Module of Eng Literature Student Version

Module Companion English Literature Student Version
CURSO DE INGLÊS
Literatura em Língua Inglesa

Livro do estudante
3o Ano
1o semestre do curso de Inglês
16 Semanas
(64 horas de contacto; 96 horas de estudo)
Regente: Dr Erik Vermeulen

vermeulenerik@yahoo.co.uk
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CONTENTS page number
UNIT 1 POETRY
1.1. Poetry - Limericks, Rhythm and Rhyme .............................................................. 4
1.2. Poetry - Limericks and Humour ......................................................................... 5
1.3. Poetry - Similes and Allegory ............................................................................. 6
1.4. Poetry and Satire .............................................................................................. 7
1.5. Poetry – Literal and Figurative Meaning ................................................................ 8
1.6. Poetry – Implied Meaning .................................................................................... 10
1.7. Poetry and Point of View .......................................................................................10
UNIT 2 HOW LITERATURE DIFFERS FROM NON-LITERATURE
2.1. The Problem of Defining the Concept ‘Literature’ .................................................... 12
2.2. Identification of Particular Registers in Particular Genres .......................................... 15
2.3. Choice of Register Defined By Genre, Medium, Participants, Purpose .......................... 18
2.4. Does Literature Have a Particular Register? ............................................................18
2.4.1. Reported Missing ...................................................................................... ..........18
2.4.2. Brave New World ................................................................................................ 19
UNIT 3 CONTEXT IN LANGUAGE
3.1. Context in Genuine or Spontaneous Language ...................................................... 20
3.2.1. Fictitious Contexts .............................................................................................. 22
3.2.2. Setting and fictional Space .................................................................................... 23
3.3. A Comparison between Context in Literary and Non-Literary texts ............................... 24
3.3.1. Senders ............................................................................................................. 24
3.3.2. Receivers and Addressees - Differences between Literary and Non-Literary Texts ......... 27
3.4. Comparison between the Contexts of Literary and Non-Literary Texts, Conclusions ........ 29
UNIT 4 A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO WRITTEN AFRICAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
4.1. Forms of Classifying African Literature ................................................................... 30
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4.2. Post Colonial Literature ....................................................................................... 32
4.3. Critique of Post Independence Regimes .................................................................. 33
4.4. Revisions by Female Writes .................................................................................. 34
4.5. Debates, Challenges, and Prospects ....................................................................... 36
UNIT 5 CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART (1958)
5.1. Excerpt from Chapter 16 ....................................................................................... 39
5.2 Excerpt from Chapter 17 ....................................................................................... 41
5.3. Excerpt from Chapter 20 ....................................................................................... 42
5.4. Chapter 22 .......................................................................................................... 43
5.5. Chapter 24 .......................................................................................................... 45
5.6. Chapter 25 .......................................................................................................... 48
5.7. Analysis of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ................................................................... 49
5.7.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 49
5.7.2. Plot Summary ..................................................................................................... 50
5.7.3. Significant Aspects of the Novel ............................................................................ 51
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UNIT 1 POETRY
________________________________________________________
1.1. Poetry - Limericks, Rhythm and Rhyme
Some Limericks:
There was an Old Man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a ...............
His daughter, called Nan,
Ran away with a ....................,
And as for the .................., Nantucket.
- Anonymous
There once was a young lady named bright
Whose speed was much faster than l.....................
She set out one day
In a relative ........................
And returned on the previous .....................
- Anonymous
There was a Young Lady whose chin

Resembled the point of a .................:
So she had it made sharp,
And purchased a ...................,
And played several tunes with her ..................
[Edward Lear, (1923 - 2011) A Book of Limericks, WH Smith Blackwell]
- Discussion and Explanation -

Rhythm in Poetry
Here is how one determines whether a line is 'metrical':
 A metrical line is a line which, when scanned, has a regular rhythmical pattern.
A sequence like o1o1o1 is metrical because it consists of three groups of "o1"s; so is
1oo1oo (two groups of 1oo). In contrast, the sequence o1oo1ooo1o1 is not rhythmical
because there are no iterated syllabic groups. Neither is 111111..., for the same reason
(this is just an iterated single element, not a group -- in modern dance music this is
usually called a beat; perhaps one should consider this a limit case of rhythm?).
 A foot is a minimal syllabic metrical unit (or rhythmical group).
In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm
based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the classical languages, on the other hand,
while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter.
The four most common feet consist of two or three syllables of which one is stressed.
 iamb (o1) An iambic foot is a two-syllable foot that begins with an unstressed
syllable, and ends with a stressed one. This is the most common type of foot in English
poetry and a useful mnemonic is to associate it with what is probably the best-known
line in English literature, "to be or not to be" (Shakespeare).
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 trochee (1o) A trochaic foot is a two-syllable foot that begins with a stressed
syllable followed by an unstressed syllable; an inverted iamb, if you want. Example: "Go
and catch a falling star" (Donne).
 dactyl (1oo) A dactylic foot is a three-syllable foot that begins with a stressed
syllable and ends in two unstressed ones. Example: "Virginal Lilian, rigidly, humblily,
dutiful" (Poe 1969 [1846]: 127).
 anapaest (oo1) An anapaestic foot is a three-syllable foot that begins with two
unstressed syllables and ends in a stressed syllable; an inverted dactyl, if you want.
Example: "It was many and many a year ago" (Poe, "Annabel Lee").
 iamb — one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
 trochee — one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable
 dactyl — one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
 anapaest — two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
 spondee — a metrical foot of two syllables, both long in quantitative terms:
/- -/ forming two stressed syllables together
In order to describe a metrical line one indicates (i) type of foot and (ii) number of
iterations.
 The metrical length of a line equals the number of feet contained in it. On this
basis, a verse can be a monometer (one foot), a dimeter (two feet), a trimeter
(three feet), a tetrameter (four feet), a pentameter (five feet), a hexamater (six
feet) or a heptameter (seven feet).
In combination, type of foot plus metrical length yields categories like 'trochaic dimeter'
(1o 1o), 'iambic pentameter' (o1 o1 o1 o1 o1) etc. The iambic pentameter, in
particular, stands out as the most popular line in English verse literature, and you do
not have to look far in this script (hint, hint) to find a suitable example of it.
Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use
them, include:
 Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost)
 Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
 Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven")
 Anapestic tetrameter (Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"; Lord Byron,
Don Juan)
 Alexandrine, also known as iambic hexameter (Jean Racine, Phèdre)
1.2. Poetry - Limericks and Humour

The lines in the following limericks are presented in jumbled order:
Until the owner shot him with a .22.

There once was a man from Peru
then run like hell,
Who had a lot of growing up to do,
He’d ring a doorbell,
- Anonymous
You expected this line to be lewd

A bather whose clothing was strewed
Saw a man come along
By winds that left her quite nude
And unless we are wrong
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- Anonymous
Which embarrassed the people of Lucca.

There was a young lady of Lucca
And said "Fiddle-de-dee!"
She ran up a tree
Whose lovers completely forsook her;
[ Edward Lear, (1923 - 2011) A Book of Limericks, WH Smith Blackwell]
1.3. Poetry - Similes and Allegory
The Visitor (poet unknown)

The ................. day in your house,
You more than welcome your .........................,
You roast him some fish, you brew him some beer,
You offer him all that is ..................
The .................... day still

You are willing to ....................
Some milk and some bread,
And so let him .......................
On the ................ day, the food

Becomes somewhat ......................... –
He may have some rice,
If with you he will ...........................
On the ...................... day, you send him

Out into the ........................;
Then after a bite,
You make him shine up your ...............................
The .............. day, your guest

Is as thin as a ..........................
You whisper to your wife,
You’ve never acted so .........................
On the ................ day, you hide

So he can’t see .....................;
If you want to eat,
In secret, you ...................
On the .............. day, really,

You have had ....................!
You throw him out with your fists:
You had to get ....................!
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You are really not

An unkindly man –
But sometimes one has to
Defend one’s own stand
1.4. Poetry and Satire
The Pig
In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn't read.
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn't puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.
What was the reason for his birth?
Why was he placed upon this earth?
His giant brain went round and round.
Alas, no answer could be found.
Till suddenly one wondrous night.
All in a flash he saw the light.
He jumped up like a ballet dancer
And yelled, "By gum, I've got the answer!"
"They want my bacon slice by slice
"To sell at a tremendous price!
"They want my tender juicy chops
"To put in all the butcher's shops!
"They want my pork to make a roast
"And that's the part'll cost the most!
"They want my sausages in strings!
"They even want my chitterlings! (intestines)
"The butcher's shop! The carving knife!
"That is the reason for my life!"
Such thoughts as these are not designed
To give a pig great piece of mind.
Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland,
A pail of pigswill in his hand,
And piggy with a mighty roar,
Bashes the farmer to the floor…
Now comes the rather grizzly bit
So let's not make too much of it,
Except that you must understand
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That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,

He ate him up from head to toe,
Chewing the pieces nice and slow.
It took an hour to reach the feet,
Because there was so much to eat,
And when he finished, Pig, of course,
Felt absolutely no remorse.
Slowly he scratched his brainy head
And with a little smile he said,
"I had a fairly powerful hunch
"That he might have me for his lunch.
"And so, because I feared the worst,
"I thought I'd better eat him first."
[by Roald Dahl (1984). Dirty Beasts. Puffin Books; Harmondsworth]
1.5. Poetry – Literal and Figurative Meaning

• Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word, the "dictionary definition."¨
For example, if you look up the word snake in a dictionary, you will discover that one of
its denotative meanings is "any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous
reptiles, having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and
temperate regions."
• Connotation, on the other hand, refers to the associations that are connected
to a certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word. The connotative
meanings of a word exist together with the denotative meanings. The connotations for
the word snake could include “evil” or “danger”.
Poets often deviate from the denotative meanings of words to create fresher
ideas and images. Such deviations from the literal meanings are called figures of
speech or figurative language. If you whisper to your classmate that the introduction
to literature class is so wonderful and exciting that the class sessions seem to “only last
a minute”, you are using a figure of speech (hyperbole). If you say that our textbook is
“your best friend”, you are using a figure of speech (personification). There are many
different kinds of figures of speech, such as metaphors, similes, personification,
hyperbole, understatement, paradox, and pun.
It's important that you understand several kinds of figures of speech. We will be
focusing on similes and metaphors
• Literal and Literature

First, note the difference between the concepts “literal” and “literature”:
Literature is a category of texts such as poems and fictional stories.
Literal is about meaning or the way to understand a word or an expression. Words and
expressions can have literal or figurative meaning.
Words or expressions with literal meaning can occur in literature (poems, novels, etc.)
as well as in non-literary texts (e.g. newspaper articles, emails, grammar books, etc.).
Expressions have literal meaning (or denotative meaning) when they mean what
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everybody normally understands by those words, i.e. the meaning(s) you can find in a
dictionary.
Consider this example when Jack says:
• “My best friend is a pig.”
If what Jack says is literally true then there exists a real pig that he likes very much, so
much, that he considers that pig “his best friend”.
But if we are not to take his expression as literally true, i.e. if it has figurative meaning,
then his friend is not really a pig, but a person who is compared to a pig, for example,
he acts or eats like a pig.
• Similes
To avoid misunderstandings Jack could have said:
• “My best friend eats like a pig”. Or “My best friend is as dirty as a pig”.
We call these similes. By adding the word “like” or “...as...(as...)”, we understand the
expression as a comparison. Jack’s friend is compared to a pig in the way he eats or
refuses to wash (like a pig!).
• Metaphors
Example (a) “My best friend is a pig” is more ambiguous than example (b) “My best
friend eats like a pig”, because example (a) is grammatically phrased as a statement,
not a comparison. It can therefore easily be misunderstood outside its context. Is there
or is there not a real pig involved? We call example (a) a metaphor. In a metaphor we
do not have “like” or “..as..(as..)”.
Both similes and metaphors compare something (a person, animal or thing) with
something else and both are so-called figures of speech. In a figure of speech our mind
creates a figure or image of an object or animal that helps us to get a better idea of a
particular quality or aspect of the thing, person (animal) or even action that we are in
fact talking about. Jack is talking about his friend. If it is a metaphor then there is no
real pig. We can imagine (create an image in the mind) how pigs eat or wallow in the
mud to get a better idea of what Jack’s friend is like.
• Tenor, ground and vehicle

The actual person or thing we refer to literally is called the tenor; c.f. the above
examples: “my best friend”.
The figure/image to which we compare him/her, or it, is the vehicle; c.f. the above
examples: “a pig”.
The quality that the tenor and vehicle have in common is the ground; in the examples
above: greediness or dirtiness. The ground is not normally mentioned in metaphors,
whereas similes are usually easier to understand, because they are (somehow) more
explicit. In explicit similes (see 4.1.) the ground is mentioned as well.
The following poem exemplifies figurative meaning:
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The Mesh
We have come to the cross–roads
And I must either leave or come with you
I lingered over the choice
But in the darkness of my doubt you lifted the lamp of love
And I saw in your face
The road I should take
[by: (1928–2007) Kwesi Brew Ghanaian poet from: (1968)The Shadow of

Laughter, Longmans or Senanu, Kojo E. & Theo Vincent.(1988). A Selection of
African Poetry. Longman, pp. 53/54]
1.6. Poetry – Implied Meaning
Face Downwards
She hits the world.

