p. 8.Google Scholar

Page 448 note 2 Lindfors, Bernth (ed.), Palaver: interviews with five African writers (Austin, 1972), pp. 1112.Google Scholar

Page 448 note 3 See his introduction to Achebe, Chinua, A Mon of the People (New York, 1967), p. 13.Google Scholar

Page 449 note 1 Roscoe, Adrian A., Mother is Gold: a study in West African literature (London, 1971), p. 129.Google Scholar

Page 449 note 2 Brain, Russell, The Nature of Experience (London, 1959), pp. 10 and 3940.Google Scholar

Page 449 note 3 Langer, Susan, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore, 1962), p. 88.Google Scholar

Page 449 note 4 Langer, , Problems of Art, p. 93.Google Scholar

Page 450 note 1 Duhamel, P. A. and Hughes, R. E. (eds.), Literature: form and function (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), pp. 447–8.Google Scholar

Page 450 note 2 Lindfors, op. cit. p. 27.

Page 450 note 3 Quoted by Lukacs, George, ‘The Ideology of Modernism,’ in Grebstein, Sheldon N. (ed.), Perspective in Contemporary Criticism (New York, 1968), p. 207.Google Scholar

Page 451 note 1 Wellek, op. cit. p. 225.

Page 451 note 2 Guerin, W. L.et al., A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (New York, 1966), p. 3.Google Scholar

Page 451 note 3 Shelton, Austin J., ‘The Offended Chi in Achebe's Novels’ in Transition (Kampala), 3, 1964, p. 36.Google Scholar

Page 452 note 1 The distinction between the useful and the beautiful is clearly evident in the aesthetic concept of nsaasia held by the Turu, a Bantu people living in central Tanzania. According to Harold K. Schneider: ‘The essential qualities of nsaasia are regularity, smoothness, symmetry, cleanliness and color… also wholeness and completeness in the sense of integration. A stoll which has no ornament may still be nsaasia because it is skillfully made and integrated, but it loses its quality if disfigured even if it is still useful.' See his ‘Turn Aesthetic Concept,’ in The American Anthropologist (Washington), 63, 1966, pp. 157–8.Google Scholar I am presently at work on a study of nsaasia and its importance in literary criticism.

Page 452 note 2 See my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘The Rhetoric of African Fiction,’ Binghamton, State University of New York, 1972.Google Scholar

Page 453 note 1 See Gleason, Judith I., This Africa: novels by West Africans in Engtish and French (Evanston 1965).Google Scholar

Page 453 note 2 Taiwo, Oladele, An Introductisn to West African Literature (London, 1967), p. 58.Google Scholar

Page 453 note 3 Ibid. p. 151.

Page 453 note 4 Cf. Palmer, Eustace, An Introduction to the African Novel (London, 1972), p. 53Google Scholar: ‘Okonkwo is what his society has made him, for his most conspicuous qualities are a response to the demands of his society. If he is plagued by fear of failure and of weakness it is because his society is preoccupied with rank and prestige; if he is always itching to demonstrate his prowess in war it is because his society reverses bravery and courage, and measures success by the number of heads a man has won; if he is contemptuous of weaker men it is because his society has conditioned him into despising cowards. Okonkwo is a personification of his society's values, and he is determined to succeed in this rat-race.’.

Page 454 note 1 Roscoe, op. cit. p. 130.