CHAPTER 5: REPRESENTATIVE GENRES, TRADITIONS, TEXT AND AUTHORS FROM

ANGLO-AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA AND AFRICA

World literature is used to refer to the total of the world's national literature and the circulation
of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. In the past, it primarily referred to
the masterpieces of Western European literature; however, world literature today is increasingly
seen in an international context. Now, readers have access to a wide range of global works in
various translations.
Many scholars assert that what makes a work considered world literature is its circulation beyond
its country of origin. For example, Damrosch states, "A work enters into world literature by a
double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world
beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin".
Likewise, the world literature scholar Venkat Mani believes that the "worlding" of literature is
brought about by "information transfer" largely generated by developments in print culture.
Because of the advent of the library, "Publishers and booksellers who print and sell affordable
books, literate citizens who acquire these books, and public libraries that make these books
available to those who cannot afford to buy them collectively play a very important role in the
“making” of world literature".

Reading for Understanding Meaning

After reading and analyzing the unit, you should be able to:
1. comprehend the meaning of the various literary texts;
2. reflect on the learnings gain from the various literary texts;
3. interpret the various literary texts through answering the differentiated activities;
4. create a sentence outline to show the ideas about Anglo-American, Latin American, and
African Literature.

CHAPTER 5: REPRESENTATIVE GENRES, TRADITIONSTEXT AND AUTHORS FROM

ANGLO-AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA AND AFRICA

Lesson 5.1. ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE (GROUP 1) provide a 15 item quiz

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Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old
English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman
Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th century, according to Bede, is often
considered as the oldest surviving poem in English. Poetry written in the mid-12th century
represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English; for example, The Soul's
Address to the Body (c. 1150–1175) found in Worcester Cathedral Library MS F. 174 contains
only one word of possible Latinate origin, while also maintaining a corrupt alliterative meter and
Old English grammar and syntax, albeit in a degenerative state (hence, early scholars of Old
English termed this late form as "Semi-Saxon"). The Peterborough Chronicle can also be
considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century. The strict adherence to the
grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th century work – as is evident in
the works cited above – and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had
almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of
literature.

The poem Beowulf, which often begins the traditional canon of English literature, is the most
famous work of Old English literature. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has also proven significant
for historical study, preserving a chronology of early English history.

In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of: sermons and saints' lives;
biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles
and narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works
on grammar, medicine, geography; and poetry. In all there are over 400
surviving manuscripts from the period, of which about 189 are considered "major".
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_literature)

Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire, UK, in 1960 and since
1992 has lived in the United States, currently residing near
Minneapolis.

Following the publication of his groundbreaking series

‘Sandman’ (1989-1996) he has become established as one of the
creators of modern comics, as well as an author whose work
crosses genres and reaches audiences of all ages. He is listed in
the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living
post-modern writers and is a prolific creator of works of prose,
poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama.

(Source: https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/neil-gaiman)

Coraline is a 2009 American stop-motion animated dark fantasy-horror film written and directed
by Henry Selick based on the 2002 novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman.
While exploring her new home, a girl named Coraline (Dakota Fanning) discovers a secret door,
behind which lies an alternate world that closely mirrors her own but, in many ways, is better.
She rejoices in her discovery, until Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) and the rest of her parallel
family try to keep her there forever. Coraline must use all her resources and bravery to make it
back to her own family and life.

Coraline [Excerpt]
by Neil Gaiman (England)

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It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A
woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother.
Only…

Only her skin was white as paper.

Only she was taller and thinner.
Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails
were curved and sharp.

“Coraline?” the woman said. “Is that you?”

And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.
“Lunchtime, Coraline,” said the woman.
“Who are you?” asked Coraline.
“I’m your other mother,” said the woman. “Go and tell your other father that lunch is ready,” She
opened the door of the oven. Suddenly Coraline realized how hungry she was. It smelled
wonderful. “Well, go on.”

Coraline went down the hall, to where her father’s study was. She opened the door. There was a
man in there, sitting at the keyboard, with his back to her. “Hello,” said Coraline. “I – I mean,
she said to say that lunch is ready.”
The man turned around. His eyes were buttons, big and black and shiny.
“Hello Coraline,” he said. “I’m starving.”

He got up and went with her into the kitchen. They sat at the kitchen table, and Coraline’s other
mother brought them lunch. A huge, golden-brown roasted chicken, fried potatoes, tiny green
peas. Coraline shoveled the food into her mouth. It tasted wonderful.
“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” said Coraline’s other father.
“For me?”
“Yes,” said the other mother. “It wasn’t the same here without you. But we knew you’d arrive
one day, and then we could be a proper family. Would you like some more chicken?”
It was the best chicken that Coraline had ever eaten. Her mother sometimes made chicken, but it
was always out of packets or frozen, and was very dry, and it never tasted of anything. When

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Coraline’s father cooked chicken he bought real chicken, but he did strange things to it, like
stewing it in wine, or stuffing it with prunes, or baking it in pastry, and Coraline would always
refuse to touch it on principle.
She took some more chicken.
“I didn’t know I had another mother,” said Coraline, cautiously.
“Of course, you do. Everyone does,” said the other mother, her black button eyes gleaming.
“After lunch I thought you might like to play in your room with the rats.”
“The rats?”
“From upstairs.”
Coraline had never seen a rat, except on television. She was quite looking forward to it. This was
turning out to be a very interesting day after all.