She cries at what she sees,
Yet the mother suddenly smiles,
Full of relief and pride
That her baby has scored points of life.
The infant seems to know and feel,
And cries for leaving her inner world –
A world of warmth and comfort,
Where there is no work or struggle,
But just to sail and kick at leisure;
Where there is no hunger or anxiety,
No tears or cause of pain,
No spanking and no scolding!
Then suddenly she hits the world
And breathes the air that other mortals breathe.
She makes a long shriek of regret,
As if fearful of this other world;
A world full of bondage and pain,
A world full of lies and intrigue,
A world full of flattery,
A world of no love, but HATRED!
[by Joyce Kigoonya - King's College, Budo, Uganda, Literature classes (?)
another possible link:
Ayeta Anne Wangusa & Violet Barungi (2003) Tears of Hope, Femrite
Publications]
1.7. Poetry and Point of View
Phenomenal Woman
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
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But when I start to tell them,

They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
I walk into a room

Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Men themselves have wondered

What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
Now you understand

Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
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Or have to talk real loud.

When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
[By: Maya Angelou, (1995) Random House Publishing Group]
UNIT 2 HOW LITERATURE DIFFERS FROM NON-LITERATURE
2.1. The Problem of Defining the Concept ‘Literature’

It is difficult to define the concept ‘literature” or written works that are
commonly branded as literature. For every definition something can be found that
contradicts the definition.
You can define it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction -
writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people
commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. A
distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction' seems unlikely to get us very far, not least
because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. In the English late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel' seems to have been used about both
true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered factual.
Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our
discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Moreover, if 'literature
includes much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic
and Mills and Boon novels are fiction but not generally regarded as literature, and
certainly not Literature. If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginative' writing does this imply
that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is
definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but because it uses
language in peculiar ways. Above this has been defined as ‘foregrounding’. Literature
transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday
speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of
quietness' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know
this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their
abstract able meaning. Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material
being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do not.
In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality
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become stale, blunted, or 'automatized'. Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic

awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more
'perceptible'. By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious
way than usual, the world which that language contains is vividly renewed. Literary
discourse 'estranges or alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings
us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience. Most of the time we breathe in
air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in which we
move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we are forced to attend to our
breathing with new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of
our bodily life, we read a scribbled note from a friend without paying much attention to
its narrative structure; but if a story breaks off and begins again, switches constantly
from one narrative level to another and delays its climax to keep us in suspense, we
become freshly conscious of how it is constructed at the same time as our engagement
with it may be intensified. The story uses impeding' or 'retarding' devices to hold our
attention; and in literary language, these devices are laid bare'.
However, qualifying literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a
kind of linguistic violence: literature is a ‘special’ kind of language, in contrast to the
'ordinary' language we commonly use. But the idea that there is a single 'normal'
language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion.
Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated
according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly
unified into a single, homogeneous linguistic community. One person's norm may be
another's deviation: 'ginnel' for 'alleyway' may be poetic in Brighton but ordinary
language in Barnsley. Even the most 'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound
'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were to stumble across an isolated
scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was
'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society's
'ordinary' discourses; and even if further research were to reveal that it was 'deviatory',
this would still not prove that it was poetry as not all linguistic deviations are poetic.
Slang, for example. We would not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not a
piece of 'realist' literature, without much more information about the way it actually
functioned as a piece of writing within the society in question. And what about jokes,
football chants and slogans, newspaper headlines, advertisements, which are often
verbally flamboyant but not generally classified as literature?
On the other hand, literature is not only poetry (which usually contains a lot of
foregrounding) but also contains, for example, realist or naturalistic writing which is not
linguistically self-conscious or self-exhibiting in any striking way. People sometimes call
writing 'fine' precisely because it doesn't draw undue attention to itself: they admire its
laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety.
Another problem with the 'estrangement' case is that there is no kind of writing
which cannot, given sufficient ingenuity, be read as estranging. Consider a prosaic,
quite unambiguous statement like the one sometimes seen in the London underground
system: 'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.' This is not perhaps quite as
unambiguous as it seems at first sight: does it mean that you must carry a dog on the
escalator? are you likely to be banned from the escalator unless you can find some
stray mongrel to clutch in your arms on the way up? Many apparently straightforward
notices contain such ambiguities: 'Refuse to be put in this basket,' for instance, or the
British road-sign 'Way Out' as read by a Californian.
Literature, however, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology
textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to
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be taken as referring to, general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may
employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious - to signal that what is at
stake is a way of talking about a woman rather than any particular real-life woman. This
focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is
sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential
language, a language which talks about itself.
There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too. For one
thing, it would probably have come as a surprise to George Orwell to hear that his
essays were to be read as though the topics he discussed were less important than the
way he discussed them. In much that is classified as literature the truth-value and
practical relevance of what is said is considered important to the overall effect But even
if treating discourse 'non-pragmatically' is part of what is meant by literature', then it
follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be 'objectively' defined. It
leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the
nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing -poems, plays, novels -
which are fairly obviously intended to be 'non- pragmatic' in this sense, but this does
not guarantee that they will actually be read in this way.
It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions
were 'constructed' to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were
not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be
ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its
archaeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and
some have literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in this respect may count for a good
deal more than birth. What matters may not be where you came from but how people
treat you. If they decide that you are literature then it seems that you are, irrespective
of what you thought you were.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of
qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf,
than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing. It would not be
easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called 'literature', some constant set of
inherent features. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single
distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no 'essence' of
literature whatsoever.
We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill
are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the
simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas the last
three are not. But the definition of literature as highly valued writing is a value
judgement that it is not a stable entity: value-judgements are notoriously variable. This
means that the so-called 'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the
'national literature', has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people
for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or
tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come
to say about it. 'Value' is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain
people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given
purposes.
It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history,
we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of
Shakespeare. His works might simply seem desperately alien, full of styles of thought
and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a situation,
Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. And though
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many people would consider such a social condition tragically impoverished, it seems to
me dogmatic not to entertain the possibility that it might arise rather from a general
human enrichment.
The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of
our own concerns -indeed that in one sense o 'our own concerns' we are incapable of
doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to
retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many
preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually
been valuing the 'same' work at all, even though they may think they have. 'Our Homer
is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, no 'our' Shakespeare with that
of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a
'different Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts
elements to value or devalue, though, not necessarily the same ones. All literary works,
in other words, are 'rewritten' if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them;
indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no
current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being
changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why
what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair .
[Adapted from: Terry Eagleton, (1983, 1996) Literary Theory, An Introduction, Wiley
– Blackwell]
2.2. Identification of Particular Registers in Particular Genres

The term register is closely related to two other terms: style and genre. They
overlap to a certain extent and by some writers these terms are interchanged or
switched. The reason for discussing these concepts is to find out whether literary texts
have their own specific register.
We can define the term style as the internal properties of individual texts or
utterances and the language use by individual authors, with "formality" being perhaps
the most important and fundamental one. We can distinguish between various levels of
formality, e.g. "frozen," "formal," "informal," "colloquial," and "intimate" etc., but these
are only suggestive terms, and may be multiplied or sub-divided endlessly, since they
are but five arbitrary points on a sliding scale. On a more informal level, we may talk
about speakers or writers having a "humorous," "ponderous," or "disjointed" style, or
having a "repertoire of styles." Thus, describing one text as "informal" in style is not to
say the speaker/writer cannot also write in a "serious' style," even within the same
genre. Usually the speaker or writer (i.e. the sender) will adapt his/her style to the
person or people being addressed (receiver-s). For example, the style of language of
one and the same person will vary greatly when addressing a close relative or a child as
compared to addressing a non-related superior, e.g. a school director or manager.
The difference between style and register is that styles are often analysed
along a scale of formality, whereas registers, when they are distinguished from styles,
tend to be associated with particular groups of people or sometimes specific situations
of use, for example, journalese (typical language used by journalists), the language of
auctioneers, the language of airline pilots, financiers, politicians and disc jockeys, the
15
language of teachers in the classroom, and baby-talk, etc. which could all be considered
examples of different registers. The term 'register' here describes the language of
groups of people with common interests or jobs, or the language used in situations
associated with such groups.
Register and genre are in essence two different ways of looking at the same
object. Register is used when we view a text as language, that is, different situations
or contexts "require" different configurations of language (i.e. syntax, word choice,
layout, etc.), each being "appropriate" to its task. These language features should be
maximally "functionally adapted" to the situational parameters of the context, that is,
the participants (sender and receiver), and the purpose of the text or utterance. For
example, registers include the language used, as seen in the previous paragraph, by
journalists, auctioneers teachers, etc.. Other groups can be added here: preachers as
they speak in sermons, the language used by sports commentators in giving a play-
by-play description of a football game, and the language used by scientists reporting
experimental research results. In fact journalese, sermons, sports comments,
scientific reports, etc. are all specific (sub)-genres, which are discussed in the next
section.
The term genre refers to a conventional, culturally recognised grouping of texts
based on properties other than lexical or grammatical features. Genre is used when we
view the text or utterance as a member of a category: a culturally recognised artifact, a
grouping of texts according to some conventionally recognised criteria, a grouping
according to purposive goals, culturally defined. Genres are categories established by
consensus within a culture.
Thus, we talk about the existence of a legal register (focus: language), which
can be recognized in various genres such as "courtroom debates," "wills" and
"testaments," "affidavits," and so forth (focus: category membership).
Sometimes a text type can be seen as a register as well as a genre: for example,
weather reports can be said to be a register (from the point of view of the language
being functionally adapted to the situational purpose), but they are surely also a genre
(a culturally recognised category of texts).
The following table, which is not exhaustive, in fact, rather simplified, is a way of
categorizing types of texts into genres and sub-genres and may give you a better idea of
the meaning of this word:
Medium Medium II Super-genre Genres
I (?) or or
Interactio Function
n Type (?)
SPOKEN Dialogue Private face-to-face
conversations
phone calls
Public classroom lessons
broadcast
discussions
broadcast interviews
parliamentary
debates
legal
(cross-)examination
s
16
business
transactions
Monologue Unscripted spontaneous
commentaries
unscripted speeches
Demonstrations
legal presentations
Scripted broadcast talks
non-broadcast
speeches
Mixed broadcast news
WRITTE Non- student essays

N Unpublishe professional student examination
d (Non- student essays scripts
Printed) writing
Correspondenc social letters (emails
e and sms)
business letters (or
emails and sms)
Official personal /private
documents purposes
public and purposes
Legal purposes
Published Academic Humanities
(Printed) writing Social sciences
Natural sciences
Technology
Non-academic Humanities
writing Social sciences
Natural sciences
Technology
Reportage press news reports
Instructional administrative/
writing regulatory
skills/hobbies
Persuasive press editorials
writing
Creative press editorials
writing
Creative novels/stories/
writing poetry/drama
Genres include both literary and non-literary text varieties, as you can see in
the table above. The literary texts are the last or bottom category: Creative writing >
novels, short stories, poetry and drama. All the other genres are NON-literary texts.
17
Based on this table we can even distinguish sub-genres in the genres. For example,
novels in the last category has many subdivisions, to mention just a few: General
fiction, mystery & detective fiction, Science fiction, Adventure & western fiction,
Romance & love stories.
The example of genres mentioned earlier, i.e. “sermons” can be categorised, in
accordance with the table above, as a sub-genre as follows: Spoken > monologue >
unscripted > unscripted speech > sermon. Another example mentioned before, i.e.
"courtroom debates," are also as a sub-genre, e.g.: Spoken > dialogue > public > legal
cross examinations > courtroom debates, while "wills", "testaments" and "affidavits,"
are in the written section: Written > unpublished > Correspondence > official
documents > legal purposes. etc.
2.3. Choice Of Register Defined By Genre, Medium, Participants, Purpose

A certain register may be used in a number of (sub)-genres: for example, in
"wills", "testaments" and "affidavits," the same register will be encountered. Another
example is the register of broadcast news (read on radio or TV) and press news reports
as published in newspapers or on Internet news websites. The language features (word
choice, syntax etc.) is very similar and constitutes the same register. This is because
the situational parameters of the context, that is, the participants (sender-s and
receiver-s), and the purpose of the texts or utterances for each register are practically
the same.
The producers of legal documents are people trained in law (lawyers, jurists,
etc.) and they produce these documents to resolve legal affairs of their customers or
clients, this means they will use a certain type of language that they have acquired
during their training period. We could call this register a jargon, i.e. a terminology
which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, group, or
event. The word jargon focuses on the word choice or lexis and that is where it differs
(again slightly) from the concept register which broadens the focus including the use of
a specific syntax and in the case of printed texts usually also the use of a specific and
recognisable layout (the sizing, spacing, and placement of content within a window or
page).
So, what distinguishes one register from another are language features that
allow the text to be the maximally "functionally adapted" to the situational parameters
of the context, that is, the participants (sender and receiver), and the purpose of the
text or utterance.
2.4. Does Literature Have a Particular Register?

