Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and CultureBy "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest" (New York Times), Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage is a fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multi-culturalism. This volume brings together nineteen iconoclastic essays from the past twenty-five years on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics - many of which are published here for the first time. Whether he is discoursing on the idea of "negritude" in "From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image" or on protest literature in "The Writer in a Modern African State"; debunking the orthodoxies of contemporary literary criticism in "The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies"; offering surprising readings of Shakespeare and Aristophanes; expounding on the tragedy of "the recurrent cycle of human stupidity"; skewering intellectual demigods or his own critics, Soyinka is never less than profound and incisive. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gives a startling vision of culture in our times. |
Contents
Towards a True Theatre | 3 |
A Reassessment of the African Literary Image | 7 |
The Writer in a Modern African State | 15 |
Copyright | |
17 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
actually aesthetic African literature African world African writer alien Amos Tutuola appears Arab artist attempt audience Bacchae Barthes become Cabral Chinua Achebe Chinweizu christian chthonic claim Cleopatra colonial commitment concept consciousness contemporary continent course creative critic cultural death Dionysos drama encounter essays essence European existence experience exploitation expression Femi Osofisan forms frontier Geoffrey Hunt human Hunt's Ibadan ideological idiom ignore images insist intellectual Islamic language liberation linguistic literary Lysistrata Marxist merely metaphor mind modern African Mongo Beti myth mythology mythopoesis nature Negritude Ngugi wa Thiongo Nigerian Obatala Ogun Onitsha Market literature Osofisan philosophy play poet poetic poetry political production question radical reality religions religious revolution revolutionary ritual Roland Barthes Sango sense sensibility Shakespeare simply social society South African spiritual struggle symbolic theatre theatrical theme theoretical traditional tragic understand University violence Wole Soyinka Yoruba