Perspectives on Wole Soyinka : freedom and complexity / edited by Biodun Jeyifo.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Jeyifo, Biodun, 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Soyinka, Wole--Criticism and interpretation.

Soyinka, Wole.

Criticism and interpretation.

Nigeria--In literature.

Nigeria.

Physical Description:

xxii, 242 pages ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Wole Soyinka

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2001]

Summary:

This collection of the most significant and illuminating critical essays about the works of Wole Soyinka over the past three decades is evidence of the international esteem he has achieved. This Nobel Prize winner from Nigeria is arguably Africa's greatest living writer. His novels and plays are appreciated throughout the world. His works have attracted the attention of such acclaimed authors and critics as Wilson Harris, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, as well as such leading academics as Philip Brockbank, Joachim Fiebach, Abiola Irele, Femi Osofisan, and Niyi Osundare.

An essay by each of these is included in this volume. Nearly every major contemporary school of critical theory is represented here -- from analytic philosophy to reconstructed Marxism, from poststructuralism to postcoloniality, and from feminism to recuperated phenomenology. This diversity of theoretical interests and interpretive approaches unites Soyinka's art with his political activism.

Gathered here in this remarkable collection, the essays simultaneously showcase Soyinka's postcolonial politics and his literary aestheticism. They reveal the irony that the downtrodden peoples whom Soyinka champions are those who cannot read his stirring books or see his compelling dramas. Biodun Jeyifo was Soyinka's student, junior colleague, and even, Jeyifo says, his "adversary in the ferocious intramural ideological debates within the community of African leftist writers, critics, and academics in the seventies and eighties."

"This book," Jeyifo writes in his introduction, "is the product of [an] extensive review of the scholarly aspects of the reception of Soyinka in the last three decades of his career as one of the most influential of writers of Africa."

This volume will afford Soyinka's readers a heightened sense of the wit, humor, and eloquence of this leading writer-activist of Africa and the English-speaking world.

Contents:

Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: D. O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, and Wole Soyinka / Abiola Irele 3

Poetics and the Mythic Imagination / Stanley Macebuh 27

The Fox's Dance: The Staging of Soyinka's Plays / Annemarie Heywood 41

The Complexity of Freedom / Wilson Harris 51

Being, the Will, and the Semantics of Death / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 62

Blood and Wine: Tragic Ritual from Aeschylus to Soyinka / Philip Brockbank 77

Soyinka and His Radical Critics: A Review / Brian Crow 91

Wole Soyinka and the Tropes of Disalienation / Biodun Jeyifo 104

Wole Soyinka and Heine Muller: Different Cultural Contexts, Similar Approaches / Joachim Fiebach 128

Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men's Writing / Florence Stratton 140

Myth, Literature, and the African World / Kwame Anthony Appiah 157

Wole Soyinka and the Living Dramatist: A Playwright's Encounter with the Drama of Wole Soyinka / Femi Osofisan 172

Wole Soyinka and the Atunda Ideal: A Reading of Soyinka's Poetry / Niyi Osundare 187

The Space of Transformations: Theory, Myth, and Ritual in the Work of Wole Soyinka / Ato Quayson 201.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1578063353

1578062616

OCLC:

45284632