Research on Wole Soyinka

Research on Wole Soyinka PDF Author: James Gibbs
Publisher: Africa World Press
ISBN: 9780865432192
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
A broad introduction to the works of the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer and the varieties of criticism they have elicited. There are many different critical methodologies represented, ranging from those concerned with verbal texture (linguistic, structural, and textual approaches) to those focusing on cultural context (historical, mythological, and comparative studies). Most of the articles were originally published in Research in African Literatures. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Research on Wole Soyinka

Research on Wole Soyinka PDF Author: James Gibbs
Publisher: Africa World Press
ISBN: 9780865432192
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
A broad introduction to the works of the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer and the varieties of criticism they have elicited. There are many different critical methodologies represented, ranging from those concerned with verbal texture (linguistic, structural, and textual approaches) to those focusing on cultural context (historical, mythological, and comparative studies). Most of the articles were originally published in Research in African Literatures. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526638223
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
'Soyinka's greatest novel ... No one else can write such a book' - Ben Okri 'A high-jinks state-of-the-nation novel' - Chibundu Onuzo A FINANCIAL TIMES AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR A towering figure in world literature, Wole Soyinka aims directly at the corridors of power as he warns against corruption both of high office and of the soul, with a dazzling lightness of touch and gleeful irreverence. Much to Doctor Menka's horror, some cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from his hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Already at the end of his tether from the horrors he routinely sees in surgery, he shares this latest development with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne, who has never before met a puzzle he couldn't solve. Neither realise how close the enemy is, nor how powerful. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a savagely witty whodunit, a scathing indictment of Nigeria's political elite, and a provocative call to arms from one of the country's most relentless political activists and an international literary giant. MORE PRAISE FOR WOLE SOYINKA: 'You don't see the things the same when you encounter a voice like that' - Toni Morrison 'One of the best there is today, a poet and a thinker, who knows both how the world works and how the world should work' - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Of Africa

Of Africa PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed the promise of independence and lived through postcolonial failure. He deeply comprehends the pressing problems of Africa, and, an irrepressible essayist and a staunch critic of the oppressive boot, he unhesitatingly speaks out.In this magnificent new work, Soyinka offers a wide-ranging inquiry into Africa's culture, religion, history, imagination, and identity. He seeks to understand how the continent's history is entwined with the histories of others, while exploring Africa's truest assets: "its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment—both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual)."Fully grasping the extent of Africa's most challenging issues, Soyinka nevertheless refuses defeatism. With eloquence he analyzes problems ranging from the meaning of the past to the threat of theocracy. He asks hard questions about racial attitudes, inter-ethnic and religious violence, the viability of nations whose boundaries were laid out by outsiders, African identity on the continent and among displaced Africans, and more. Soyinka's exploration of Africa relocates the continent in the reader's imagination and maps a course toward an African future of peace and affirmation.

Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation

Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation PDF Author: Bola Dauda
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501375776
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness

The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190285435
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka considers all of Africa--indeed, all the world--as he poses this question: once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries-long devastation wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka boldly challenges in these pages the notions of simple forgiveness, confession, and absolution as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art--poetry, music, painting, etc.--as the one source that can nourish the seed of reconciliation: art is the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness. Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the DuBois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn

You Must Set Forth at Dawn PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307432904
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland. In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family who bolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneering theater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not only recounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha, but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes–including his improbable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and the time he smuggled a frozen wildcat into America so that his students could experience a proper Nigerian barbecue. More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinka is a courageous voice for human rights, democracy, and freedom. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.

Conversations with Wole Soyinka

Conversations with Wole Soyinka PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781578063376
Category : Authors, Nigerian
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Within these interviews, Soyinka is forthright, clear and eloquent. He addresses many facets of his writing and plumbs pressing issues of culture, society and community.

Myth, Literature and the African World

Myth, Literature and the African World PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521398343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, here analyses the interconnecting worlds of myth, ritual and literature in Africa.

Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka

Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka PDF Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9780914478492
Category : Nigeria
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Distinguished scholars analyze the plays, poetry, and prose of Wole Smoyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. Essays trace his career and place his work in the general context of African literature.

Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka

Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka PDF Author: Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042022582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Soyinka's representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer's idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist's intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory, arguing that, although ostensibly distant from mainstream theory, Soyinka focuses on fundamental questions concerning international culture and political identity formations - the relationship between myth and history / tradition and modernity, and the unresolved tension between power as a force for good or evil. Soyinka's treatment of the relationship between individual selfhood and the various framing social and collective identities, so the book argues, is yet another aspect linking his work to the broader intellectual currents of today. Thus, Soyinka's vision is seen as central to contemporary efforts to grasp the nature of modernity. His works conceptualize identity in ways that promote and modify national perceptions of 'Africanness', rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation. Overall, what emerges from the present study is the conviction that, in Soyinka's work, it is the capacity to assume personal and collective agency and the particular choices made by particular subjects at given historical moments that determine the trajectory of change and ultimately the nature of postcolonial existence itself. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka is a major and imaginative contribution to the study of Wole Soyinka, African literature, and postcolonial cultural theory and one in which writing and creativity stand in fruitful symbiosis with the critical sense. It should appeal to Soyinka scholars, to students of African literature, and to anyone interested in postcolonial and cultural theory.