The reason for discussing the concept register is to find out whether literary
texts have their own specific register, in the way sports comments have or legal texts.
Before we conclude anything about this, let’s read and focus on the type of language
used in the poem “Reported missing”.
18
2.4.1. Reported Missing

Can you give me a precise description?
Said the policeman. Her lips, I told him
Were soft. Could you give me, he said, pencil
Raised, a metaphor? Soft as an open mouth
I said. Were there any noticeable
Peculiarities? he asked. Her hair hung
Heavily, I said. Any particular
Colour? he said. I told him I could recall
Little but its distinctive scent. What do
You mean, he asked, by distinctive? It had
The smell of woman's hair, I said. Where
Were you? he asked. Closer than I am to
Anyone at present, I said, level
With her mouth, level with her eyes. Her eyes?
He said, what about her eyes? There were two
I said, both black. It has been established
He said, that eyes cannot, outside common
Usage, be black; are you implying that
Violence was used? Only the gentle
Hammer blow of her kisses, the scent
Of her breath, the ... Quite, said the policeman
Standing, but I regret that we know of
No one answering to that description.
[A poem by Barry Cole (1936) in (1982) The Makers; An Anthology of Poets and
their Craft. Eds. Michael Chapman, Richard Purkis, OUP, (p.xi)]
2.4.2. Brave New World

The extract below from a novel, Brave New World, is a futuristic satire on how
scientific developments would allow society to become totally controlled and
regularised. The novel opens in London in A.F. 632 [F = Ford or AD 2540 in the
Gregorian calendar). The vast majority of the population is unified under the World
State, an eternally peaceful, stable global society in which goods and resources are
plentiful (because the population is permanently limited to no more than two billion
people) and everyone is happy. Natural reproduction has been done away with and
children are created, "decanted", and raised in "hatcheries and conditioning centres",
where they are divided into five castes (which are further split into "Plus" and "Minus"
members) and designed to fulfil predetermined positions within the social and economic
strata of the World State. Foetuses chosen to become members of the highest castes,
"Alpha" and "Beta", are allowed to develop naturally while maturing to term in
"decanting bottles", while foetuses chosen to become members of the lower castes
("Gamma", "Delta", "Epsilon") are subjected to in situ chemical interference to cause
arrested development in intelligence or physical growth. Each Alpha or Beta is the
product of one unique fertilised egg developing into one unique foetus. Members of
lower castes are not unique but are instead created using "Bokanovsky's Process" which
19
enables a single egg to spawn (at the point of the story being told) up to 96 children
and one ovary to produce thousands of children.
The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains a group of students how his
factory produces batches of 96 identical twins by a process called the Bokanovsky
Process. By in-vitro fertilisation thousands of test tube babies are produced yielding
groups of 96 identical adults in extremely short periods (two years). The factory
produces various social layers of classes ranging from factory workers to the elite
classes, which the director defends as process that contributes to social stability:
The excerpt:
Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!
...
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small
factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!
These...are the incubators... The week's supply of ova. Kept....at blood
heat; whereas the male gametes...they have to be kept at thirty-five
instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes. ...
Essentially...Bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of
development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough,
the egg responds by budding. ...
.. in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen
thousand adult individuals....
Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of
identicals. But of course they've done much better...in some of the
tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five
hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand
mark. ...
[Aldous Huxley (1932), Brave New World. Abe books]
UNIT 3 CONTEXT IN LANGUAGE
3.1. Context in Genuine or Spontaneous Language

Genuine, spontaneous or authentic language is to be understood as the
language utterances (spoken or written) used in real life, as opposed to the texts
produced by authors of textbooks, narrative fiction or other forms of literature.
Sociolinguistic theories explain that spoken language in “real life”, and to some
extent also written language, is marked by and only understood properly in the context
in which it is produced, i.e. geographical and social features and the time in which the
utterances were/are produced: i.e. who produced the language for whom, when and
where. Broadly speaking, it is the situation in which the language is/was produced. So
the term “situation” can imply many things, such as the place where, the time when and
the kind of (social) circumstances in which the language was produced. We call this
language context.
Context has two basic sets of components: the participants in the language
production, or sender(s) and receiver(s) and the situational context, which
20
constitutes elements such as time when and place where the language is/was
produced. The place can determine accents or varieties of language but also social class,
e.g. upper class formal language or lower class slang, etc. and even whether the speaker
(writer) directs or directed him/herself to someone of his/her own social level or to
someone of a higher or a lower social level.
The term participants is used to refer to who produces/d the utterance or text
and to whom it is/was directed, in other words the speaker or writer and the hearer(s)
or reader(s).
Other often used and useful terminology is:
Sender Receiver
or ↣ or
Addresser Addressee
For written texts, which only have one-way communication, the above concepts
have obvious meanings. In most conversations (dialogue), though, these roles are not
static but there is rapid alteration between the roles of “sender” (“addresser)”, i.e. the
speaker, and “receiver” (“addressee”), i.e. the hearer or listener and the flow of words
is in both directions ( ⇄). An example of writing having a similar characteristic occurs
when people chat on Internet.
Obviously, the time when and place where this communication took place are
important factors that influence the choice of words (simple, common, academic, etc.),
the type of syntax, word choice, etc (simple, complex, etc.) or as regards written
works, the layout (typography and organisation of words on the page).
Normally, we can draw some or even lots of conclusions about the participants’
identities, in particular the sender/addresser’s, for example, basic facts such as a rough
estimate of his/her age, status (social level), origin (judging from the dialect or variety
of language used, i.e. British, American, Jamaican or Indian English, etc,) the person’s
type of educational background and job (if not a child or elderly person) and even
whether it is a man or a woman.
More often than not we also get clues about the addressee. The addressees and
the context affect our choice of style or word choice, whether language, dialect or style.
This includes two aspects: formal and informal. We could not say “hi” when we first
meet somebody because it would be regarded as impolite. Different reasons for
addressing a person, ages of participants, etc. may prompt individuals to use different
types of expressions and words to communicate a certain message.
In ordinary circumstances, when people disagree with each other, to an older
person one would say: “I am not sure if I can agree with you.” To a colleague one
would say: “I cannot agree with you” or “I could not go along with you.” To a good
friend we could say: “I totally disagree.”
Speakers with different occupations and at different occasions, use different
language. A boy at home must call his mother (who is a teacher): “mum”, but at
school, he must call her, “Madam”.
Not just age or social background may be of importance but even cultural
background may be an important factor in the choice of language. Often people from
different cultures and social customs may misunderstand each other. The following
situations serve as examples to demonstrate how relevant knowledge of a culture is for
understanding certain utterances which otherwise may cause bewilderment or surprise.
When an English native speaker comes to China, he often hears Chinese people saying:
“Have you already eaten?” What does that mean? The foreigner feels totally at a loss.
21
“Does the speaker want to invite me to a dinner or does he want me to help him do
anything?” If he knows Chinese culture, he will find that it is a very normal way for
Chinese people who meet each other to greet in such a way “have you already eaten?”
Another example: A Chinese man and his wife were visiting the USA, where it is
polite for a gentleman to praise a visitor’s wife. The foreigner said, “Oh, Mr. Li, your
wife is very beautiful.” The Chinese man thought a while and reacted to the American’s
praise with: “No, no!” The American got confused, because the remark he would
normally hear after such a remark as his was, “Thank you.” The utterances are very
well understood at a literal level but the meanings the speakers intended to convey
were totally lost, because of a lack of knowledge of certain cultural habits.
3.2.1. Fictitious Contexts

Novels as a literary art form were “invented” in the eighteenth century after
America and Asia had become lucrative destinations for European trade and settlement.
The first famous novel was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe1, a survivor of a ship that
sank near an uninhabited island where he lived for decades before people started
making contact with him. The public in general became interested in these faraway
lands and wanted to read about them in stories that had taken place there or
supposedly had taken place there (fiction).
For the readers the stories should appear to be real even if they were not
(completely) based on facts, so writers adopted a style that was close to travel reports,
autobiographies or journalism. Even though most of the stories of these novels were
fictitious, the style of reporters was adopted to create what is referred to as realism,
meaning appearing to be real. For that reason very detailed descriptions of characters
(the people who act in the stories) including lifelike dialogues (as if quoted from real
living human beings) were introduced in the stories plus often very detailed descriptions
of the surroundings in which the action took place. In fictional narrative the situational
context is called setting.
The setting is often a real place (e.g. New York, Soweto, Hitler’s bunker, etc.),
but may be a fictitious city or place within our own world or outside our world, for
example, an imaginary uninhabited island or haunted house, or a city built on a far-
away planet.
Basically fictional narrative (novels, short stories and tales, etc.) are mainly
composed of two types of discourse, i.e. the dialogues between the characters,
composed mainly of direct speech and the descriptive passages describing the setting
as well as the characters (including, their appearance, thoughts and their motives,
etc.) and the action or events that take place in the story.
The dialogue should sound as natural as possible, but it cannot be exactly like
utterances as spoken in real life, since readers or the audience are from anywhere in
the world and therefore not capable of getting the full input about the speaker’s
background that people get in real life. In real life or authentic conversation, a lot can
be left out by the speakers, especially if they know each other well and have the same
social and cultural background.
Natural or genuine dialogue has a lot of characteristics that would make a novel
or short story hard to follow if used (a lot). Sociolinguistic theories teach us:
22
 The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called

pragmatic competence. For example, someone wants a person in the
same room to stop smoking.This can normally be achieved by the use of a
variety of differentl utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop
smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning, but
sounds rather unfriendly or rude; alternatively, the person could say,
'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning
but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the
intended meaning. Actually, this utterance could be comprehended to be
cynical.
 Besides the pragmatic perspective that presents an alternative way in

which utterances should or can be understood and are used in natural
communication, there are some other aspects of natural/authentic
dialogue which do not exist in normal written or formal language and are
often hard to “capture” in literary dialogue (e.g. short stories and novels):
i. The gap-fillers, used to give speakers a little time to organise their
ideas, such as “uhmmm”, …”I mean” ….. “well”… , “you know” …..,
etc.
ii. The common tendency of speakers to suddenly break off a sentence
and begin a completely new one.
iii. Hedging, (closely related phenomenon to i.) used when speakers
are reluctant to be too open or straightforward, such as : "sort of,"
"kind of," "it seems like"
iv. Empty phrases or vocal sounds used to express an emotion or to
express enthusiasm, approval, (dis)agreement or anger, etc. that
would need a relatively long (clumsy) expression in words, such as
“wow” , “aahhhh!“ “Jesus!”” “eeeeeh”, or sounds like “Pfffff” or
“sshhh”, etc. .
v. Body language (principally, face, legs, gestures and posture ) and
physical communication such as pointing, patting, slapping, shaking
hands, hugging, nodding and shaking one´s head, etc. etc
vi. The use of “taboo” slang that is too offensive to be printed.
 The phenomenon of “phatic language” or “small talk” which means saying

things not for the purpose of wanting to communicate something in
particular but with the purpose of creating or enhancing social bonds. This
can be done by casual conversation about things that everybody already
knows about, gossiping or telling each other jokes, etc.
3.2.2. Setting and Fictional space

For a long time, the general assumption was that a verbal narrative's setting
simply is not as important as its temporal framework and chronology. It is true that
space in fiction is distinct from space in the visual arts (photography, videos, etc.),
because space in fiction can never be presented completely. Describing the entire
interior of a room, to the smallest visible detail, is an impossible (and rather boring)
task, but the full depiction of a room in the medium of film clearly poses no problem at
all. In verbal narrative, a room can only be described by referring to a small selection of
more or less 'graphic' detail -- luckily, in the process of reading, readers will complete
the 'verbal picture' by imagining the rest.
23
So setting or fictional space is the environment which situates objects and

characters; more specifically, the environment in which characters move or live in. The
description, by a talented writer of setting or the ‘atmosphere’ in which the characters
move and live are a device or technique of reinforcing the ‘make-up’ of the characters,
their emotions, states of mind and even attitudes. For example, the architecture,
interior decoration, furniture and the objects in a house or a room generally give the
reader a good idea of the type of person (people) who live(s) there.
An example is the old dilapidated mansion Wuthering Heights (1847) in the
middle of the lonely moors, in the novel with the same title by Emile Bronte and the
way in which the mansion is the perfect background to complete Heathcliff’s violent and
eccentric nature. [Emile Bronte. (1847, 2002). Wuthering Heights, Penguin Books]
Literary space in this sense is more than a stable 'place' or 'setting' -- it includes
landscapes as well as climatic conditions, cities as well as gardens and rooms, indeed,
it includes everything that can be conceived of as spatially located objects and persons.
Along with characters, space belongs to the 'existents' of a narrative.
1
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. The book is a
fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote
tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives and mutineers
before being rescued.
The story was perhaps influenced by Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for
four years on the Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (in 1966 its name was changed to
Robinson Crusoe Island), Chile. The details of Crusoe's island were probably based on the
Caribbean island of Tobago, since that island lies a short distance north of the Venezuelan
coast near the mouth of the Orinoco river, in sight of Trinidad
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe ;16/01/2011)
3.3. A Comparison between Context in Literary and Non-Literary texts
3.3.1. Senders

