Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 ‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka
- Chapter 2 Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical and theoretical writings
- Chapter 3 The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
- Chapter 4 Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka's dramatic parables
- Chapter 5 The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis: fictional and nonfictional prose works
- Chapter 6 Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment
- Chapter 7 “Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical and theoretical writings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 ‘Representative’ and unrepresentable modalities of the self: the gnostic, worldly and radical humanism of Wole Soyinka
- Chapter 2 Tragic mythopoesis as postcolonial discourse – critical and theoretical writings
- Chapter 3 The “drama of existence”: sources and scope
- Chapter 4 Ritual, anti-ritual and the festival complex in Soyinka's dramatic parables
- Chapter 5 The ambiguous freight of visionary mythopoesis: fictional and nonfictional prose works
- Chapter 6 Poetry, versification and the fractured burdens of commitment
- Chapter 7 “Things fall together”: Wole Soyinka in his Own Write
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There are only two ways to go about forming racial concepts: either one causes certain subjective characteristics to become objective, or else one tries to interiorize objectively revealed manners of conduct. Thus, the black man who asserts his negritude by means of a revolutionary movement immediately places himself in the position of having to meditate, either because he wishes to recognize in himself certain objectively established traits of the African civilization or because he hopes to discover the Essence of blackness in the well of his heart. Thus, subjectivity reappears, the relation of the self with the self, the source of all poetry …
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir”Esu sleeps in the house/But the house is too small for him/Esu sleeps on the front yard/But the yard is too constricting for him/Esu sleeps in the palm-nut shell/Now he has room enough to stretch at large.
From a Praise-poem to Esu, the Yoruba god of fate, chance and contingencyConsidering the fact that there are only three volumes of the published critical and theoretical essays of Soyinka – Myth, Literature and the African World, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, The Burden of Memory and the Muse of Forgiveness – Derek Wright's estimate that in this group of our author's writings we have “the substance of over 1,000 pages of critical prose” may seem an exaggeration.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Wole SoyinkaPolitics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism, pp. 41 - 82Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003