Take Note: Watch the full movie entitled “Coraline.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aRlcuRTv1M)

Lesson 5.2. LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE (GROUP 2) provide a 15 item quiz

Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in
several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of the
Americas as well as literature of the United States written in the Spanish language. It rose to
particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the
international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is
often associated solely with this style, with the 20th Century literary movement known as Latin

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American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American
literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_literature)

About the Author

Gabriel García Márquez, born on March 6, 1927, Aracataca,
Colombia—died on April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mexico),
Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th
century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982,
mostly for his masterpiece Cien años de Soledad (1967; One
Hundred Years of Solitude). He was the fourth Latin American to
be so honored, having been preceded by Chilean poets Gabriela
Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971 and by Guatemalan
novelist Miguel Angel Asturias in 1967. With Jorge Luis Borges,
García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer
in history. In addition to his masterly approach to the novel, he
was a superb crafter of short stories and an accomplished
journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez
achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader
while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.

(Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez)
One of These Days
Gabriel García Márquez
Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, and a very early
riser, opened his office at six. He took some false teeth, still mounted in their plaster mold, out of
the glass case and put on the table a fistful of instruments which he arranged in size order, as if
they were on display. He wore a collarless striped shirt, closed at the neck with a golden stud,
and pants held up by suspenders He was erect and skinny, with a look that rarely corresponded to
the situation, the way deaf people have of looking.

When he had things arranged on the table, he pulled the drill toward the dental chair and sat
down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but
worked steadily, pumping the drill with his feet, even when he didn’t need it.

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After eight he stopped for a while to look at the sky through the window, and he saw two pensive
buzzards who were drying themselves in the sun on the ridgepole of the house next door. He
went on working with the idea that before lunch it would rain again. The shrill voice of his
eleven-year-old son interrupted his concentration.
“Papa.”
“What?”
“The Mayor wants to know if you’ll pull his tooth.”
“Tell him I’m not here.”
He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm’s length, and examined it with his eyes half
closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.
“He says you are, too, because he can hear you.”
The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished
work did he say:
“So much the better.”
He operated the drill again. He took several pieces of a bridge out of a cardboard box where he
kept the things he still had to do and began to polish the gold.
“Papa.”
“What?”
He still hadn’t changed his expression.
“He says if you don’t take out his tooth, he’ll shoot you.”
Without hurrying, with an extremely tranquil movement, he stopped pedaling the drill, pushed it
away from the chair, and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a
revolver. “O.K.,” he said.
“Tell him to come and shoot me.”
He rolled the chair over opposite the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer. The Mayor
appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side, swollen and in
pain, had a five-day-old beard.
The dentist saw many nights of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his
fingertips and said softly:
“Sit down.”
“Good morning,” said the Mayor.

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“Morning,” said the dentist.
While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his skull on the headrest of the chair and
felt better. His breath was icy. It was a poor office: an old wooden chair, the pedal drill, a glass
case with ceramic bottles. Opposite the chair was a window with a shoulder-high cloth curtain.
When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor braced his heels and opened his mouth.
Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed
the Mayor’s jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers.
“It has to be without anesthesia,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you have an abscess.”
The Mayor looked him in the eye. “All right,” he said, and tried to smile.
The dentist did not return the smile. He brought the basin of sterilized instruments to the
worktable and took them out of the water with a pair of cold tweezers, still without hurrying.
Then he pushed the spittoon with the tip of his shoe, and went to wash his hands in the
washbasin. He did all this without looking at the Mayor. But the Mayor didn’t take his eyes off
him. It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grasped the tooth with the hot
forceps. The Mayor seized the arms of the chair, braced his feet with all his strength, and felt an
icy void in his kidneys, but didn’t make a sound. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without
rancor, rather with a bitter tenderness, he said:
“Now you’ll pay for our twenty dead men.”
The Mayor felt the crunch of bones in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn’t
breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to
his pain that he failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights.
Bent over the spittoon, sweating, panting, he unbuttoned his tunic and reached for the
handkerchief in his pants pocket. The dentist gave him a clean cloth.
“Dry your tears,” he said.
The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the crumbling
ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider’s eggs and dead insects. The dentist returned, drying
his hands. “Go to bed,” he said, “and gargle with salt water.” The Mayor stood up, said goodbye
with a casual military salute, and walked toward the door, stretching his legs, without buttoning
up his tunic.
“Send the bill,” he said.
“To you or the town?”

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The Mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen:
“It’s the same damn thing.”

Lesson 5.3. AFRICAN LITERATURE (GROUP 3) provide a 15 item quiz

African literature, literary works of the African continent. African literature consists of a body
of work in different languages and various genres, ranging from oral literature to literature
written in colonial languages (French, Portuguese, and English).

About the Author

Rasaq Malik is a graduate of the University of Ibadan, Ibadan,

Nigeria. His work has appeared in various journals,
including Michigan Quaterly Review, Poet Lore, Spillway, Rattle,
Juked, Connotation Press, Heart Online Journal, Grey
sparrow, and Jalada. He is a two-time nominee for Best of the Net
Nominations, and was among the finalists for the 2015 Best of the
Net. Recently, Rattle Magazine and Poet Lore nominated his
poems for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.

(Source: https://www.poemhunter.com/rasaq-malik/biography/)

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 Another World
by Rasaq Malik

In another world I want to be a father without

passing through the eternal insanity of mourning
my children, without experiencing the ritual
of watching my children return home as bodies
folded like a prayer mat, without spending my
nights telling them the stories of a hometown
where natives become aliens searching for
a shelter. I want my children to spread a mat
outside my house and play without the walls
of houses ripped by rifles. I want to watch my children
grow to recite the name of their homeland like Lord’s
Prayer, to frolic in the streets without being hunted like
animals in the bush, without being mobbed to death.
In another world I want my children to tame grasshoppers
in the field, to play with their dolls in the living room,
to inhale the fragrance of flowers waving as wind blows,
to see the birds measure the sky with their wings.

(Source: https://peelsofpoetry.tumblr.com/post/177761868529/in-another-world-by-rasaq-malik-
in-another-world-i)

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