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Author: Ketu Katrak
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313240744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The tragic drama of Nigeria's leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, is the focus of this in-depth study. Ketu H. Katrak explores Soyinka's concept of the tragic experience as it relates to Yoruba culture and analyzes the unique features of his theory of tragedy which blends Yoruba traditional drama with Western tragic forms. Opening with a biographical overview of Soyinka's life and career, Katrak addresses the major issues presented by Soyinka in his essay on tragedy, The Fourth Stage. These include the origin of tragic feeling, the components of the tragic experience, and the concretization of these abstract notions in the Yoruba god Ogun. The author demonstrates that it is through these themes and the elements of ritual and myth that Soyinka imparts communal values to his work, ultimately achieving a metaphysical level of expression. Katrak also discusses the element of the death of the protagonist in a number of Soyinka's plays and how it is beneficial for the community. The history of a community, a nation, and mankind, as it appears in other Soyinka plays, is also discussed. Throughout the work, the study of Soyinka's drama is balanced with an analysis of dramatic structure and stagecraft. Included are interviews and discussions with many of Nigeria's academicians, as well as with Soyinka himself.
Author: Ketu Katrak
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313240744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
The tragic drama of Nigeria's leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, is the focus of this in-depth study. Ketu H. Katrak explores Soyinka's concept of the tragic experience as it relates to Yoruba culture and analyzes the unique features of his theory of tragedy which blends Yoruba traditional drama with Western tragic forms. Opening with a biographical overview of Soyinka's life and career, Katrak addresses the major issues presented by Soyinka in his essay on tragedy, The Fourth Stage. These include the origin of tragic feeling, the components of the tragic experience, and the concretization of these abstract notions in the Yoruba god Ogun. The author demonstrates that it is through these themes and the elements of ritual and myth that Soyinka imparts communal values to his work, ultimately achieving a metaphysical level of expression. Katrak also discusses the element of the death of the protagonist in a number of Soyinka's plays and how it is beneficial for the community. The history of a community, a nation, and mankind, as it appears in other Soyinka plays, is also discussed. Throughout the work, the study of Soyinka's drama is balanced with an analysis of dramatic structure and stagecraft. Included are interviews and discussions with many of Nigeria's academicians, as well as with Soyinka himself.
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.
Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786410934
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Western literature has become more influential in Africa since the independence of many of that continent's countries in the early 1960s. In particular, Greek tragedy has grown as model and inspiration for African theatre artists. This work begins with a discussion of the affinity that modern-day African playwrights have for ancient Greek tragedy and the factors that determine their choice of classical texts and topics. The study concentrates on how African playwrights transplant the dramatic action and narrative of the Greek texts by rewriting both the performance codes and the cultural context. The methods by which African playwrights have adapted Greek tragedy and the ways in which the plays satisfy the prevailing principles of both cultures are examined. The plays are The Bacchae of Euripides by Wole Soyinka, Song of a Goat by J.P. Clark, The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi, Guy Butler's Demea, Efua Sutherland's Edufa, Orestes by Athol Fugard, The Song of Jacob Zulu by Tug Yourgrau, Femi Osofisan's Tegonni, Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Odale's Choice, The Island by Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and Sylvain Bemba's Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone.
Author: Astrid Van Weyenberg
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 940120957X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
This book explores contemporary African adaptations of classical Greek tragedies. Six South African and Nigerian dramatic texts – by Yael Farber, Mark Fleishman, Athol Fugard, Femi Osofisan, and Wole Soyinka – are analysed through the thematic lens of resistance, revolution, reconciliation, and mourning. The opening chapters focus on plays that mobilize Greek tragedy to inspire political change, discussing how Sophocles’ heroine Antigone is reconfigured as a freedom fighter and how Euripides’ Dionysos is transformed into a revolutionary leader. The later chapters shift the focus to plays that explore the costs and consequences of political change, examining how the cycle of violence dramatized in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy acquires relevance in post-apartheid South Africa, and how the mourning of Euripides’ Trojan Women resonates in and beyond Nigeria. Throughout, the emphasis is on how playwrights, through adaptation, perform a cultural politics directed at the Europe that has traditionally considered ancient Greece as its property, foundation, and legitimization. Van Weyenberg additionally discusses how contemporary African reworkings of Greek tragedies invite us to reconsider how we think about the genre of tragedy and about the cultural process of adaptation. Against George Steiner’s famous claim that tragedy has died, this book demonstrates that Greek tragedy holds relevance today. But it also reveals that adaptations do more than simply keeping the texts they draw on alive: through adaptation, playwrights open up a space for politics. In this dynamic between adaptation and pre-text, the politics of adaptation is performed.
Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617032530
Category : Authors, Nigerian
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Essays that examine the aesthetics and the radical politics of one of Africa's greatest writers
Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108924956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.
Author: David Krasner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118893204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
A History of Modern Drama: Volume II explores a remarkable breadth of topics and analytical approaches to the dramatic works, authors, and transitional events and movements that shaped world drama from 1960 through to the dawn of the new millennium. Features detailed analyses of plays and playwrights, examining the influence of a wide range of writers, from mainstream icons such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, to more unorthodox works by Peter Weiss and Sarah Kane Provides global coverage of both English and non-English dramas – including works from Africa and Asia to the Middle East Considers the influence of art, music, literature, architecture, society, politics, culture, and philosophy on the formation of postmodern dramatic literature Combines wide-ranging topics with original theories, international perspective, and philosophical and cultural context Completes a comprehensive two-part work examining modern world drama, and alongside A History of Modern Drama: Volume I, offers readers complete coverage of a full century in the evolution of global dramatic literature.
Author: Adam Lecznar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135024905X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka's writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka's prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka's critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka's authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa's ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka's notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.
Author: O. Ifowodo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137337982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
What would it mean to read postcolonial writings under the prism of trauma? Ogaga Ifowodo tackles these questions through a psycho-social examination of the lingering impact of imperialist domination, resulting in a refreshing complement to the cultural-materialist studies that dominate the field.
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN: 9781474260763
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)
