Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T21:24:02.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making up their own minds: readers, interpretations and the difference of view in Ghanaian popular narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Stephanie Newell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Résumé

La lecture est un événement social qui a lieu dans le contexte de suppositions à propos du language et du sens qui conditionnent les interprétations d'un individuel. Avant de tourner la première page d'un roman populaire, ou de regarder la première scène d'une représentation théâtrale, le ‘lecteur’ occupe toujours une position receptive qui est spécifique culturellement, et il est vraisemblable que chaque occasion d'interprétation soit inspiré par des préconceptions au sujet de la fonction de la littérature.

Le rôle des lecteurs est essentiel à la discussion des narratives populaires en Afrique de l'ouest. Les auteurs reconnaissent la participation des lecteurs à la jointe création des romans, à tel point que les histoires elles-mêmes peuvent être tansformées ou prolongées en réponse aux lettres des lecteurs. En prenant parti pour le type de personnage dont la position sociale ressemble le plus à la leur, les lecteurs sélectionnent des figures à qui ils peuvent assigner du blâme et des éloges et à travers lesquelles ils peuvent confirmer leur opinions sur les rôles domestiques des hommes et des femmes. Les lecteurs adoptent des positions interprétatives qui dépendent de la façon dont ils peuvent rattacher les personnages fictifs à leurs réserves d'opinions sur es conjoints, les ‘filles de bon-temps’, les belles-mères, les ‘vieux protecteurs’ et les prostituées.

Une perspective qui se base sur le lecteur est done essentielle pour compléter lʼanalyse littéraire ‘directe’ des narratives populaires. En effet, on pourrait dire que sans la contribution interprétative des lecteurs de l'Afrique de l'ouest la fiction populaire n'est rien. Les lecteurs ne peuvent pas être homogénéisé en une seule catégorie: pendant la lecture, des communautés distinctes et pré-constituées de ecteurs apparaissent, s'identifiant à l'histoire en tant que sujets sociaux et xtrapolant des opinions à partir du texte. Dans cet environnement réceptif, les narratives populaires prennent l'apparence de radeaux plutôt que d'épaves, évoquant et soutenant les reconstructions actives et intéressées que les lecteurs font d'euxnêmes.

