Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Cavone, libro consigliato English Literature. A Short History, Bertinetti

LITERATURES IN ENGLISH

Unity and diversity – during the last thirty years the Nobel prize for literature has several times been

awarded to English-language writers who are not English at all (the Australian Patrick White, the Nigerian

Wole Soyinka, the Indian Anita Desai…). These authors are very diverse but united in their use of the same

language, and they have emerged from the furthest corners of the globe to communicate their own world

through the medium of literary invention. This variety was for a long time collectively referred to under the

label “commonwealth literature”, but today the most widely used phrase is “post-colonial literatures”, even if

it has been rejected by a large number of authors. Whatever definition one adopts, it is nevertheless

necessary to keep in mind the distinction made by Maxwell: that between settler colonies (Canada,

Australia, New Zealand), where the land was occupied by European colonisers who took it from the

indigenous population, and invaded colonies (India and Nigeria), where the British presence was limited

only to the necessities of rule. This distinction (which doesn’t cover certain cases, such as those of the

Caribbean and South Africa) remains an important point of departure. In the former case authors are writing

in their own language, which is also the language of the community they belong to; in the latter case writers

are using a language which is not their mother tongue: it’s a language historically imposed on them by the

Empire, which often gets adopted as a lingua franca among the various ethnic groups and which authors

choose to use. There are many differences in their literary production also at the level of content and

theme. Important themes are the relationship with Britain and the aspiration to independence during the

colonial period; but common to all was the fact of being subjects of the Empire, even if the nature of this

varied enormously: being a white in New Zealand from being a black African in Nigeria. Different too are the

modes of definition of one’s own identity: in India, Africa and the Caribbean this is sought through difference

and the search for roots, whereas in Canada, Australia and New Zealand the theme is the continuity and at

the same time contrast between mother country and colony. The theme of exile is the one that has received

most critical attention. One common aspect was that which emerged at the independence stage, when the

problem was posed of how to deal with the colonial inheritance, and how to learn a new identity. The

problem could be seen as that of constructing the idea of the nation and of national identity. This task came

to be called “imagining nation” and writers have attempted to give it concrete substance in narrative forms

of a fantastic type. The relationship with the past and with history has been central. In the invaded colonies

the material developed by the writer was extracted from the everyday reality of moments of revolt, of the

testimony of great figures of the anti-colonial struggle, and from the lives of anonymous subjects living with

the contrast between their own values and the culture of their rulers.

Africa. African literatures – the African writers in English come from places widely separated in space and

belong to ethnic groups whose languages, traditions and cultures are very diverse. The unifying element is

provided by English, a language used as a lingua franca not only between countries but often within a

single nation. Another common element is provided by diglossia, as a result of which a work written in

English will contain words from the author’s native language: sometimes these words are left untranslated,

so the author can indicate that that is the language which corresponds to the world he is writing about,

rather than the English he is using to describe it. The type of English used can either be standard English or

one modified by African usages, and may even at times give way to pidgin, a basic language which arose

as a cross between English and elements of local languages. Two important aspects are important: the first

is a legacy of the oral tradition and manifests itself in several ways: in the choice of a narrator who is a

narrating voice, and in the use of proverbs; in the use of a non-linear concept of time which makes past and

present co-exist; in the incorporation of magic into reality, typical of oral literature. Many of these

characteristics are in The Palm-Wine Drinkard by the Nigerian Amos Tutuola. The second concerns the

role of the writer: he sets himself up as a guide able to propose the road to be followed. This function is

linked, in African writers, to a strong political commitment which for many of them was paid for by exile,

prison and even death: for the African writer, commitment often means losing one’s freedom and

sometimes one’s life. African literature come to the English-language literary scene with the novel by the

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Nigerian Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart, set in eastern Nigeria at the end of the 19 century. The tale of

its protagonist, Okonkwo, coincides with the extension of British rule. Achebe’s aim is to demonstrate the

existence and the importance of a culture which is African, so as to be able to rewrite the history of Africa

from an internal perspective. So the novel returns to the pre-colonial past to show what values Nigeria

possessed and how it functioned before the arrival of the British. When Okonkwo returns to his native

village after 7 years of exile, he finds a community divided between Christians and non-Christians and

unable to resist the invader. His response – he kills the envoy of the British authorities- is pointless: the old

world is finished, the new one is unacceptable. Okonkwo kills himself, committing an act irreconcilable with

his own traditional values. The main characteristics of this novel, such as the use of oral tradition, of

proverbs and popular tales, and of the imagery proper to this ethnic origins, together with the portrait of the

encounter between whites and Africans, provided an important model for African writers. We find these in

