THE once widely-held conviction that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the human experience may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula.
The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but represent the major trends in Western literary theoretical tradition which colonised countries have been made to treat as universal.
We summarise them here so that you have an idea of what we mean by the Western centre.
And may I add that knowing them is not a crime at all; what is culturally criminal is substituting your own knowledge system with these.
I will demonstrate in the next couple of instalments how a good number of Western theories of literature destroy the African worldview.
Traditional criticism
Academic literary criticism, prior to the rise of ‘New Criticism’ in the US tended to practise traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions within the text.
Literary biography was, and still is, an important interpretive method in and out of the academy.
Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature.
What literature was, why we read literature and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.
Such an approach is akin to the African ideas about literature in that it situates the text in the full context of situation (place, people, their values and worldviews).
But as you can pick from the nomenclature, this approach is now perceived by Western scholars as ‘traditional’ and therefore dead.
Why dead?
Because it does not promote the interests of capital! Capitalism!
Anything that promotes unity and group welfare does not favour capitalism.
Any worldview that looks at the world holistically is dangerous to the interests of those who think all resources are meant for the selected few.
Good theories are those that create boxes which then beget silo mentalities.
I shall pick on a few to illustrate this point.
Formalism and structuralism
‘Formalism’ is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasises literary form and the study of literary devices within the text.
It is derived from ‘form’.
The form of a piece of writing is simply its structure; how it is constructed and organised.
Literary forms are like the roots of the literary family tree.
Genres, in turn, are like the branches of the family tree.
A genre is a specific style or category of writing such as prose, poetry and drama.
The work of the formalists is closely related to ‘structuralism’.
Formalism, like structuralism, seeks to place the study of literature on a scientific basis through presumably objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques and other ‘functions’ that comprise the literary work.
The Formalists place great importance on the literariness of texts; those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing.
Neither author nor context is essential for the formalists; it is the narrative that speaks.
Form is the content.
A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works.
Structuralism on the other hand refers to a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture and experience that focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system that reflect patterns underlying a superficial diversity.
Contrast or difference, rather than unity or similarity, is a major focus of structuralism.
The controlling thought is the doctrine that structure is more important than function; thus placing aesthetics at the level of the external and superficial.
In simpler terms we are saying the lyricism of language, or the organisation of the novel, or the plot structure, is more important than meaning.
Thus students can spend years studying the rhyming, the alliteration and the rhythm in a poem without necessarily worrying about the effects of these devices; neither getting the messages nor relating the messages to their own lives.
Notice that as Africans we find the ideas of both formalism and structuralism quite strange.
We do not see the benefit of separating the artist from history or from the wherewithal of the community which he must serve.
To us neither writing nor criticism is self-indulgence.
Both are considered a service.
As such, their products are assessed in terms of their contribution to their society; otherwise as Chinua Achebe says, they lack relevance.
And yet you still find such questions as: “From a structuralist/formalist perspective, analyse the poetry of …” dominating in our university assignment headlines.
Products of such a curriculum can only think and act as trained by the boxes.
The bottom-line is that once the mind has been enslaved, the body follows suit.
If you check with history, you will see one constant: The power of the idea in transforming reality.
Idea is power.
Power is idea.
Those who have ruled all over the world have done so not through sheer physical power but the power of their ideas.
Hence you cannot talk about liberation unless you are referring to freedom from oppressive ideas.
For as long as you think using someone else’s ideas, you remain an oppressed animal.