Frye\u27s Thought and Its Implications for the Interpretation of Nigerian Narratives (original) (raw)
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The figure with recurrent presence: the defiant hero in Nigerian narratives
Acta Scientiarum. Language and Culture, 2014
ABSTRACT. Nigerian narratives always reveal corruption, disillusionment, mythological entities, political instability, cultural backgrounds and traditions of the tribes and nations used as context. Textual resources advertise literary works as realistic. In general, the recurring presence of the characters in these narratives is almost ignored. Unlike earlier interpretations of the Nigerian narratives, this essay is based on the theory of Frye’s five mimetic modes or categories. Based on the analysis of The Interpreters (SOYINKA, 1972) and The Famished Road (OKRI, 1992), this article examines the defiant hero as a recurring presence in Nigerian narratives. In fact, the hero is a character of resistance, which, in many ways, is in conflict with the laws made unbearable for others. The article also shows how the character, revealed by the constant manifestations of the structure of the primary activities of the hero of narratives such as myths, gradually and systematically hides in later narratives of mimetic modes through the emergence and influence of realist art. Similar processes in which the hero is involved are abundant in many Nigerian narratives. The insights revealed by these discussions serve to rethink previous critical views on these texts.
Mythic displacement in Nigerian Narratives: An Introduction
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Five decades of resorting to humanistic critical procedures have bequeathed to the Nigerian critical practice the legacy of examining and discovering in Nigerian and African narratives the historical and social concepts of the time and times they are presumed to posit. These concepts include colonialism, corruption, war, political instability, and culture conflict. These procedures are undertaken without due regard to seeing the whole of the literary tradition as a stream out of which narratives emerge. This article, therefore, by way of introduction, seeks to retrieve Nigerian narratives from "every author" and humanistic critical approach by placing them in a realm where a holistic method such as Frye's could be applied. Here, the traverses of the structure of mythical imagery such as the mythos of crime and punishment as embodied in these narratives and how this structure was displaced/shrouded from Frye's first mimetic mode to the last, via the concept of mythic displacement, will be analysed.
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From the first appearance of the form in Nigeria, in the early work of Amos Tutuola, it is already possible to say that the Nigerian novel is traditional, in that it has sought consciously to meet the requirements of the art. It comes of age, that is, at the time it first begins calling forth critical efforts at interpretation and understanding by taking place in a form which is also traditionally very important for a literary culture, the form of the heroic narrative, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. On the one hand, it is as if the tradition wishes to leave no one in doubt that it is literary; on the other, the movement from fantasy to the heroic is a kind of sign-signal that this is indeed a tradition.
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