Achebe’s following novels: The Arrow of God, A man of the people: in this latter the inquiry shifts to the

present and the voice expressing a collective reality gives way to a single voice: there’s no longer a

collective in which to locate one’s identity; there’s only the personal destiny of the individual, reflecting the

individualism which has taken over the country. Another novel is Anthills of the Savannah: this work, which

makes more use of pidgin than any of its predecessors, focuses of Africa’s post-colonial reality to portray

the power struggle between rival elites, who were turning contemporary Africa into a monstrous tragedy.

The corruption and brutality of the post-independence regimes are the themes for the works of the

Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei; The beautiful ones are not yet born describes a reality which is rotten and

toxic, both contaminated and contaminating: one power group is replaced by another which inherits the

same structures. For the protagonist of Fragments, Baako, to accept the situation is to admit a humiliating

defeat, and the spectacle offered by the post-colonial regimes is mentally destabilising. The theme of

alienation is raised by the Nigerian poet Gabriel Okara in his novel The Voice, in a way that suggests that

schizophrenia is a condition linked to colonisation and to post-colonial phase, leading to a division of the

self which rejects western values but doesn’t find a reference point either in African tradition or in present-

day African reality. Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize winner in 1986, finds in African roots the material with which

to reshape the present, but without falling victim to the fascination of the past. He has combined his

European experience (he studied at the university of Leeds and worked at the Royal Court Theatre) with

the rediscovery of the pagan theatre of ancient Nigeria. In 1960, on the occasion of the independence

celebrations, he wrote A dance of the forests, a play that invoked the need to root in the past the

celebration of the new. The dance in the jungle of Nigerian politics is the opening image for a play which, as

also happens in later works, merges references to European classical and contemporary theatre with

African spectacle and ritual. Outside his work for the theatre, Soyinka is also famous for his

autobiographical work, Aké, about his childhood, and for the novel Season of Anomy, written during the civil

war (he spent two years in prison). Soyinka’s artistic career is linked to his life choices and the density of

his poetic writing represents one of the most important contributions the African world has made to the

literatures in English. The same guiding role was taken up by a writer growing up in Kenya, James Ngugi,

who changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o. he spent a year in prison because of his writings and has

lived in exile since 1982. His first two novels reflect his uncertainty about the future of his country. Then

followed A grain of wheat, his masterpiece, centred on the Mau Mau revolt; the novel makes regular returns

from the present into the past, and there’s an epic dimension in the attachment to the land and its exaltation

of the heroism of the revolt, making it clear that violence was an unavoidable option. As regards his

response to the present, Petals of blood shows a strong conviction that the organised movement of the

labouring masses can be the agent to rescue the Kenyan people from the oppression inflicted by its African

masters. His later novels are written in his native language of Gikuyu (but which he then translated into

English), following the choice not to write any longer in the language of the former colonial masters. One of

the most appreciated African writers is the Nigerian Ben Okri, who has lived in London for many years. He

achieved success with The famished road, a novel whose protagonist is abiku, a child who has returned to

earth from the land of the dead and which portrays contemporary Nigerian reality. His writing is suggestive

of the style of magic realism, and what Okri does is drawing from the Yoruba oral tradition the idea of the

coexistence of the real and the supernatural. In the immediate post-war years, African poetry found an

original voice in the work of Christopher Okigbo, creator of a sophisticated hybridisation between western

poetry and the folkloric hinterland of his native Ibo tribe. The spectrum of his poetry ranges from religious

reflection to political protests, passing through themes of alienation, childhood innocence. These is to be

found in the posthumous volume Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder

The literature of South Africa – the birth of south African literature in English is traditionally dated from

The story of an African farm, the novel by Olive Schreiner, a self-taught writer and an attentive reader of

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the revolutionary English thinkers of the mid-19 century. An important feature of this novel is its attention to

the theme of the liberation of women, with specific reference to the colonial world,