The senders of both non-literary and literary texts (and utterances), are
real people who actually live or lived in this world. In this respect there is no
difference between non-literary and literary texts. The senders are the real people
who have produced the text either in spoken or in written form. (Hi-tech is now
developing so fast that, who knows, maybe within a few decennia we may have to
include artificial intelligence here as well.)
There is a difference, though, between non-literary texts and literary
texts as regards the addressers in the texts: In non-literary texts sender and
addresser are the same, i.e. the sender is the addresser. The addresser as well as
the sender is the real (living) person who produced the text. The person “speaking”
to us through the text is the writer himself and we can assume that what (s)he
wrote or tells us is true and in accordance with something that exists or existed in
the real world. (It is NOT fictional.)
However, in literary texts (poems, short stories, novels and drama) the
sender and the addresser are two different entities. To understand why this is so,
the term addresser should be clearly understood: the addresser in a literary text
is a fictional person or persona addressing him/herself to an audience by means of
24
the spoken or written words. In literary texts, unlike non-literary texts, this is
NEVER assumed to be the real person who actually wrote (tells or told) the text
(author, writer or storyteller), but an invented, imagined or unreal person that only
“lives” in the mind of the author or poet and can be imagined by the people who
read this text (the audience). The two examples below are meant to illustrate the
above explanation:
FIRST EXAMPLE
Extract from a non-literary text:
[Eyewitness Account of Atomic Bomb Over Nagasaki- William L. Laurence
(1945)]
WITH THE ATOMIC BOMB MISSION TO JAPAN, AUGUST 9 (DELAYED)--We are
on our way to bomb the mainland of Japan. Our flying contingent consists of
three specially designed B-29 Superforts, and two of these carry no bombs.
But our lead plane is on its way with another atomic bomb, the second in
three days, concentrating its active substance, and explosive energy
equivalent to 20,000, and under favorable conditions, 40,000 tons of TNT.
……
We flew southward down the channel and at 11:33 crossed the coastline and
headed straight for Nagasaki about a hundred miles to the west. Here again
we circled until we found an opening in the clouds. It was 12:01 and the goal
of our mission had arrived.
We heard the pre-arranged signal on our radio, put on our ARC welder's
glasses and watched tensely the maneuverings of the strike ship about half a
mile in front of us.
"There she goes!" someone said. Out of the belly of the Artiste what looked
like a black object came downward.
Captain Bock swung around to get out of range, but even though we were
turning away in the opposite direction, and despite the fact that it was broad
daylight in our cabin, all of us became aware of a giant flash that broke
through the dark barrier of our ARC welder's lenses and flooded our cabin
with an intense light.
We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered on, a
bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky all around. A tremendous
blast wave struck our ship and made it tremble from nose to tail. This was
followed by four more blasts in rapid succession, each resounding like the
boom of cannon fire hitting our plane from all directions.
Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from
the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings. Next
they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward with
enormous speed.
(http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Nagasaki.shtml - visited on
18/01/2011)
SECOND EXAMPLE
Extract from a literary text:
“The Copy” a short story by Paul Jennings
I1 had to walk home with Fiona and every night I went to her place to
study with her. Not that we got much study done. On weekends we went
hiking or hung around listening to records. It was the best time of my life.
25
There was only one blot on the horizon. Mat Hodson. One of his mates had
told me he was out to get me. He left a message saying he was going to
flatten me for taking his girl. ........................
I would make an exact copy of myself and together we could go off
and flatten Hodson.2 I
wondered what my first words to the new arrival should be. In the end I
decided to say, 'Hello there, welcome to earth.' I know it sounds corny but at
the time it was all I could think of.
I turned the Cloner to COPY and jumped in before I lost my nerve. In
a twinkling there was
another 'me' standing there. It was just like looking into a mirror. He had the
same jeans, the same jumper and the same brown eyes. We both stood
staring at each other for about thirty seconds without saying a thing. Then,
both at the same time we said, 'Hello, there, welcome to earth.'
That gave me a heck of a shock. How did he know what I was going to
say? I couldn't figure it out. It wasn't until much later I realized he knew all
about me. He had an exact copy of my brain. He knew everything I had ever
done. He knew what I had been thinking before I stepped into the Cloner.
That's why he was able to say the same sentence. He knew everything about
me. He even knew how many times I had kissed Fiona. The Copy wasn't just
a copy. He was me.
1
The narrator, Tim, is a school-going youngster whose friend Mr
Woolley, has invented a machine, called a “cloner” that can make exact
copies of anything in an instant, even human beings.
2
One day Tim found the cloner in Woolley’s house in full operation,
but the owner Mr Woolley was strangely gone. So Tim decides to take his fate
into his own hands. Hodson was the narrator’s school colleague who wanted
to beat him up for dating with a girl in their class, Fiona, whom Hodson
considered his girl.
[Jennings, Paul (2006). “The Copy”. Unbelievable. Puffin Books]
EXPLANATION:
In Example One, we are presented with an eyewitness account of the
second atomic bomb being dropped by the US army on Nagasaki in Japan at
the end of World War II, which devastated the city and immediately killed
more than 50,000 people. (The first bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.)
The sender here is the writer of the account, William L. Laurence, (Science
writer for the New York Times), who witnessed the dropping of the bomb and
with this account wanted to inform the general public of a true event. He
wrote in the first person plural and singular and as the narrator of this event
he is also the addresser.
Example Two is from a fictional narrative written by Paul Jennings, who is
therefore the sender. However, Jennings’s intention was not to inform the
general public of a true event, the invention of a machine that could produce
exact copies of anything, even living creatures, on the spot (which is
obviously not possible and will most probably never be possible), but to
amuse his audience with an interesting tale. The person narrating the story in
the I-form as his own experience is not Paul Jennings himself; he is actually
called Tim in the story, not Paul, neither is Paul Jennings trying to make us
believe a false story. Readers will never question Paul Jennings about the
26
truthfulness of this story, because it is literary fiction. Tim, Hodson, Fiona and
Dr Woolley are creations of Paul Jennings’s mind. Tim is narrating the story
and is therefore the addresser.
Clearly, in this case, the sender and addresser are not equal. The sender is a
real person (Paul Jennings) and the addresser is a fictitious character (Tim).
3.3.2. Receivers and Addressees - Differences between Literary and

Non-literary Texts

To explain the difference between literary and non-literary texts as regards
receivers and addressees , much of what was said as an introduction in the
previous section is applicable here as well: the receivers of both non-literary and
literary texts (and utterances), are real people who actually live or lived in this
world. In this respect there is no difference between non-literary and literary texts.
The receivers are the real people who read or listen to the text produced either in
spoken or in written form.
There is a difference, though, between non-literary texts and literary
texts with respect to the addressees in the texts: In non-literary texts receiver
and addressee are the same, i.e. the receiver is the addressee. The receiver as
well as the addressee are the real living person or people who read(s) the text. The
person reading the non-literary (consequently, non-fictional) text, assumes that
what (s)he reads is true or, at least thought to be true by the writer and related to
something that exists or existed in the real world.
However, in literary texts (poems, short stories, novels and drama) the
receiver and the addressee are two different entities. To understand why this is so,
the term addressee should be clearly understood: the addressee in a literary text
is a fictional person or persona who is being addressed by the addresser in the
text, both addresser and addressee being invented or imagined by the writer or
teller of the story or poem. In literary texts, unlike non-literary texts, the
addressee is NEVER assumed to be the real person who actually reads the text ,
but an invented, imagined or unreal person that only “lives” in the mind of the
author or poet and may be imagined by the people who read this text. The two
examples below are meant to illustrate the above explanation:
EXAMPLE ONE
Extract from a non-literary text:

by TDM (Mozambican Telecommunications Company)
When you make a call:
First check the code (if any)
Lift the receiver and listen for dialing tone
Dial the number carefully
At the end of your call, replace the receiver securely
[source Introduction to Literature Module 1 Universidade Pedagógica,

Maputo, Distance Education, p.39]
27
EXAMPLE TWO
A literary text: a poem
“Lullaby”, Traditional song by Akan people; Ghana;
Someone would like to have you for her child

But you are mine.
Someone would like to rear you on a costly mat
But you are mine.
Someone would like to tie you on her back
But you are mine.
I have to rear you on a torn old mat.
I have to tie you in a faded cloth
But you are mine.
[source: http://cas.illinoisstate.edu/sites/childrenslit/2012/11/27/a-lullaby-from-
ghana/ - 29 November 3013]
In Example One, which is a non-literary text belonging to the genre of

instructional writing, subgenre – regulatory, (see p.5 and notice the imperatives),
is clearly directed to people or clients who want to use a phone installed or part of
the TDM Telecommunications system. The reader(s) of this text is/are the
receiver(s) but also the addressee(s), because TDM, the sender/addresser,
addresses itself directly to the reader or receiver personally. The advice in the text
should be followed by the person/people reading the text and are, therefore, not
only the receiver(s) but also the addressee(s).
However, in Example Two (a poem or literary text), the receiver reads a
lullaby (= a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep)
and presumably the mother of the baby in the poem is addressing herself to her
baby. Firstly, the mother or addresser is quite obviously not the sender (it is a
traditionally transmitted song of an African people.)
Secondly, the addresser, the mother, is addressing her baby or young child, who is
the addressee. Concluding, the receiver (anybody who reads the poem) and the
addressee (in this poem a baby) are not the same. The addresser and addressee
are products of the Akan folklore.
It should be noted that quite frequently in literary texts there is no clearly
identified addresser or addressee. For example, in novels or short stories there can
be a narrator who himself is not involved in the story (as for example Tim in “The
Copy”), but is just some unidentified “mouthpiece” voicing the events in the story.
The convention is that we never simply indicate the author himself as the narrator;
the author wrote the book but creates some unidentified narrator or persona, if
none of the characters themselves narrates the story.
This is also the case in most poetry. Sometimes the poem contains features
that allows for the audience to form some image or a personality behind the words
produced by the addresser, -- but in the absence of a specific attribution to a
(clearly) identified addresser, the term persona is applied in a neutral sense. Often
we, as readers cannot escape the almost automatic tendency to imagine that the
poem is about the poet’s own life. But as said before, in the absence an identified
28
addresser in literary texts (narratives of poetry) the addresser is never equated

with the writer or poet himself, but just qualified as unspecified.
3.4. Comparison between the Contexts of Literary and Non-Literary Texts,

Conclusions

Until now, we have defined context as a combination of factors (who wrote
the text for whom, i.e. the participants, when and where), which are very
important factors as regards the interpretation of non-literary texts, for example,
soccer match or weather reports, business letters, or even science course books:
the underlying theories in physics, maths and biology are in a constant process of
change and physics books for students written in the eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries can of course not be of great significance for students in the twenty-first
century who want some valid information to pass their exams. These books may be
of interest to historicists, though.
With respect to literary texts we have seen that the interpretation of the
text depends far less on the actual (real world) context in which the works were
produced, because the addressers and addressees in these texts are not the
writers or authors themselves but fictitious personae or characters. This is also true
for the situational context, because most narrative fiction is only loosely placed in a
certain era of human history, but it has its own time frame and chronology which is
(largely) fictional. Nevertheless, we can distinguish between novels written in
different centuries simply because of the different stages of technological
development that become apparent in the stories. We would not, for example,
expect Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to be suddenly rescued from his
uninhabited island by a helicopter.
Fictional narratives are imagined worlds existing in their own right and their
contexts are, as it were, supplied by the creators (the authors and poets)
themselves. This is especially true in fantasy stories, fairy tales, and science fiction
in which the context, i.e. time and place, are practically exclusively the product of
someone’s imagination. For poetry, in general, context is usually even less
important, as most critics of literary texts argue, because poems present emotions,
insights, attitudes or general truths that are not specifically related to a certain
period in history but to the very state of our human existence.
On the other hand, most theories of literary analysis and different schools of
thought have, to some degree, always admitted that the actual real world context,
that is the time in history and the place (country) where the work was produced
and by whom it was produced, is important to the extent that it influences the way
in which readers should or may interpret the work.
Two main schools of thought dominate critics’ answers to the question to
what extent the real world context in which the work was produced plays a role as
to the interpretation or the meaning of the work: Formalism and Historicism, which
are examples of intrinsically and extrinsically approaching a text respectively. While
formalists and intrinsic readers take meaning solely from the text itself, historicists
and other extrinsic schools believe the contextual background to be imperative in
finding the true meaning of a literary text.
Today, most who study literature find themselves somewhat in-between the
two concepts though the difference each approach can make to the meaning of the
text is often unrealised.
29
(Adapted from:http://bookstove.com/book-talk/how-important-is-context-in-
determining-the-meanings-of-a-literary-text/)
Variations in the time when and the place where literary works are read and
analysed have produced significant differences in the interpretations of great works
of literature. In general, the older a literary work is, the more useful it is to also
study the cultural and social background in which it was produced. For example,
Shakespeare’s plays were written around 1600 and in those days the plays had a
very different impact on the audience than on today’s audiences. Actually, in each
century following the seventeenth century, interpretations and readings of
Shakespeare’s plays have been changing due to changing lifestyles and the
attitudes of the people in the different centuries. Some extreme schools of thought
even go as far as to maintain that interpretations produced by readers or critics of
poems, narratives or plays reveal more about the readers and critics themselves,
i.e. their attitudes to life, than about the authors or poets, etc. who produced these
literary works.
What can be said about varying interpretations due to varying periods in
history is also true for geographical variations, that is, the countries and continents
where literary works were produced, can also cause interesting variations in the
interpretations of these works. This has become ever more evident since the days
of the collapse of colonial domination by western countries in Africa and Asia, after
which local authors started producing their own works with their personal visions
and attitudes to life, history and their home countries which have sometimes
surprised, irritated or even embarrassed western readers and critics.
Nowadays anybody can read almost any work in any language (since we
have fairly efficient website translators) and all great works have been translated in
tens or sometimes hundreds of languages. However, interpretations may vary
greatly depending on the geographical origin of the reader or critic. For example,
literature written by authors from Islamic countries such as Iran, Turkey or Saudi
Arabia, for example, may be interpreted in very different ways by different
audiences as for instance from countries such as the USA, China, Mozambique or
as a matter of fact by the audiences living in these Islamic countries themselves.
UNIT 4 A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO WRITTEN AFRICAN

