African Literature and the Interpretive Enterprise: Between Orthodoxy and Sub-Versions
Journal Title: Saudi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 12
Abstract
This paper, in a two-pronged interrogation first contends that the interpretive enterprise has, overtime, drawn, and still draws from disparate insights by seminal thinkers, from Aristotle through Matthew Arnold to the emergence of the ‘subversive’ Modern Literary and Critical theories, which are paradoxically ‘sub- versions’ of those coalescence of in sights from those of the classical seminal thinkers to the present. Predicating its second contention on the first above, this paper argues that the process of accessing meanings in a literary text presupposes the resolution of a number of issues, issues that border on Attridge’s (1988) ‘shifting web of socially produced relations, judgments, and distinctions which eventually opens it to change and cultural variation’, as well as those issues that transcend the literary to the political, the economic, the psychological, the social, and the philosophical. Consequently, the paper concludes that the interpretation of African literary text may be open to all nature of critics and critical paradigms, but what remains indubitable is the fact that no single critical standard can sufficiently engage the nuances of an African literary text as to present to the readers all its possible vistas, more so, given the composite construct or elements of an African literary text, and the fact that most of those theories were not particularly cognizant of the peculiarities of Africa’s pre-colonial history , and literary heritage. Further, this paper suggests the employment of diverse critical parameters from across the disparate critical standards in any reading of an African text. Keywords: African Literature, Interpretation, criticism, literary text, textual meaning.
Authors and Affiliations
Muhammad Tahir Mallam
Keywords
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