Type
Ghanaians at the mirror
Information
Africa , Volume 67 , Issue 3: Audiences in action , July 1997 , pp. 389 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abbam, K. 1974. Interview with Richard Priebe, 4 June, Accra.Google Scholar
Abbam, K. 1981. ‘From the publisher’, Obaa Sima (Ideal Woman) 10 (1), 9.Google Scholar
Abbam, K. 1995. ‘From the publisher’, Obaa Sima (Ideal Woman) 22 (2), 3.Google Scholar
Adeleye-Fayemi, B. 1995. ‘Shinamania: gender, sexuality and popular culture’, in Newell, S. (ed.), Images of African Women: the gender problematic, pp. 45–56. Stirling: Centre of Commonwealth Studies.Google Scholar
Amarteifio, V. 1985. Bediako the Adventurer. Accra: Amaa Books.Google Scholar
Antwi-Boasiako, K. 1994. My Run-away Daughter. Accra: Anima Publications.Google Scholar
Antwi-Boasiako, K. 1995. The Hidden Agenda. Accra: Anima Publications.Google Scholar
Asante-Darko, N. and van der Geest, S. 1983. ‘Male chauvinism: men and women in Ghanaian highlife songs’, in Oppong, C. (ed.), Female and Male in West Africa, pp. 242–55. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Badoe, A.-E. (pseud. Abbam, K.). 1973. Beloved Twin. Accra: Scorpio Books.Google Scholar
Bame, K. 1985. Come to Laugh: African traditional theater in Ghana. New York: Lillian Barber Press.Google Scholar
Barber, K. 1986. ‘Radical conservatism in Yoruba popular plays’, in Drama and Theatre in Africa, pp. 5–32. Bayreuth African Studies series 7, Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth.Google Scholar
Barthes, R. 1977. ‘The death of the author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, S., pp. 142–8. London: Fontana.Google Scholar
Blay, J. B. 1944. Emelia's Promise. Accra: Benibengor Book Agency.Google Scholar
Blay, J. B. 1945. After the Wedding. Accra: Benibengor Book Agency.Google Scholar
Blay, J. B. 1957. Love in a Clinic. Accra: Benibengor Book Agency.Google Scholar
Blay, J. B. 1974. Interview with Richard Priebe, 13 June, Accra.Google Scholar
Boehmer, E. 1991. ‘Stories of women and mothers: gender and nationalism in the early fiction of Flora Nwapa’, in Nasta, S. (ed.), Motherlands: black women's writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, pp. 3–23. London: Women's Press.Google Scholar
Boyce Davies, C. 1986. ‘Introduction’, in Davies, C. Boyce and Graves, A. Adams (eds.), Ngambika: studies of women in African literature, pp. 1–23. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Boyce Davies, C. 1994. Black Women, Writing and Identity: migrations of the subject. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Collins, J. 1994. Highlife Time. Accra: Anansesem Publications.Google Scholar
Coulon, V. 1987. ‘Onitsha goes national: Nigerian writing in Macmillan's Pacesetter series’, Research in African Literatures 18 (3), 304–19.Google Scholar
Dinan, C. 1983. ‘Sugar-daddies and gold diggers: the white-collar single women in Accra’, in Oppong, C. (ed.), Female and Male in West Africa, pp. 344–66. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Eagleton, T. 1989. ‘The ideology of the aesthetic’, in Hernadi, P. (ed.), The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric, pp. 75–86. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ehling, H. 1990. ‘The Biafran War and recent English-language “popular” writing in Nigeria: Kalu Okpi's Crossfire! and Kalu Uka's Colonel Ben Brim’, in Granqvist, R. (ed.), Signs and Signals: popular culture in Africa, pp. 151–71. Umea: Acta Universitatis Umensis.Google Scholar
Fish, S. 1989. Doing What Comes Naturally: change, rhetoric, and the practice of theory in literary and legal studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Griswold, W. and Bastian, M. 1987. ‘Continuities and reconstructions in crosscultural literary transmission: the case of the Nigerian romantic novel’, Poetics 16, 327–51.Google Scholar
Gyamfuaa-Fofie, A. 1989. The Tested Love. Kumasi: Beginners Publishers.Google Scholar
Gyamfuaa-Fofie, A. 1990a. The Forbidden Love. Accra: Beginners Publishers.Google Scholar
Gyamfuaa-Fofie, A. 1990b. Because she was a Woman. Accra: Beginners Publishers.Google Scholar
Gyamfuaa-Fofie, A. 1995. Interview with Stephanie Newell, 10 July, Accra.Google Scholar
Gyawuh, T. B. 1988? Life is a Stage. Tamale: Except God Enterprise.Google Scholar
Iser, W. 1989. ‘Towards a literary anthropology’, in Cohen, R. (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory, pp. 208–88. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Iser, W. 1993. The Fictive and the Imaginary: charting literary anthropology. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Jauss, H. R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Bahti, T.. Brighton: Harvester.Google Scholar
Jauss, H. R. 1990. ‘The theory of reception: a retrospective of its unrecognised prehistory’, in Collier, P. and Geyer-Ryan, H. (eds.), Literary Theory Today, pp. 53–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Konadu, A. 1974. Interview with Richard Priebe, 29 May, Accra.Google Scholar
Newell, S. 1996. ‘From the brink of oblivion: the anxious masculinism in Nigerian market literature’, Research in African Literatures 27 (3), 50–67.Google Scholar
Nyaku, F. K. 1984. The Marriage Experiment and other Stories. Accra: Sedco Publishing.Google Scholar
Obiechina, E. 1973. An African Popular Literature: a study of Onitsha market pamphlets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Oduyoye, A. M. 1995. Daughters of Anowa: African women and patriarchy. New York: Orbis Books.Google Scholar
Ogundipe-Leslie, M. 1987. ‘The female writer and her commitment’, in Jones, E. Durosimi et al. (eds.), Women in African Literature Today, pp. 5–13. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Opong-Ofori, E. 1988. The Wounds of Love. Accra: Quick Service Books and Stationery Supply.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, P. J. 1987. Before Reading: narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Radway, J. 1984. Reading the Romance: women, patriarchy and popular literature. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Schild, U. 1980. ‘Words of deception: popular literature in Kenya’, in Schild, U. (ed.), The East African Experience: essays on English and Swahili literature, pp 25–34. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.Google Scholar