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
____________________________________________________________________________
4.1. Forms of Classifying African Literature

When most Americans and Europeans use the expression African literature," what
they mean is poetry, plays, and narrative written by Africans in English, French and
Portuguese, sometimes referred to as "Euro-African". But it is not possible to speak
or write of African literature as homogeneous or coherent, since Africa is a vast
continent, consisting of more than fifty nations and several hundred languages and
ethnic groups. And despite many cultural similarities across the continent and a
virtually ubiquitous history of imperialism and neo-colonialism, there are many
African experiences and many verbal expressions of them. Moreover, to see what
30
we are calling African literature in proper perspective is to recognize from the

outset both that it is a gendered body of work and that it represents but a fraction
of the verbal arts in Africa. There is a vast production of African-language literature
and oral traditions, which is largely unknown and ignored by those outside the
continent. Indeed, verbal artistic traditions, literary as well as oral, are ancient in
Africa.
Centuries before European colonialism and the introduction of European
languages, there were bards and storytellers, scribes, poets, and writers in
languages such as Kiswahili (Tanzania) and Amharic (Ethiopia). Many of those
traditions adapt and live on in various guises today, and many African writers draw
on these indigenous oral and written traditions as well as those of Europe, the
Americas, and Asia.
Understanding of African literature has changed tremendously in the last
twenty years, because of several important developments: firstly, the ever-
increasing numbers of women writers. Fiction, plays, and poetry by women from
around the continent have been singularly important because they "complicate" the
meaning of works by their literary forefathers, bringing those works into sharper
relief, forcing us to see their limits as well as their merits.
Second, there is greater awareness of written and oral production in
national languages such as Yoruba in Nigeria:

(Yoraba Sculpture)
and Zulu in South Africa,

and greater critical attention to factors such as the politics of publishing and
African literature's multiple audiences. These developments coincide with and have,
in fact, helped produce a general shift in literary sensibility away from literature as
pure text, the dominant paradigm for many years, to literature as an act between
parties located within historical, socioeconomic and other contexts.
There are many ways to divide the terrain of literature written by Africans.
These approaches reflect the fact that the continent is home to many different
peoples and cultural practices, political and physical geographies, local and non
local languages. Thus we routinely divide African literature by region (West Africa,
East Africa, North Africa, Central Africa, southern Africa, each of which is more or
31
less distinctive environmentally and historically), by ethnicity (the Mande, for

example, live across the region now divided by the states of Guinea, Senegal, Cote
d'Ivoire, and Mali), or by nationality (a heritage of nineteenth-century European
literary practice, whose merit in the African context is sometimes debated, and
which privileges the force of national history and identity as opposed to ethnic or
"African" determinants).
African literature is also often categorized by language of expression
(Anglophone, Francophone, Hausa, Swahili, etc.) or genre (poetry, proverb,
narrative, drama, essay), or some combination of these. The field may also be
examined in terms of themes or generations. These many approaches suggest not
only the diversity and complexity of life on the African continent but also the stuff
of which literature is made: language, aesthetic and literary traditions, culture and
history, socio-political reality.
4.2. Post Colonial Literature
In the 1950s and 1960s, as nations around the continent moved more or less
slowly to achieve decolonization, many Africans took up the pen. Although there
were African creative writers, as well as essayists and polemicists, who wrote in
European languages well before the fifties and sixties, there was an acceleration of
contemporary African literature at time.
African narrative and poetry, in the era immediately preceding and following
formal declarations of independence, were born, for the most part, in protest
against history and myths constructed in conjunction with the colonial enterprise.
Writers struggled to correct false images, to rewrite fictionally and poetically the
history of pre colonial and colonial Africa.
The implicit or explicit urge to challenge the premises of colonialism was
often realized in autobiography or pseudo-autobiography, describing the journey
the writers themselves had away from home to other shores and back again.
African intellectuals and writers felt keenly that "the truth," as Birago Diop had put
it, "depends also on who speaks."
In 1958, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria published Things Fall Apart.
Characterized by a language rich in proverbs and images of

agrarian life, this novel and his later Arrow of God portray the complex, delicately
balanced social ecology of Igbo village life as it confronts colonial power. Achebe's
protagonists are flawed but dignified men whose interactions with British
emissaries are fatal or tragic. Achebe, like other writers of those years, wrote in
response to denigrating mythologies and representations of Africans by nineteenth-
and twentieth-century British and European writers such as Joyce Cary, James
32
Conrad, Jules Verne, and Pierre Loti, to show, as Achebe put it, that the African
past was not one long night of savagery before the coming of Europe.
Similar processes occurred, and still occur, within other traditions around
the continent. The condemnation of colonial domination and the determination to
bear witness are more urgent in the Portuguese-language poetry of Agostinho
Neto and the fiction of Jose Luandino Vieira, because of Angola's long war of
liberation.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels (Weep Not, Child, 1964; The River Between,
1965; and A Grain of Wheat, 1967) explore the many facets of individual Kenyan
lives within the context of colonialism: their experiences of education, excision,
religious conflict, collective struggle, and the cost of resistance. A Grain of Wheat
suggests, moreover, the coalescing of lives and forces in the making of historical
events.
There is also a tradition of anti-colonialist satire in both English and French.
Okot p'Bitek's (Uganda) Song of Lawino (1966) heaps ridicule on the would-be
assimile, while Ferdinand Oyono's (Cameroon) Houseboy and The Old Man and
the Medal and Mongo Beti's (Cameroon) The Poor Christ of Bomba (1956) offer
scathing portraits of the hypocritical and mediocre French colonial masters who are
would-be bearers of "Civilization."
4.3. Critique of Post Independence Regimes
The critique of foreign domination under colonialism and the concomitant, urgent
issue of identity are often constructed as a conflict between the assimilation of
"Western" ways and an African authenticity, and they are often articulated in
realist narratives. With the advent of formal independence little by little throughout
the continent, these issues gradually cede center stage to the disillusionment of
independence and the critique of abusive power and corruption. This critique was
never absent from African literatures. It is fictionalized and unveiled even in
Achebe's novels at midcentury.
But the critique of post independence regimes is accomplished in part by a
change in literary form, which Ngugi wa Thiong'o suggests in his controversial
essay
Decolonising the Mind (1986-p.79):

How does a writer, a novelist, shock his readers by telling them that these [heads
of state that collaborate with imperialist powers] are neo-slaves when they
themselves, the neo-slaves, are openly announcing the fact on the rooftops? How
do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters,
robbers, thieves, when they. the perpetrators of these anti-people crimes, are not
even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and
proudly their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of the nation? How
33
do you satirise their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional
exaggerations? (Introduction)
Ngugi's (Kenya) fictions (Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross
(1980/2), and Matigari (1986/7)) signal the greed for wealth and power unleashed
by "independence" and the betrayal of Kenyan peasants and workers by leaders
who collaborate with international capitalism, when they do not vie with it. These
fictions cross over into the absurd and turn away from the realism that
characterizes many first-generation narratives focused on colonialism. As Ngugi
has suggested, writers invent new forms commensurate with the new and deeply
troubling reality.
4.4. Revisions by Female Writes
An important revision of the early representations of Africa in colonial and post

colonial times is the writing by women which has developed rapidly in recent years.
What was missing in the early chorus of voices denouncing the arrogance and
violence of the various forms of colonialism were female voices. The "first
generation" of male writers critique the imperial and colonial project for its racism
and oppression, but they nonetheless (and not unlike the European objects of their
critique) portray these matters as they pertain to men, and they formulate a vision
of independence or of utopias in which women are either goddesses, such as
muses and idealized mothers, or mere helpmates.
Mariama Ba's (Senegal) novels made clear that the nationalism

and independence that these (by now) celebrated male writers had been defending
were by and large patriarchal: women were symbols of the nation or, at best,
helpmates of man, who alone would reap the real fruits of independence.
Her epistolary novel So Long a Letter (1979 in French, 1981 in English)
rocked the literary landscape. At the death of her husband, Ramatoulaye writes a
"long letter" to her divorced friend Ai'ssatou, now residing with her sons in the
United States. Through the experience of writing, the heroine Ramatoulaye comes
to terms with her own independence, having been betrayed by her husband of
many years, who took as a second wife the girlfriend of their daughter.
In Bâ's novel, which is imbued with its own prejudices, we nonetheless see
a conflation of class biases, male vanity, and female complicity in the practice of
polygamy. In this novel and her posthumous Scarlet Song, which describes the
stakes and constraints in interracial or, more precisely, cross-cultural marriages,
one can infer the gender biases of these early notions of nation and identity.
As with the French-language literatures of Africa, a powerful force in English
language literature is the emergence of women writers, who have filled the silences
surrounding women's lives. Flora Nwapa's (Nigeria) Efuru (1966) suggests the
tension between women's desires and the strictures of womanhood in the same era
34
that male writers seemed to portray as the nearly golden age before colonialism.
She concludes her novel with this haunting passage:

Efuru slept soundly that night. She dreamt of the woman of the lake, her beauty,
her long hair and her riches. She had lived for ages at the bottom of the lake. She
was as old as the lake itself. She was happy, she was wealthy. She was beautiful.
She gave women beauty and wealth but she had no child. She had never
experienced the iov of motherhood. Why then did the women worship her?
Ama Ata Aidoo, (Ghana) in her early collection of short stories

and sketches No Sweetness Here (1971), voice to women's concerns as they face
problems of urbanization and Westernization: standards of beauty, the absence of
husbands and fathers, prostitution, clashing values and expectations. In her most
recent novel, Changes (1992), Aidoo explores the meaning of friendship, love,
marriage and family for young women in contemporary West Africa.
Bessie Head's (South Africa) fictions of village life in rural

Botswana lay bare the mystifications of race, gender, and a patriarchal God. In a
most moving scene in When Rain Clouds Gather (1969), for example, titular
authority and might give way to the moral force of ordinary people. The mean-
spirited and reactionary rural Botswana chief is disarmed by the sheer presence of
the villagers who have come purposefully to sit in his yard and wait for him to
come out and face them. They make no threats of violence, but he knows they will
no longer tolerate his excesses, that he is effectively divested of power. If for
Sembene Ousmane (Senegal) in God’s Bits of Wood

(1960), social transformation proceeds from the material world of the workplace
and of the kitchen, that is, from the outside in, for Head this transformation
35
proceeds from the heart and spirit, from the inside out: it is personal and collective
spiritual strength that enables the transformation of the external social order.
4.5. Debates, Challenges, and Prospects
Of course, the consensus has always been that literature in Africa is deeply
political. Part of its politicality may, of course, be in the eye of the Western
beholder, who often has been trained to see art and aesthetics as apolitical. But,
indeed, many African texts are explicitly political.
An important debate in African literary circles focuses, then, on the
implications and consequences of writing in national or now Africanized European
languages. Ngugi has been in the forefront of a campaign for African literatures in
African languages. For him, this would seem to be a matter both of the irrelevance
of the European language to "authentic" experience and of the audience for whom
the author writes. If African writers and intellectuals want to address Africans,
most of whom are not literate in European languages, then writers should write,
this argument runs, in the languages and aesthetic traditions of those African
populations. This shift in audience will also affect what writers say, the
perspectives they offer, and will foster the growth of African languages and
literatures.
This debate has been divisive for African writers, many of whom feel at
home in European languages. In addition, there are many forces, foreign
publishers and (paying) readerships, and still lower literacy rates in national than
in European languages, militating against the use of African languages. But there
are indeed many thriving African-language literatures, such as those in Yoruba,
Swahili, Poular, and Zulu, and these will continue to grow. With the ever-increasing
legitimacy of these literatures, through school and university curricula, and new
interest by publishing houses, the controversies surrounding European-language
literatures are likely to subside.
An equally important debate in African literary circles, as in African studies
generally, is the very meaning of the term "African." For some, Africa is either
racially or culturally defined, and they often look toward the past, "original," that
is, pre-colonial, Africa to locate the signs of African authenticity. Those who hold
this view may equate certain forms, such as proverbs and tales, or types of
language, such as colloquial or creolized French or English, as the pure expressions
of Africa and [ St p 24 ] those to which writers of European language texts should
aspire or which they should emulate.
For others, such as philosophers Anthony Appiah and V. Y. Mudimbe, these
supposedly pure, authentic forms and the notion of "traditional times" are illusory.
So, too, for the Arabic-language writer Tayeb el Salih of Sudan, who holds that
Africa has always been syncretic. This debate has serious repercussions. To
champion a narrow African authenticity based on some arbitrarily chosen moment
of the past is probably to exclude the work of white South Africans. It is to exclude
much of the work of a writer such as Wole Soyinka, whose work evinces
syncretism, embodying Yoruba and multicultural elements. Indeed, Wole
36
Soyinka's (Nigeria) Death and the King's Horseman (1975)

makes this point explicitly: there is no contradiction in being African and being
"universal."
Perhaps this is an appropriate moment, then, to note that the literature of
North Africa has not been included here. This is less a matter of principle than it is
the consequence of the nineteenth century's compartmentalization of the continent
into "black" (sub-Saharan) Africa and "Arab" (north) Africa, plus Ethiopia which is
largely orthodox Christian. To have been able to study the literatures of Africa at
all is a recent phenomenon, and it is more recent still that the literatures to the
north and south of the Sahara are read and taught side by side.
The reconciliation of Africa to itself is one of the challenges facing African
writers and peoples today: to overcome the topographical/cultural division of North
African/ Arab and sub-Saharan/black, on the one hand, and, on the other, given
the new South African ideal of a "nonracial" society, to reconsider the role of race
in a definition of African identity.
Thus the circumstances in which African novels, plays, and poetry are
produced, many of them the legacy of colonialism, are as important to our
understanding of African literature as are the style and images of the texts we
read. Many factors give African writing its character and at the same time impinge
on its development. One of the terrible, ironic testimonies to the vitality of African
literature, to its resolute denunciation of all forms of domination, is the fact that
writers - Kofi Awoonor, Mongo Beti, Bessie Head, Dennis Brutus, Nuruddin Farah,
Jack Mapanje, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka, to name some of the most
prominent-are routinely censored and forced into exile, when they are not
incarcerated and tortured. African writers often wander, teach, and write on foreign
shores because they cannot do so at home.
Within Africa, college students in a former French colony such as Cote
d'Ivoire may, in fact, never read Ngugi of Kenya, either because of Francophone
and Anglophone educational legacies, or because they cannot afford to buy books,
were books available. American students have far greater access to African
literature than do most African students. Books by African writers are likewise
more likely to be published and marketed in Paris and London than in Dakar or
Lagos; or those published in major overseas capitals are more likely to garner
international acclaim. African books are also more plentiful in university libraries in
Europe and the United States, and scholars outside of Africa are more likely to
review and critique those books in the prominent and widely read periodicals,
newspapers, and publications of the West.
All these factors come between the reader and the lines on the page when
one picks up a book of "African literature." To insist on such categories of literature
and to contextualize it in this way is also to recognize that our understanding of the
field has shifted in the last few years. We are far more conscious of the ways in
37
which the factors outlined above are present in texts, of the ways in which new
texts revise the meaning of their antecedents, and the fact that the literary act is a
function of the reader as well as of the writer and what are written.
[Adapted from: Julien, Eileen. "African Literature" In: Africa (1995), 3rd
edition, edited by Phyllis M. Martin & Patrick O'Meara, Indiana University Press pp.
295-312.]
Suggestions for further Reading:

ACHEBE, Chinua, (1958, 1994), Things Fall Apart , Anchor, ISBN-10: 0385474547 / ISBN-
13: 978-0385474542
AIDOO, Ama Ata, (1991), Changes– A Love Story, The Women's Press Ltd, ISBN-
10: 0704342618, ISBN-13: 978-0704342613
AIDOO, Ama Ata, (1971, 1995), No Sweetness Here, The Feminist Press, ISBN-
10: 1558611193ISBN-13: 978-1558611191
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043590026AIDOO,
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Other relevant texts
Web Resources
ENN (European Narratology Network) <http://www.narratology.net/>
ICN (Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology. Hamburg University) <http://www.icn.uni-
hamburg.de>
Project Narrative (Ohio State University) <http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/>
UNIT 5 CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART (1958)
A MILESTONE IN AFRICAN NOVEL WRITING
5.1. Excerpt from Chapter 16

The arrival of the missionaries had caused a considerable stir in the village of Mbanta.
There were six of them and one was a white man. Every man and woman came out to
see the white man. Stories about these strange men had grown since one of them had
been killed in Abame and his iron horse tied to the sacred silk-cotton tree. And so
everybody came to see the white man. It was the time of the year when everybody was
at home. The harvest was over.
What moved Obierika to visit Okonkwo was the sudden appearance of the
latter's son, Nwoye, among the missionaries in .
"What are you doing here?" Obierika had asked when after many difficulties the
missionaries had allowed him to speak to the boy.
39
"I am one of them," replied Nwoye.

"How is your father?" Obierika asked, not knowing what else to say.
"I don't know. He is not my father," said Nwoye, unhappily.
And so Obierika went to Mbanta to see his friend. And he found that Okonkwo
did not wish to speak about Nwoye. It was only from Nwoye's mother that he heard
scraps of the story.
The arrival of the missionaries had caused a considerable stir in the village of
Mbanta. There were six of them and one was a white man. Every man and woman
came out to see the white man. Stories about these strange men had grown since one
of them had been killed in Abame and his iron horse tied to the sacred silk-cotton tree.
And so everybody came to see the white man. It was the time of the year when
everybody was at home. The harvest was over.
When they had all gathered, the white man began to speak to them. He spoke through
an interpreter who was an Ibo man, though his dialect was different and harsh to the
ears of Mbanta. Many people laughed at his dialect and the way he used words
strangely. Instead of saying "myself" he always said "my buttocks." But he was a man
of commanding presence and the clansmen listened to him. He said he was one of
them, they could see from his colour and his language. The other four black men were
also their brothers, although one of them did not speak Ibo. The white man was also
their brother because they were all sons of God. And he told them about this new God,
the Creator of all the world and all the men and women. He told them that they
worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone. A deep murmur went through the
crowd when he said this. He told them that the true God lived on high and that all men
when they died went before Him for judgment. Evil men and all the heathen who in [ St
28 ] their blindness bowed to wood and stone were thrown into a fire that burned like
palm-oil. But good men who worshipped the true God lived forever in His happy
kingdom.
"We have been sent by this great God to ask you to leave your wicked ways and
false gods and turn to Him so that you may be saved when you die," he said.
"Your buttocks understand our language," said someone light-heartedly and the
crowd laughed.
"What did he say?" the white man asked his interpreter. But before he could
answer, another man asked a question: "Where is the white man's horse?" he asked.
The Ibo evangelists consulted among themselves and decided that the man probably
meant bicycle. They told the white man and he smiled benevolently.
"Tell them," he said, "that I shall bring many iron horses when we have settled
down among them. Some of them will even ride the iron horse themselves." This was
interpreted to them but very few of them heard. They were talking excitedly among
themselves because the white man had said he was going to live among them. They
had not thought about that.
At this point an old man said he had a question. "Which is this god of yours," he
asked, "the goddess of the earth, the god of the sky, Amadiora or the thunderbolt, or
what?"
The interpreter spoke to the white man and he immediately gave his answer. "All
the gods you have named are not gods at all. They are gods of deceit who tell you to
kill your fellows and destroy innocent children. There is only one true God and He has
the earth, the sky, you and me and all of us."
"If we leave our gods and follow your god," asked another man, "who will protect
us from the anger of our neglected gods and ancestors?"
40
"Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm," replied the white man.
"They are pieces of wood and stone."
When this was interpreted to the men of Mbanta they broke into derisive
laughter. These men must be mad, they said to themselves. How else could they say
that Ani and Amadiora were harmless? And Idemili and Ogwugwu too? And some of
them began to go away.
Then the missionaries burst into song. It was one of those gay and rollicking
tunes of evangelism which had the power of plucking at silent and dusty chords in the
heart of an Ibo man. The interpreter explained each verse to the audience, some of
whom now stood enthralled. It was a story of brothers who lived in darkness and in
fear, ignorant of the love of God. It told of one sheep out on the hills, away from the
gates of God and from the tender shepherd's care.
After the singing the interpreter spoke about the Son of God whose name was
Jesu Kristi. Okonkwo, who only stayed in the hope that it might come to chasing the
men out of the village or whipping them, now said "You told us with your own mouth
that there was only one god. Now you talk about his son. He must have a wife, then."
The crowd agreed.
"I did not say He had a wife," said the interpreter, somewhat lamely.
"Your buttocks said he had a son," said the joker. "So he must have a wife and
all of them must have buttocks."
The missionary ignored him and went on to talk about the Holy Trinity. At the
end of it Okonkwo was fully convinced that the man was mad. He shrugged his
shoulders and went away to tap his afternoon palm-wine.
But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye,
Okonkwo's first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did
not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow.
The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague
and persistent question that haunted his young soul--the question of the twins crying in
the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the
hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of
frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye's callow mind was
greatly puzzled.
5.2 Excerpt from Chapter 17
As Okonkwo sat in his hut that night, gazing into a log fire, he thought over the matter.
A sudden fury rose within him and he felt a strong desire to take up his [ St 30 ] machete,
go to the church and wipe out the entire vile and miscreant gang. But on further
thought he told himself that Nwoye was not worth fighting for. Why, he cried in his
heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people, be cursed with such a son? He saw clearly in
it the finger of his personal god or chi. For how else could he explain his great
misfortune and exile and now his despicable son's behaviour? Now that he had time to
think of it, his son's crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one's
father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very
depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow
Nwoye's steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through
him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation. He saw himself and his
41
fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice
and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days, and his children the while praying to the
white man's god. If such a thing were ever to happen, he, Okonkwo, would wipe them
off the face of the earth.
Okonkwo was popularly called the "Roaring Flame." As he looked into the log fire
he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son
like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? Perhaps he was not his son. No! He could not
be. His wife had played him false. He would teach her! But Nwoye resembled his
grandfather, Unoka, who was Okonkwo's father. He pushed the thought out of his mind.
He, Okonkwo, was called a flaming fire. How could he have begotten a woman for a
son? At Nwoye's age Okonkwo had already become famous throughout for his
wrestling and his fearlessness.
He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smouldering log also sighed. And
immediately Okonkwo's eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living
fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.
5.3. Excerpt from Chapter 20
But apart from the church, the white men had also brought a government. They had
built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance. He had court
messengers who brought men to him for trial. Many of these messengers came from
Umuru on the bank of the Great River, where the white men first came many years
before and where they had built the centre of their religion and trade and government.
These court messengers were greatly hated in because they were foreigners and also
arrogant and high-handed. They were called kotma, and because of their ash-coloured
shorts they earned the additional name of Ashy Buttocks. They guarded the prison,
which was full of men who had offended against the white man's law. Some of these
prisoners had thrown away their twins and some had molested the Christians. They
were beaten in the prison by the kotma and made to work every morning clearing the
government compound and fetching wood for the white Commissioner and the court
messengers. Some of these prisoners were men of title who should be above such
mean occupation. They were grieved by the indignity and mourned for their neglected
farms. As they cut grass in the morning the younger men sang in time with the strokes
of their machetes: "Kotma of the ashy buttocks, He is fit to be a slave. The white man
has no sense, he is fit to be a slave."
...
"What has happened to that piece of land in dispute?" asked Okonkwo.
"The white man's court has decided that it should belong to Nnama's family, who
had given much money to the white man's messengers and interpreter."
"Does the white man understand our custom about land?"
"How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our
customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our
customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned
against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his
religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won
our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things
that held us together and we have fallen apart."
42
"How did they get hold of Aneto to hang him?" asked Okonkwo.
"When he killed Oduche in the fight over the land, he fled to Aneto to escape the
wrath of the earth. This was about eight days after the fight, because Oduche had not
died immediately from his wounds. It was on the seventh day that he died. But
everybody knew that he was going to die and Aneto got his belongings together in
readiness to flee. But the Christians had told the white man about the accident, and he
sent his kotma to catch Aneto. He was imprisoned with all the leaders of his family. In
the end Oduche died and Aneto was taken to Umuru and hanged. The other people [ St
32 ] were released, but even now they have not found the mouth with which to tell of
their suffering."
The two men sat in silence for a long while afterwards.
5.4. Chapter 22
Mr. Brown's successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of
man. He condemned openly Mr. Brown's policy of compromise and accommodation. He
saw things as black and white. And black was evil. He saw the world as a battlefield in
which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness. He
spoke in his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheat and tares. He believed in
slaying the prophets of Baal.
Mr. Smith was greatly distressed by the ignorance which many of his flock
showed even in such things as the Trinity and the Sacraments. It only showed that they
were seeds sown on a rocky soil. Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He
should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord
Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To
fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamouring for signs was a folly of
everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life--to drive the
crowd away from His church.
Within a few weeks of his arrival in Mr. Smith suspended a young woman from
the church for pouring new wine into old bottles. This woman had allowed her
heathen husband to mutilate her dead child. The child had been declared an ogbanje,
plaguing its mother by dying and entering her womb to be born again. Four times this
child had run its evil round. And so it was mutilated to discourage it from returning.
Mr. Smith was filled with wrath when he heard of this. He disbelieved the story
which even some of the most faithful confirmed, the story of really evil children who
were not deterred by mutilation, but came back with all the scars. He replied that such
stories were spread in the world by the Devil to lead men astray. Those who believed
such stories were unworthy of the Lord's table.
There was a saying that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him. Mr.
Smith danced a furious step and so the drums went mad. The over-zealous converts
who had smarted under Mr. Brown's restraining hand now flourished in full favour. One
of them was Enoch, the son of the snake-priest who was believed to have killed and
eaten the sacred python. Enoch's devotion to the new faith had seemed so much
greater than Mr. Brown's that the villagers called him the outsider who wept louder than
the bereaved.
Enoch was short and slight of build, and always seemed in great haste. His feet
were short and broad, and when he stood or walked his heels came together and his
feet opened outwards as if they had quarrelled and meant to go in different directions.
43
Such was the excessive energy bottled up in Enoch's small body that it was always
erupting in quarrels and fights. On Sundays he always imagined that the sermon was
preached for the benefit of his enemies. And if he happened to sit near one of them he
would occasionally turn to give him a meaningful look, as if to say, "I told you so." It
was Enoch who touched off the great conflict between church and clan in which had
been gathering since Mr. Brown left.
It happened during the annual ceremony which was held in honour of the earth
deity. At such times the ancestors of the clan who had been committed to Mother Earth
at their death emerged again as egwugwu through tiny ant-holes.
One of the greatest crimes a man could commit was to unmask an egwugwu in
public, or to say or do anything which might reduce its immortal prestige in the eyes of
the uninitiated. And this was what Enoch did.
The annual worship of the earth goddess fell on a Sunday, and the masked
spirits were abroad. The Christian women who had been to church could not therefore
go home. Some of their men had gone out to beg the egwugwu to retire for a short
while for the women to pass. They agreed and were already retiring, when Enoch
boasted aloud that they would not dare to touch a Christian. Whereupon they all came
back and one of them gave Enoch a good stroke of the cane, which was always carried.
Enoch fell on him and tore off his mask. The other egwugwu immediately surrounded
their desecrated companion, to shield him from the profane gaze of women and
children, and led him away. Enoch had killed an ancestral spirit, and was thrown into
confusion.
That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan,
weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in
Umiofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard
again. It seemed [ St 34 ] as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was
coming-- its own death.
On the next day all the masked egwugwu of assembled in the marketplace. They
came from all the quarters of the clan and even from the neighbouring villages. The
dreaded Otakagu came from Imo, and Ekwensu, dangling a white cock, arrived from
Uli. It was a terrible gathering. The eerie voices of countless spirits, the bells that
clattered behind some of them, and the clash of machetes as they ran forwards and
backwards and saluted one another, sent tremors of fear into every heart. For the first
time in living memory the sacred bull-roarer was heard in broad daylight.
From the marketplace the furious band made for Enoch's compound. Some of
the elders of the clan went with them, wearing heavy protections of charms and
amulets. These were men whose arms were strong in ogwu, or medicine. As for the
ordinary men and women, they listened from the safety of their huts.
The leaders of the Christians had met together at Mr. Smith's parsonage on the
previous night. As they deliberated they could hear the Mother of Spirits wailing for her
son. The chilling sound affected Mr. Smith, and for the first time he seemed to be
afraid.
"What are they planning to do?" he asked. No one knew, because such a thing
had never happened before. Mr. Smith would have sent for the District Commissioner
and his court messengers, but they had gone on tour on the previous day.
"One thing is clear," said Mr. Smith. "We cannot offer physical resistance to
them. Our strength lies in the Lord." They knelt down together and prayed to God for
delivery.
"O Lord, save Thy people," cried Mr. Smith.
"And bless thine inheritance," replied the men.
44
They decided that Enoch should be hidden in the parsonage for a day or two.
Enoch himself was greatly disappointed when he heard this, for he had hoped that a
holy war was imminent,- and there were a few other Christians who thought like him.
But wisdom prevailed in the camp of the faithful and many lives were thus saved.
The band of egwugwu moved like a furious whirlwind to Enoch's compound and
with machete and fire reduced it to a desolate heap. And from there they made for the
church, intoxicated with destruction.
Mr. Smith was in his church when he heard the masked spirits coming. He
walked quietly to the door which commanded the approach to the church compound,
and stood there. But when the first three or four egwugwu appeared on the church
compound he nearly bolted. He overcame this impulse and instead of running away he
went down the two steps that led up to the church and walked towards the approaching
spirits.
They surged forward, and a long stretch of the bamboo fence with which the
church compound was surrounded gave way before them. Discordant bells clanged,
machetes clashed and the air was full of dust and weird sounds. Mr. Smith heard a
sound of footsteps behind him. He turned round and saw Okeke, his interpreter.
Okeke had not been on the best of terms with his master since he had strongly
condemned Enoch's behaviour at the meeting of the leaders of the church during the
night. Okeke had gone as far as to say that Enoch should not be hidden in the
parsonage, because he would only draw the wrath of the clan on the pastor. Mr. Smith
had rebuked him in very strong language, and had not sought his advice that morning.
But now, as he came up and stood by him confronting the angry spirits, Mr. Smith
looked at him and smiled. It was a wan smile, but there was deep gratitude there.
For a brief moment the onrush of the egwugwu was checked by the unexpected
composure of the two men. But it was only a momentary check, like the tense silence
between blasts of thunder. The second onrush was greater than the first. It swallowed
up the two men. Then an unmistakable voice rose above the tumult and there was
immediate silence. Space was made around the two men, and Ajofia began to speak.
Ajofia was the leading egwugwu of . He was the head and spokesman of the nine
ancestors who administered justice in the clan. His voice was unmistakable and so he
was able to bring immediate peace to the agitated spirits. He then addressed Mr. Smith,
and as he spoke clouds of smoke rose from his head.
"The body of the white man, I salute you," he said, using the language in which
immortals spoke to men.
"The body of the white man, do you know me?" he asked.
Mr. Smith looked at his interpreter, but Okeke, who was a native of distant
Umuru, was also at a loss.
Ajofia laughed in his guttural voice. It was like the laugh of rusty metal. "They
are strangers," he said, "and they are ignorant. But let that pass." He turned round to
his comrades and saluted them, calling them the fathers of . He dug his rattling spear
into the ground and it shook with metallic life. Then he turned once more to the
missionary and his interpreter.
"Tell the white man that we will not do him any harm," he said to the interpreter.
"Tell him to go back to his house and leave us alone. We liked his brother who was with
us before. He was foolish, but we liked him, and for his sake we shall not harm his
brother. But this shrine which he built must be destroyed. We shall no longer allow it in
our midst. It has bred untold abominations and we have come to put an end to it." He
turned to his comrades. "Fathers of, I salute you." and they replied with one guttural
voice. He turned again to the missionary. "You can stay with us if you like our ways.
45
You can worship your own god. It is good that a man should worship the gods and the
spirits of his fathers. Go back to your house so that you may not be hurt. Our anger is
great but we have held it down so that we can talk to you."
Mr. Smith said to his interpreter: "Tell them to go away from here. This is the
house of God and I will not live to see it desecrated."
Okeke interpreted wisely to the spirits and leaders of : "The white man says he
is happy you have come to him with your grievances, like friends. He will be happy if
you leave the matter in his hands."
"We cannot leave the matter in his hands because he does not understand our
customs, just as we do not understand his. We say he is foolish because he does not
know our ways, and perhaps he says we are foolish because we do not know his. Let
him go away."
Mr. Smith stood his ground. But he could not save his church. When the egwugwu went
away the red-earth church which Mr. Brown had built was a pile of earth and ashes.
And for the moment the spirit of the clan was pacified.
5.5. Chapter 24
The marketplace began to fill as soon as the sun rose. Obierika was waiting in his obi
when Okonkwo came along and called him. He hung his goatskin bag and his sheathed
machete on his shoulder and went out to join him. Obierika's hut was close to the road
and he saw every man who passed to the marketplace. He had exchanged greetings
with many who had already passed that morning.
When Okonkwo and Obierika got to the meeting place there were already so
many people that if one threw up a grain of sand it would not find its way to the earth
again. And many more people were coming from every quarter of the nine villages. It
warmed Okonkwo's heart to see such strength of numbers. But he was looking for one
man in particular, the man whose tongue he dreaded and despised so much.
"Can you see him?" he asked Obierika.
"Who?"
"Egonwanne," he said, his eyes roving from one corner of the huge marketplace
to the other. Most of the men sat on wooden stools they had brought with them.
"No," said Obierika, casting his eyes over the crowd. "Yes, there he is, under the
silk-cotton tree. Are you afraid he would convince us not to fight?"
[ St 37 ] "Afraid? I do not care what he does to you. I despise him and those who listen to
him. I shall fight alone if I choose."

They spoke at the top of their voices because everybody was talking, and it was
like the sound of a great market.
"I shall wait till he has spoken," Okonkwo thought. "Then I shall speak."
"But how do you know he will speak against war?" Obierika asked after a while.
"Because I know he is a coward," said Okonkwo. Obierika did not hear the rest
of what he said because at that moment somebody touched his shoulder from behind
and he turned round to shake hands and exchange greetings with five or six friends.
Okonkwo did not turn round even though he knew the voices. He was in no mood to
exchange greetings. But one of the men touched him and asked about the people of his
compound.
"They are well," he replied without interest.
46
The first man to speak to that morning was Okika, one of the six who had been
imprisoned. Okika was a great man and an orator. But he did not have the booming
voice which a first speaker must use to establish silence in the assembly of the clan.
Onyeka had such a voice, and so he was asked to salute before Okika began to speak.
" kwenu!" he bellowed, raising his left arm and pushing the air with his open
hand.
"Yaa!" roared .
" kwenu!" he bellowed again, and again and again, facing a new direction each
time. And the crowd answered, "Yaa!"
There was immediate silence as though cold water had been poured on a roaring
flame.
Okika sprang to his feet and also saluted his clansmen four times. Then he
began to speak: "You all know why we are here, when we ought to be building our
barns or mending our huts, when we should be putting our compounds in order. My
father used to say to me: 'Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then
know that something is after its life." When I saw you all pouring into this meeting from
all the quarters of our clan so early in the morning, I knew that something was after our
life." He paused for a brief moment and then began again: "All our gods are weeping.
Idemili is weeping, Ogwugwu is weeping, Agbala is weeping, and all the others. Our
dead fathers are weeping because of the shameful sacrilege they are suffering and the
abomination we have all seen with our eyes." He stopped again to steady his trembling
voice.
"This is a great gathering. No clan can boast of greater numbers or greater
valour. But are we all here? I ask you: Are all the sons of with us here?" A deep
murmur swept through the crowd.
"They are not," he said. "They have broken the clan and gone their several ways.
We who are here this morning have remained true to our fathers, but our brothers have
deserted us and joined a stranger to soil their fatherland. If we fight the stranger we
shall hit our brothers and perhaps shed the blood of a clansman. But we [ St 38 ] must do
it. Our fathers never dreamed of such a thing, they never killed their brothers. But a
white man never came to them. So we must do what our fathers would never have
done. Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: 'Men
have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without
perching on a twig.' We must root out this evil. And if our brothers take the side of evil
we must root them out too. And we must do it now. We must bale this water now that it
is only ankle-deep..."
At this point there was a sudden stir in the crowd and every eye was turned in
one direction. There was a sharp bend in the road that led from the marketplace to the
white man's court, and to the stream beyond it. And so no one had seen the approach
of the five court messengers until they had come round the bend, a few paces from the
edge of the crowd. Okonkwo was sitting at the edge.
He sprang to his feet as soon as he saw who it was. He confronted the head
messenger, trembling with hate, unable to utter a word. The man was fearless and
stood his ground, his four men lined up behind him.
In that brief moment the world seemed to stand still, waiting. There was utter
silence. The men of were merged into the mute backcloth of trees and giant creepers,
waiting.
The spell was broken by the head messenger. "Let me pass!" he ordered.
"What do you want here?"
47
"The white man whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to
stop."
In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete. The messenger crouched to avoid the
blow. It was useless. Okonkwo's machete descended twice and the man's head lay
beside his uniformed body.
The waiting backcloth jumped into tumultuous life and the meeting was stopped.
Okonkwo stood looking at the dead man. He knew that would not go to war. He knew
because they had let the other messengers escape. They had broken into tumult
instead of action. He discerned fright in that tumult. He heard voices asking: "Why did
he do it?"
He wiped his machete on the sand and went away.
5.6. Chapter 25
When the district commissioner arrived at Okonkwo's compound at the head of an

armed band of soldiers and court messengers he found a small crowd of men sitting
wearily in the obi. He commanded them to come outside, and they obeyed without a
murmur.
"Which among you is called Okonkwo?" he asked through his interpreter.
"He is not here," replied Obierika.
"Where is he?"
"He is not here!"
The Commissioner became angry and red in the face. He warned the men that
unless they produced Okonkwo forthwith he would lock them all up. The men murmured
among themselves, and Obierika spoke again.
"We can take you where he is, and perhaps your men will help us."
The Commissioner did not understand what Obierika meant when he said,
"Perhaps your men will help us." One of the most infuriating habits of these people was
their love of superfluous words, he thought.
Obierika with five or six others led the way. The Commissioner and his men
followed their firearms held at the ready. He had warned Obierika that if he and his men
played any monkey tricks they would be shot. And so they went.
There was a small bush behind Okonkwo's compound. The only opening into this
bush from the compound was a little round hole in the red-earth wall through which
fowls went in and out in their endless search for food. The hole would not let a man
through. It was to this bush that Obierika led the Commissioner and his men. They
skirted round the compound, keeping close to the wall. The only sound they made was
with their feet as they crushed dry leaves.
Then they came to the tree from which Okonkwo's body was dangling, and they
stopped dead.
"Perhaps your men can help us bring him down and bury him," said Obierika.
"We have sent for strangers from another village to do it for us, but they may be a long
time coming."
The District Commissioner changed instantaneously. The resolute administrator
in him gave way to the student of primitive customs.
"Why can't you take him down yourselves?" he asked.
48
"It is against our custom," said one of the men. "It is an abomination for a man
to take his own life. It is an offence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will
not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it. That is
why we ask your people to bring him down, because you are strangers."
"Will you bury him like any other man?" asked the Commissioner.
"We cannot bury him. Only strangers can. We shall pay your men to do it. When
he has been buried we will then do our duty by him. We shall make sacrifices to cleanse
the desecrated land."
Obierika, who had been gazing steadily at his friend's dangling body, turned
suddenly to the District Commissioner and said ferociously: "That man was one of the
greatest men in. You drove him to kill himself and now he will be buried like a dog..."
He could not say any more. His voice trembled and choked his words.
"Shut up!" shouted one of the messengers, quite unnecessarily.
"Take down the body," the Commissioner ordered his chief messenger, "and
bring it and all these people to the court."
"Yes, sah," the messenger said, saluting.
The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In
the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he
had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must
never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such
attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to
write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that
book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed
a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost
write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph,
at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out
details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought:
The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
5.7. Analysis of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Discussion and Explanation -

5.7.1. Introduction
Things Fall Apart is an English-language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is

seen as the archetypal modern African novel, and one of the first African novels written
in English to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout
Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The
title of the novel comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming", (a
poem which foreshadows the coming of the anti-Christ and falling apart of civilisations
built on Greek and Christian philosophies).
The novel depicts the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in
—one of a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo
people (archaically, and in the novel, "Ibo"). It focuses on his family and personal
history, the customs and society of the Igbo and the influence of British colonialism and
Christian missionaries on the Igbo community during the late nineteenth century.
49
The majority of the story takes place in the village of, located west of the actual
city of Onitsha, on the east bank of the Niger River in Nigeria. The events of the novel
unfold around the 1890s. The culture depicted, that of the Igbo people, is similar to that
of Achebe's birthplace of Ogidi, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of
independent villages ruled by titled elders. The customs described in the novel mirror
those of the actual Onitsha people, who lived near Ogidi, and with whom Achebe was
familiar.
Within forty years of the arrival of the British, by the time Achebe was born in 1930, the
missionaries were well established. Achebe's father was among the first to be converted
in Ogidi, around the turn of the century. Achebe himself was an orphan raised by his
grandfather. His grandfather, far from opposing Achebe's conversion to Christianity,
allowed Achebe's Christian marriage to be celebrated in his compound.
5.7.2. Plot Summary

The protagonist Okonkwo is strong, hard-working, and strives to show no weakness.
Although brusque with his three wives, children, and neighbours, he is wealthy,
courageous, and powerful among the people of his village. He is a leader of his village,
and he has accomplished a position in his society for which he has striven all his life.
Because of the great esteem in which the village holds him, Okonkwo is selected
by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a
peace settlement between two villages after Ikemefuna's father killed a woman. The
boy lives with Okonkwo's family and Okonkwo grows fond of him. The boy looks up to
Okonkwo and considers him a second father. The Oracle of eventually pronouces that
the boy must be killed. The oldest man in the village warns Okonkwo that he should
have nothing to do with the murder because it would be like killing his own child. Rather
than seem weak and feminine to the other men of the village, Okonkwo participates in
the murder of the boy despite the warning from the old man. In fact, Okonkwo himself
strikes the killing blow as Ikemefuna begs his "father" for protection.
Shortly after Ikemefuna's death, things begin to go wrong for Okonkwo. When
he accidentally kills someone at a ritual funeral ceremony when his gun explodes, he
and his family are sent into exile for seven years to appease the gods he has offended.
While Okonkwo is away, white men begin to arrive in with the intent of introducing
their religion. As the number of converts increases, the foothold of the white people
grows and a new government is introduced. The village is forced to respond to the
imposition of the white people's nascent society—whether by appeasement or through
conflict.
Returning from exile, Okonkwo finds his village a changed place because of the
presence of the white man. He and other tribal leaders try to reclaim their hold on their
native land by destroying a local Christian church. In return, the leader of the white
government takes them prisoner and holds them for ransom for a short while, further
humiliating and insulting the native leaders. As a result, the people of finally gather for
what could be a great uprising. Okonkwo, a warrior by nature and adamant about
following n custom and tradition, despises any form of cowardice and advocates for war
against the white men. When messengers of the white government try to stop the
meeting, Okonkwo kills one of them. He realizes with despair that the people of are not
50
going to fight to protect themselves—his society's response to such a conflict, so long

predictable and dictated by tradition, is changing.
When the local leader of the white government comes to Okonkwo's house to take
him to court, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself. Among his own people,
Okonkwo's action has ruined his reputation and status, as it is strictly against the
custom of the Igbo to commit suicide.
5.7.3. Significant Aspects of the Novel
The achievement of Things Fall Apart set the foreground for numerous African novelists.
Because of Things Fall Apart, novelists after Achebe have been able to find an eloquent
and effective mode for the expression of the particular social, historical, and cultural
situation of modern Africa. Before Things Fall Apart was published, Europeans had
written most novels about Africa, and they largely portrayed Africans as savages who
needed to be enlightened by Europeans. Achebe broke apart this view by portraying
Igbo society in a sympathetic light, which allows the reader to examine [ St 43 ] the
effects of European colonialism from a different perspective. He commented, "The
popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply... this was the
first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people,
or as Conrad would say, 'rudimentary souls'."
Reviewers have praised Achebe's neutral narration and have described Things
Fall Apart as a realistic novel. Much of the critical discussion about Things Fall
Apart concentrates on the socio-political aspects of the novel, including the friction
between the members of Igbo society as confront the intrusive and overpowering
presence of Western government and beliefs. Ernest N. Emenyonu commented that
"Things Fall Apart is indeed a classic study of cross-cultural misunderstanding and the
consequences to the rest of humanity, when a belligerent culture or civilization, out of
sheer arrogance and ethnocentrism, takes it upon itself to invade another culture,
another civilization."
Achebe's writing about African society, in telling from an African point of view
the story of the colonization of the Igbo, tends to extinguish the misconception that
African culture had been savage and primitive. Despite converting to Christianity
himself, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart not only in response to the then common
bastardizations of his native people, but to show his fellow citizens that the Igbo were
dignified. His mentioning of the Igbo people's democratic institutions and culture serve
to test themselves "against the goals of modern liberal democracy and to have set out
to show how the Igbo meet those standards."
Achebe portrays the culture as having a religion, a government, a system of
money, and an artistic tradition, as well as a judicial system. Prior to British
colonization, the Igbo people as depicted in Things Fall Apart lived in a patriarchal
collective political system. Decisions were not made by a chief or by any individual but
rather by a council of male elders. Religious leaders were also called upon to settle
debates reflecting the cultural focus of the Igbo people. While the Europeans in Things
Fall Apart are depicted as intolerant of Igbo culture and religion, telling villagers that
their gods are not real (pp. 135, 162) the Igbo are seen as tolerant of other cultures as
a whole.
51
In Things Fall Apart, western culture is portrayed as being "arrogant and

ethnocentric," insisting that the African culture needed a leader. As it had no kings or
chiefs, Umuofian culture was vulnerable to invasion by western civilization. It is felt that
the repression of the Igbo language at the end of the novel contributes greatly to the
destruction of the culture. Although Achebe favours the African culture of the pre-
western society, the author attributes its destruction to the "weaknesses within the
native structure."
For example, Okonkwo values tradition so highly that he cannot accept change.
(It may be more accurate to say he values tradition because of the high cost he has
paid to uphold it, i.e. killing Ikemefuna and moving to Mbanta). The Christian teachings
render these large sacrifices on his part meaningless. The distress over the loss of
tradition, whether driven by his love of the tradition or the meaning of his sacrifices to
it, can be seen as the main reasons for his suicide.
Achebe writes that European sentiments toward Africans are mistaken. According
to Diana Akers Rhoads, "Perhaps the most important mistake of the British is their
belief that all civilization progresses, as theirs has, from the tribal stage through
monarchy to parliamentary government. On first arriving in Mbanta, the missionaries
expect to find a king (p. 138), and, discovering no functionaries to work with, the
British set up their own hierarchical system which delegates power from the queen of
England through district commissioners to native court messengers — foreigners who
do not belong to the village government at all (p. 160). Since the natives from other
parts of Nigeria feel no loyalty to the villages where they enact the commands of the
district commissioners, the British have superimposed a system which leads to bribery
and corruption rather than to progress." By contrast, the Igbo follow a democracy which
judges each man according to his personal merit.
52

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Module Companion English Literature Student Version

Literatura em Língua Inglesa

1o semestre do curso de Inglês

(64 horas de contacto; 96 horas de estudo)

Regente: Dr Erik Vermeulen

CONTENTS page number

1.1. Poetry - Limericks, Rhythm and Rhyme .............................................................. 4

1.2. Poetry - Limericks and Humour ......................................................................... 5

1.3. Poetry - Similes and Allegory ............................................................................. 6

1.4. Poetry and Satire .............................................................................................. 7

1.5. Poetry – Literal and Figurative Meaning ................................................................ 8

1.6. Poetry – Implied Meaning .................................................................................... 10

1.7. Poetry and Point of View .......................................................................................10

UNIT 2 HOW LITERATURE DIFFERS FROM NON-LITERATURE

2.1. The Problem of Defining the Concept ‘Literature’ .................................................... 12

2.2. Identification of Particular Registers in Particular Genres .......................................... 15

2.3. Choice of Register Defined By Genre, Medium, Participants, Purpose .......................... 18

2.4. Does Literature Have a Particular Register? ............................................................18

2.4.1. Reported Missing ...................................................................................... ..........18

2.4.2. Brave New World ................................................................................................ 19

UNIT 3 CONTEXT IN LANGUAGE

3.1. Context in Genuine or Spontaneous Language ...................................................... 20

3.2.1. Fictitious Contexts .............................................................................................. 22

3.2.2. Setting and fictional Space .................................................................................... 23

3.3. A Comparison between Context in Literary and Non-Literary texts ............................... 24

3.3.1. Senders ............................................................................................................. 24

UNIT 4 A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO WRITTEN AFRICAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

4.1. Forms of Classifying African Literature ................................................................... 30

4.2. Post Colonial Literature ....................................................................................... 32

4.3. Critique of Post Independence Regimes .................................................................. 33

4.4. Revisions by Female Writes .................................................................................. 34

4.5. Debates, Challenges, and Prospects ....................................................................... 36

UNIT 5 CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART (1958)

5.1. Excerpt from Chapter 16 ....................................................................................... 39

5.2 Excerpt from Chapter 17 ....................................................................................... 41

5.3. Excerpt from Chapter 20 ....................................................................................... 42

5.4. Chapter 22 .......................................................................................................... 43

5.5. Chapter 24 .......................................................................................................... 45

5.6. Chapter 25 .......................................................................................................... 48

5.7. Analysis of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart ................................................................... 49

5.7.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 49

5.7.2. Plot Summary ..................................................................................................... 50

5.7.3. Significant Aspects of the Novel ............................................................................ 51

1.1. Poetry - Limericks, Rhythm and Rhyme

There was a Young Lady whose chin

[Edward Lear, (1923 - 2011) A Book of Limericks, WH Smith Blackwell]

- Discussion and Explanation -

1.2. Poetry - Limericks and Humour

Until the owner shot him with a .22.

You expected this line to be lewd

Which embarrassed the people of Lucca.

[ Edward Lear, (1923 - 2011) A Book of Limericks, WH Smith Blackwell]

1.3. Poetry - Similes and Allegory

The Visitor (poet unknown)

The .................... day still

On the ................ day, the food

On the ...................... day, you send him

The .............. day, your guest

On the ................ day, you hide

On the .............. day, really,

You are really not

1.4. Poetry and Satire

That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland,