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LITERARY CRITICISM HANDBOOK An approach to 20th Century Literature

Dr. Julia Haba Osca Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya Universitat de València 2016

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LITERARY CRITICISM HANDBOOK

An approach to 20th Century Literature

Dr. Julia Haba Osca

Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya Universitat de València 2016

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS This handbook is the first publication done by RED (Research on Education and Development) a unit working at the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València (UV) in Spain.

The illustrations of this book were all done in collaboration with a group of students and lecturers from the Departamento de Design e Expressão Gráfica at the Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Manaus (UFAM) in Brazil. And the author of this handbook is particularly grateful to her kind friend, Dra. Karla Mazarelo Pacheco, for coordinating this collaboration held between both universities.

Acknowledgments to all of the designers in order of participation: ‐ Nilberto Jorge (Chinua Achebe Illustration) ‐ Gizah Ferreira (Yehuda Amichai and Mark Mathabane Illustrations) ‐ Prof. Dra. Patrícia Braga (Italo Calvino Illustration) ‐ Yukari Hirae (Albert Camus Illustrations) ‐ Êminy Laís (Isak Dinesen and Yasunari Kawabata Illustration) ‐ Alef Vernon (Nadine Gordimer and Zhang Jie Illustrations) ‐ Diego Souza (Hwang Sun‐won and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Illustrations) ‐ Prof. Dr. Almir Pacheco (Franz Kafka Illustration) ‐ Raina Feitoza and Bianca Amorim (Jamaica Kincaid Illustration) ‐ Raquel Teixeira (Czeslaw Milosz Illustration) ‐ Rayra Furtado (Nguyen Thi Vinh and Santha Rama Rau Illustrations) ‐ Matheus Ricardo (Abioseh Nicol and Léopold Sédar Senghor Illustration) ‐ Bruna Jaqueline (Rainer Maria Rilke Illustration) ‐ Ranna Ferreira (Elie Wiesel Illustration) And acknowledgments to Dr. Joan Peredo Hernández for laying out the Handbook.

This book is dedicated to my Dad, – the best critical thinking teacher I ever had.

1. PRACTICING LITERARY CRITICISM WHILE TEACHING TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Practical criticism is, like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. In Practical Criticism (1929) he reported on and analysed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on “the words on the page”, rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an “organised response”. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.

In the work of Richards’ most influential student, William Empson, practical criticism provided the basic for an entire critical method. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) Empson developed his undergraduate essays for Richards into a study of the complex and multiple meanings of poems. His work had a profound impact on a critical movement known as the New Criticism, the exponents of which tended to see poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings. New Critics would usually pay relatively little attention to the historical setting of the works which they analysed, treating literature as a sphere of activity of its own. In the work of F. R. Leavis the close analysis of texts because a moral activity, in which a critic would bring the whole of his sensibility to bear on a literary text and test its sincerity and moral seriousness.

Practical criticism today is more usually treated as an ancillary skill rather than the foundation of a critical method. It is a part of many examinations in literature at almost all levels, and is used to test students’ responsiveness to what they read, as well as their knowledge of verse forms and of the technical language for describing the way poems create their effects.

Practical criticism in this form has no necessary connection with any particular theoretical approach, and has shed the psychological theories that originally underpinned it. The discipline does, however, have some ground rules, which affect how people who are trained in it will respond to literature. It might be seen as encouraging readings that concentrate on the form and meaning of particular works, rather than on larger theoretical questions. The process of reading a poem in clinical isolation from historical processes also can mean that literature is treated as a sphere or activity, which is separated, from economic or social conditions or from the life of its author.

The classes which follow this introduction are designed to introduce you to some of the methods and vocabulary of practical criticism, and to give some practical advice about how you can move from formal analysis of a poem and its meaning to a full

critical reading of it. Above all, however, the classes are intended to raise questions about how practical criticism can be used. Do texts look different if they are presented in isolation from the circumstances in which they were written or circulated? Do our critical responses to them change if we add in some contextual information after we have closely analysed them? Do our views of a text change if we hear it read, if we see the original manuscript, or instead of simply seeing the words on a page, as I. A. Richards would have wished, we see words on a screen?

To explore these questions, go on to the first class! Albeit, remember that particularly at the Universitat de València the course entitled Practicing Criticism in English Literature has two very basic components and purposes: A critical component aims to guide students in the practical application to literary texts in English of a variety of critical approaches and of key concepts in the study of language, literature and culture. Emphasis is placed in helping students develop the critical skills needed to understand and provide a reasoned response to texts in English in relation to issues such as gender relations, social stratification, ideological censure or religious and philosophical questions. Selected literary works in English will be used throughout the course as reference texts on which different approaches will be applied.

While a technical component aims to guide students in scholarly habits and in the use of resources for English Studies (including new technologies of information and communication) in order to locate and synthesize information (bibliographies, databases) and to present their own ideas (papers, projects, oral and audiovisual presentations) following citation conventions and avoiding plagiarism.

In this particular case, students at the English Studies Degree will practice criticism on worldwide 20th literature. To appreciate twentieth‐century literature, it is helpful to have an understanding of certain aspects of Modernism, a movement that flourished in the first half of the century and continues to influence writers to this day. Most modernists sought to break with past traditions and experiment with new literary structures and styles. In poetry, this often meant using free verse instead of the metrical or (in Asia) syllabic verse of earlier times; in fiction, it often meant abandoning traditional narrative structure and beginning instead in the middle of the action, jumping around in time, or having “action” take place mainly in characters’ minds. The popularity of the short story is itself a product of modernism, for in nineteenth‐century Europe and the Americas the novel was paramount, while in most other parts of the world poetry and drama were the most highly regarded literary forms.

Modernist writing, especially poetry, tends to avoid direct statements of emotion and instead evoke feelings through powerful imagery. The modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his “things poems”, uses images to capture the essence of a particular animal or object. One development that had a tremendous impact on modern writing was Sigmund Freud’s (1856‐1939) theory of psychoanalysis. Freud believed that unconscious forces arising out of infancy and early childhood experiences determined people’s behaviour. By examining dreams and probing the unconscious through methods such as hypnosis, Freud hoped to unlock the secrets of the human

mind. This new psychoanalytical theory prompted many modernist fiction writers to focus on characters’ internal conflicts. In “Eveline”, James Joyce captures the flow of thoughts or “stream of consciousness” in the mind of the main character. Other young female characters face moments of psychological truth in coming‐of‐age stories by Isak Dinesen, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Another modernist trend was the tendency to blend realism and fantasy. In reaction to the strict realism that dominated the pre‐World War I era, many artists became fascinated with the world of dreams and fantasies. Following Freud’s interest in the unconscious, painters such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico juxtaposed images in ways that could occur only in dreams.

Point out that Franz Kafka’s landmark novella, The Metamorphosis, uses this technique to create a surrealistic nightmare world. A similar blend of reality and fantasy exists in Ben Okri’s “In the Shadow of War”. Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, too, moves into the realm of fantasy to express universal themes about time and change in his story “Half a Day”.

Despite the continuing influence of Modernism, beginning in the 1930s there was a return to be political and social concerns of nineteenth‐century Realism. In Paris during the 1930s, Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor joined with fellow students from France’s overseas colonies to initiate the Négritude movement. The movement’s emphasis on Africa’s pre‐colonial heritage is powerfully communicated in Senghor’s poem “And We Shall We Be Steeped”. Respect for African traditions is also central to “Life Is Sweet at Kumansenu”, a haunting tale by Sierra Leone’s Abioseh Nicol. In “Marriage is a Private Affair”, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe examines the clash between modern urban life and more traditional African ways.

The problems of colonialism and racial or ethnic prejudice are treated in “The Train from Rhodesia”, “By Any Other Name”, and Kaffir Boy. Zhang Jie’s “Love Must Not Be Forgotten” asks questions about the role of women that provoked a storm of controversy in China when the story first appeared. Selections by Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, Korea’s Hwang Sun‐won, Vietnam’s Nguyen Thi Vinh, and Nigeria’s Ben Okri all examine the effects of warfare in each author’s homeland.

The horrors of World War II and the Holocaust prompted some postwar writers to search for new ways to find meaning in human existence. Albert Camus was one of several French‐language authors who pioneered Existentialism, which proposes that each individual defines his or her own existence through the choices he or she makes in life.

Nevertheless, while Existentialism emphasizes human freedom in philosophical terms, freedom has been a more practical concern to post‐war authors living under totalitarian regimes. Such freedoms as the right to assemble and express one’s opinions are of vital concern to artists living under restrictive governments. For instance, freedom of expression is a recurrent topic in the prose poems of Russia’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn eventually had to emigrate to escape political oppression. The limitations of life lived under a repressive government is also the subject of much of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.

Therefore, the literature of the twentieth century spans many forms: poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, and journalism. It has raised new questions and presented new responses to eternal problems such as war, the limitation of personal, political, and intellectual freedoms, and the expression of personal experience. The writings of the twentieth century represent a mosaic of experiences at once bizarre and familiar, at once global and personal.

1.2. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

First of all, there have been twenty‐four texts carefully selected that represent the amazing variety of movements, genres, authors, styles, themes and literary terms that depict 20th century Literature. These are: Chinua Achebe’s “Marriage is a Private Affair”; Anna Akhmatova’s “Lot’s Wife”; Yehuda Amichai’s “Laments On the War Dead”; Italo Calvino’s “The Enchanted Garden”; Albert Camus’ “The Guest”; Isak Dinesen’s “The Ring”; Nadine Gordimer’s “The Train to Rhodesia”; Hwang sun‐Won’s “Cranes”; Zhang Jie’s “Love Must Not Be Forgotten”; Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”; Yasunari Kawabata’s “The Silver Fifty‐Sen Pieces”; Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Walk to the Jetty”; Selma Lagerlöf’s “The Rat Trap”; Naguib Mahfouz’s “Half a Day”; Mark Mathabane’s “Kaffir Boy”; Czeslaw Milosz’s “Song of a Citizen”; Nguyen Thi Vinh’s “Thoughts of Hanoi”; Abioseh Nicol’s “Life is Sweet at Kumansenu”; Ben Okri’s “In the Shadow of War”; Santha Rama Rau’s “By Any Other Name”; Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Black Cat” and “The Swan”; Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “And We Shall Be Steeped”; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Freedom to Breathe” and “A Journey Along the Oka”; and, Elie Wiesel’s “Night”.

Features of the Literary Criticism Handbook: An approach to 20th Century Literary present a useful material for both students and teachers, integrating literature with writing, language and speaking activities. First of all, there is a general Unit Opener about the Twentieth Century Literature clearly and succinctly present Place, Time and Literary Significance, providing students with an at‐a‐glance context for the works they are about to read and work with.

Plus, each text includes a number of features that will enable students to approach 20th century world literature with greater confidence and a sense of active participation in the whole reading and writing essays process. These sections are always related to a specific text and are: About the Author, Reader’s Guide, Exercises and two writings about literature: a Creative Writing Response and a Critical Writing Response.

About the Author is an author biography page precedes each selection by a known author, providing students with interesting and pertinent biographical information that will inform their reading of the work.

A Reader’s Guide precedes every selection, giving students adequate pre‐reading information, motivation and a purpose for reading. The Reader’s guide includes three subsections: Background, Writer’s Response and Literary Focus.

‐ The brief Background section provides students with necessary information that will help them to approach the selection with a knowledge and awareness of cultural or historical meanings that inform the work. In the case of selections that are excerpts from loner works, Background serves to bring students “up to date” on what has been occurring in the narrative thus far. ‐ The Writer’s Response activity serves as a useful pre‐reading exercise to focus student’s attention on the literary work and activate their own anticipatory responses to issues that are addressed in the literature they are about to read. ‐ While the Literary Focus enables students to review or learn about for the first time a salient element of literature in the literary work: characterization, irony, plot, theme and so on.

Throughout the whole book there a diversity of motivational Exercises that enable to amplify the knowledge around a specific text to provoke different responses but always related to critical thinking. ‐ A First Thoughts reader response question immediately follows each selection, eliciting the students’ first and most immediate reaction to the selection they have just read. ‐ Reading Comprehension Questions accompany many of the lecturer’s explanations to engage the students in a dialogue between the text and its deeper meaning. ‐ Identifying Facts questions tap students’ basic comprehension of the selection. ‐ Interpreting Meanings offers interpretative and analytical discussion questions that explore the student’s deepest understanding of the selection. ‐ An Applying Meanings question combines reader response strategies with higher‐level interpretation and analytic skills, asking students to form reasoned judgements about the literary work or to find real‐world applications for key concepts they have discovered in their reading.

Lastly, in order to promote students’ academic writing about literature, students are encourage to produce two writing responses: ‐ Creative Writing Response assignments give students the opportunity to use the literary selection as a springboard for imaginative assignments, such as writing a sequel to a selection, composing a haiku, writing a biography of a character, or transforming a scene into a screenplay. ‐ While Critical Writing Response assignments provide opportunities for analysis, comparison and contrast, and other high‐level thinking skills writing exercises.

Students may be asked to compare a new piece of literature to one they have just read; defend their point of view; compare or contrast translations, themes, or characters; or analyse the use of a particular literary element in a selection.

2. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY At the beginning of the twentieth century, the colonies of the European empires covered most of the earth. But Europe’s long period of exploration, conquest and colonization was coming to an end. Much of the twentieth century would be marked by periods of widespread warfare with interim periods of uneasy peace. Colonies’ demands for independence became increasingly intense, and many European countries that began the century as world powers found their once seemingly limitless resources dwindling. Throughout the world, artists, writers, and poets sought new forms to express the monument changes they witnessed during this turbulent century.

World War I Intense competition among the European powers for overseas colonies and markets was a major cause of World War I (1914‐1918). Germany, Turkey, and Bulgaria joined Austria‐Hungary to fight the Allies, who included Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the United States. The conflict was a brutal exercise in trench warfare.

One cause of the war was growing nationalism among Eastern European Slavic peoples long dominated by the empires of Ottoman Turkey and Austria‐Hungary.

When a revolutionary backed by Serbia assassinated an Austrian archduke, Austria‐ Hungary prepared to crush the Serbs. A system of political alliances then drew other European powers into the war. The issue was not really the fate of Serbia; rather, losses in earlier conflicts and competition for overseas colonies had prompted military build‐ups and growing belligerence.

The war brought great chaos and devastation. In Russia, revolution toppled the Czar, forcing early withdrawal from the war and the establishment of a Communist regime under Lenin. The monarchies of Austria‐Hungary and Turkey collapsed soon after their defeat in the war. Several Eastern European nations gained independence, and Arab lands formerly ruled by Turkey now came under British or French control. Dissatisfaction in Italy over the distribution of lands following World War I led to the rise of Mussolini’s Fascists. In a much reduced Germany, the monarchy also toppled, and a weak democracy on the edge of economic ruin set the stage for the rise of Hitler’s Nazis.

The peace that followed World War I was short‐lived. In 1929, an economic downturn known as the Great Depression devastated economies throughout the world. The legacy of war and dire economic circumstances was great change and continued aggression in some parts of the world. The Russian Revolution, for example, caused the downfall of the monarchy and established Communist rule in Russia. In the Far East, Japan began invading China and other neighbouring countries. In Europe, dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco came into power, thus planting the seeds for further destruction in World War II.

World War II World War II began in 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The main participants in the war were the Axis powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – and the Allies – Great Britain, France, the USSR, China, the United States, and others.

In May 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies, but it wasn’t until after President Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August that the war finally ended. The jubilation of the victorious Allies was tempered as the world became aware of two horrors: the destructive power of the atomic bomb, and the Nazi attempt to exterminate all European Jews and others they considered “undesirable”. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 300,000 people, mostly civilians, were burned or irradiated to death by the two bombs. In the German death camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and elsewhere, the Nazis killed over twelve million people. Altogether, over twelve million soldiers and twenty million civilians were killed during World War II. The Cold War The end of World War II marked the beginning of the nuclear age. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as antagonistic superpowers, and the Cold War began. From the end of World War II until the period of glasnost (“openness” in Russian) ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid‐1980s, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were involved in a stupendous arms race. At the height of the Cold War, both sides had stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet twelve times. During the Cold War era the United States and the Soviet Union often helped escalate civil unrest in less industrialized nations. With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War, these conflicts lost much of their superpower backing. A case in point seems to be the Central American nation of El Salvador. In early 1992, rebel and government forces agreed to a ceasefire, ending twelve years of civil warfare that claimed over 75,000 Salvadorian lives.

New Nations Emerge More significant in the long run than the Cold War was the decline of the Western imperial powers and its result – the emergence of dozens of newly independent states in Africa and Asia, as well as the political redefinition of older nations there and in Latin America. These nations and others began to assert their own identities and reclaim territories. This process of self‐determination, however, was seldom achieved without conflict. For example, was has broken out several times in the Middle East over the establishment of Jewish and Arab states in former British Palestine. Despite much mediation, many Arabs have opposed the creation of a Jewish homeland by the United Nations. Countries like Korea and Vietnam, once freed from foreign rule, were torn apart by internal factions trying to impose their own rule. Both the Korean and Vietnam wars were, in simplest terms, conflicts between supporters of Communist and democratic governments. South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Central America are some other regions of the globe where violence is a common experience due to the conflicts of race, religion, and political beliefs.

Science and Technology The twentieth century has seen amazing developments in science and technology – telephones, phonographs, televisions, automobiles, airplanes, computers, space technology, and medical advances such as antibiotics. Particularly important advances have been made in communication and transportation. Not everyone has enjoyed the benefits of these advances, however. The majority of the world’s less‐ industrialized nations still suffer from the effects of poverty and disease. Nor have technological advances in themselves always been a boon to humanity – many of these advances have produced dangerous side effects. For example, technological progress contributed to the massacres in the trenches of World War I, the Holocaust in World War II, nuclear weapons, and ecological disasters such as the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union.

Artistic Responses to the Twentieth Century For many, the nineteenth‐century belief that human history was a record of slow but certain progress died in the after‐math of World War I. Traditional values came under attack, and art forms of the past were seen as inadequate to express the experiences of the modern world. By rejecting the old forms, writers, painters, musicians, and other creative artists were free to experiment with new themes and styles.

Film, Art and Music Most twentieth‐century painters rejected the styles of previous centuries. For example, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were influenced by African sculpture and by concepts of geometry, developed a style called Cubism, which reduced objects and figures to their basic geometric forms. In 1937 Picasso painted Guernica in reaction to the brutal German bombing of the village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It captures the horror of modern warfare in a nightmare vision that combines the abstract planes of cubism and vivid social protest. Shortly after he painted this large mural, the German secret police began harassing him at his studio in Nazi‐occupied Paris. One officer, noticing a photograph of Guernica lying on the table, asked “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did”.

After the invention of the motion picture around the turn of the century, films quickly became a new popular art form. Most films were escapist – adventures, comedies, or romantic dramas – but others reflected the pessimism of the post‐war era. Charlie Chaplin, an early cinematic master, wrote, directed, and acted in many films that took and ironic look at war, industry, and other important issues of the day. A determination to break new ground was also apparent in popular music. Two of the most innovative popular musical forms of the century were developed by African Americans: jazz and the blues. During the 1950s, rock‐and‐roll burst on the scene, causing fans to scream and swoon over their new heroes – Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard. Then, in the 1960s, superstar groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones gained adulation. Since then, hard rock, punk rock, new wave, reggae, and rap music have evolved.

2.1. LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In literature, a broad movement called Modernism flourished between 1890 and 1940. This is an umbrella term for an array of literary and artistic movements that developed (some lasting for very short periods) during the first four decades of the twentieth century. All had in common a desire to break with nineteenth‐century traditions and move in new directions. Dadaism, Cubism, and Imagism are just three of the many specific movements that fall under the general banner of Modernism. In general, modernists were concerned with the loss of traditional values brought on by the major advances and disasters of the early twentieth century. Modernist literature usually reflects the fragmentation and uncertainty that writers and poets perceived all around them. Many modernists emphasized psychological exploration over direct social commentary. Some, like James Joyce, turned to experimental techniques such as stream of consciousness. In Ulysses, Joyce used this technique to describe everything that happens to a man in a single day – including all his thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. Other writers, such as Franz Kafka and the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke, used nightmarish settings and situations to express the alienation of the individual in modern society.

Poems such as T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke broke with traditional forms to express their own personal visions. In this most famous poem The Waste Land, Eliot describes a world without faith, incapable of restoring its spiritual and moral values.

Many other modernist poets abandoned traditional rhyme and meter. In their free‐ verse poems they experimented with punctuation and the physical appearance of the poem on the page.

Responses to War While many modernists wrote elaborate, inward‐looking “studies” of human consciousness, other twentieth‐century authors turned their pens to direct and blistering accounts of the wars that raged on nearly every continent of the world.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms are two novels, written from opposite sides of the battle line that reveal the tragedy of World War I. Elie Wiesel wrote an autobiography of his own imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II in Night. In the period of general disenchantment following the world wars, literature increasingly focused on themes of alienation, uncertainty and despair.

Absurdism and Existentialism To reflect a world in which human existence is seemingly unreasonable and incoherent, playwrights such as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter created dramas with characters who speak only in banalities and with plots that go nowhere. At the end of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one tramp says “Well? Shall we go?” and the other responds, “Yes, let’s go.” The final stage direction, however, is “They do not move”.

While the theatre of the absurd tried to dramatize the “facts” of human existence, some writers began searching for a philosophy that would allow them to understand

and accept the apparent senselessness of existence. Simone de Beauvoir, Jean‐Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and others developed one such philosophy, which they called Existentialism. Existentialism takes its name from the idea that a person’s physical existence precedes his or her “essence” or meaning. This means that there are no pre‐existing meanings, values, or guidelines for human beings. But since we want and need clarity and rationality in our lives, the existentialists concluded that each person must create his or her own meaning, or essence, in life. Existentialism had a deep impact on Christian and Jewish thought, and theologians of both faiths developed their own brands of existentialism, which emphasized a re‐examination of humanity’s relationship with God. The Fantastic Some writers responded to the increasingly hostile and confusing world by creating fantasy or science fiction stories. Although the earliest examples of science fiction in literature can be traced back to the 1600s, the genre did not reach its present form until the late 1800s. In the twentieth century, science fiction has developed in two basic directions: an infatuation with technology (Isaac Asimov and others) or an exploration of humanity’s precarious place in the universe (H. G. Wells and others).

The novels of William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Stanislaw Lem often use the conventions of science fiction to make serious comments about our world.

Though the genre Sci‐Fi had its origins in the nineteenth century, Science Fiction became especially popular in the twentieth century. In Communist Russia and Eastern Europe, where totalitarian governments practiced censorship and often punished attacks on the state, science fiction became a tool of dissenting writers. By setting a tale in the distant future or in another world and then criticizing or mocking that “alien” society, writers could often veil criticisms of their own societies sufficiently to escape government censorship.

Cultural Identity and Literature Twentieth‐century writers from less‐industrialized nations often address the problems of cultural identity. They have seen their local cultures uprooted by colonialism or foreign influence, and they have had to ask themselves whether they are to celebrate their native traditions, imitate foreign models, or create new modes of expression.

In Latin America, artists have responded in different ways. The Argentinian author Jorge Luís Borges, one of the central figures in the Latin American literary “Boom” that followed World War II, devoured nearly everything European libraries had to offer, yet his brand of fiction, which blends fantastic events and philosophical inquiry, is strikingly unique and much imitated today by writers around the world.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was greatly influenced by the modernist movement, but his epic work, Las Alturas de Machu Picchu, reconciles the poet with his country’s ancient heritage.

The 1960s saw the development of Magic Realism, which contains elements of both the real world and the world of fantasy. Magic realists such as Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez were influenced by Surrealism, which encouraged the free

association of ideas as a means of exploring the unconscious mind. But magic realists were just as much influenced by the rich folklore traditions of Latin America.

In Africa, there was much controversy over the literary movement known as Négritude, which asserted the value of African traditions. Some writers believed that Négritude was a necessary response to years of imperialism, while others, like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, felt that Négritude tended to idealize Africa’s pre‐ colonial past and that African literature must instead examine that past more critically. Definitions include “a consciousness of and pride in the cultural and physical aspects of the African heritage”; “an aesthetic and ideological concept affirming the independent validity of Negro culture”.

African writers have also debated the question of which language they should write in: that of the colonizers, which in many cases has become the only common language for the descendants of different tribes, or their native tongues. Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has taken the latter position, turning to his native language Kikuyu after much success writing in English. Achebe, Soyinka and others feel that by writing in English they reach a wider audience. Many African writers choose to write in European languages introduced in their countries in colonial times because these languages help them reach a wider audience. Chinua Achebe, for example, has written a few works in his native Ibo, but such works have a relatively small audience unless they are translated. English, on the other hand, is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. By writing in English, Achebe can more readily introduce Ibo and other Nigerian experiences to the rest of the world, thereby fostering his native culture even as he forgoes his native language.

Twentieth‐century women writers also struggled to establish a cultural identity, for until the early twentieth century, most women had virtually no political voice and little representation in literature. As the twentieth century unfolded, more and more women writers addressed the plight of their sex in a world controlled by men. In her work The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir analysed women’s secondary status in society and denounced the male middle class for perceiving women as objects.

Colette, Margaret Atwood and Jamaica Kincaid, among many others, have also helped define the politics and culture of the women’s movement of the twentieth century.

Diversity of World Literatures In literature, as in history, many different stories are proceeding at once. As we approach the year 2000, both the end of a century and the end of the millennium, we look back on cataclysmic changes that cannot be easily reduced to some clear shape or significance. Very few people could have predicted the reunification of East and West Germany or the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We know only that challenges to our understanding and imagination remain. “The only certain thing about the future,” historian Eric Hobsbawm writes in The Age of the Empire, “is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.”

3. CHINUA ACHEBE 1930‐2013, Nigeria

Illustrated by Nilberto Jorge

3.1. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chinua Achebe was born and grew up in the Ibo village of Ogidi when Nigeria was still a British colony. Although Achebe won a scholarship to study medicine, his love of literature and growing involvement with African nationalism changed his career.

The nationalist movement after World War II brought with it a new sense of African self‐awareness and confidence, and it occurred to Achebe that he and his fellow Africans might have their own stories to tell. Achebe’s insight made him question the colonial‐era notion that Africa culture was inferior to the culture the European colonists had grafted onto Africa, usually by force. As a gesture defining his roots, Achebe dropped his first name, Albert, which his parents had given him in honour of Queen Victoria’s husband.

In 1958, while working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, Achebe published his first novel, Things Fall Apart. The novel tells of an Ibo man whose personal life is ruined as a result of colonial pressures. This was the first of three novels that Achebe wrote to explore the Ibo past and the destructive effects of colonialism on African cultures and on individual Africans.

In 1960, the new nation of Nigeria, with over two hundred ethnic groups, was not a unified country. The four largest ethnic groups, the Ibo, Hausa, Fulani and Youruba, were constantly fighting for land and power. Many of the frictions originated in the groups’ very different religions, languages and outlooks on life. Eventually, in 1967, things fell apart. Achebe was one of the many Ibo who unsuccessfully tried to secede from Nigeria and establish a new republic called Biafra. In the worst months of the bloody, three‐year civil war, about twelve thousand people, mostly children, starved to death each day. Overall, somewhere between one million and two million people died – many of them from disease and hunger. Several stories in Achebe’s story collection Girls at War (1973) describe the tragedies and horrors of these years of civil war.

3.2. READER’S GUIDE FOR MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR Background Nigeria is a West African nation of great ethnic diversity. Two of the largest ethnic groups in the southeast are the Ibo and the Ibibio. Since the end of World War II, many young Nigerians have left their rural villages to attend universities and settle in large cities such as Lagos, Nigeria’s capital. As a result of this migration, some young people have abandoned their communities’ traditions for more westernized ways. Yet many have found it difficult to break away from their roots, and these young people find themselves caught in the clash between the old and the new.

“Marriage Is a Private Affair” is about two young people, an Ibo man and an Ibibio woman. They live in Lagos and have broken traditions by marrying each other. In contrast to the young couple is the man’s father, a rural villager who rigidly adheres to traditional Ibo ways.

Writer’s Response The story involves a conflict between generations. Do you think that it is inevitable that generations clash? Describe a situation that you have witnessed or heard about that illustrates the problem of conflict between older and younger generations.

Literary Focus In verbal irony, language is used to say one thing but to mean the opposite. For example, a friend is probably being ironic if he tells you, “I just love doing five hours of grammar homework every night”. As you read, “Marriage Is a Private Affair”, think about whether Achebe is using verbal irony in the title of his story.

3.3. EXERCISES FOR MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR First Thoughts Do you think that Okeke will see his grandsons and make peace with his son and daughter‐in‐law? Or do you think he will continue to stick by his traditional beliefs and die without seeing his grandsons? What makes you say so?

Reading Comprehension Questions 1.

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Lagos, Nigeria’s former capital is a coastal city of more than a million people. Do you think that city dwellers are more open‐minded than people who live in rural areas? Explain.

What do you think of marital prohibitions based on ethnicity?

Why did Nnaemeka’s father speak in a “milder tone” before he heard the name?

What do you think Mrs. Ochuba actually did? Why do you think that Achebe includes this incident?

What unreported event does the picture announce?

What flaws does Okeke display?

Do you find the “excessive deference” realistic? Explain.

How do these and other details show Achebe’s use of verbal irony in titling his story?

Identifying Facts 1.

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What ethnic difference separates Nnaemeka and Nene? In predicting that his father will be unhappy with their marriage, what reasons does Nnaemeka give?

What does Okeke, Nnaemeka’s father, believe a man must look for in a wife?

What is his opinion of Nene’s job as a teacher?

In a sentence, summarize Okeke’s treatment of his son and daughter‐in‐law for the first eight years of their marriage. In contrast, how do Nnaemeka’s Ibo friends in Lagos feel about Nene?

What request does Nene make in her letter to her father‐in‐law? After reading the letter, what happens to the resolution Okeke has “built up over so many years”, and what feelings disturb his sleep that night?

Interpreting Meanings 1.

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Explain in your own words the change of heart that Okeke experiences at the story’s end. Why do you think learning about his grandchildren has affected him more than seeing his son’s wedding photograph?

What role does nature seem to play near the end of the story?

Do you think Achebe is using verbal irony in the title of this story? Does the story reveal that marriage is a private affair or a public affair? Explain.

In the conflict between Nnaemeka’s ways and his father’s, does Achebe seem strongly to favour one side or the other?

The subject of the story is a marriage that occurs in opposition to a father’s wishes. The theme is the truth about human nature revealed in the story. In your own words state what you see as the theme of this story. Remember that a change in a main character and the nature of the conflict’s resolution often indicate the theme of a story.

Applying Meanings In your opinion, should marriage be a “private affair”, or should social considerations play an important role? Discuss your views with the class.

3.4. CREATIVE WRITING RESPONSE

Writing a Sequel Achebe ends his story without resolving the conflict between Okeke and his son.

What do you think Okeke will do? Write a brief sequel in which you show Okeke’s subsequent behaviour. You may incorporate ideas discussed in the First Thoughts question. Be sure your sequel takes into account the characters of Okeke, Nnaemeka and Nene as Achebe presented them.

3.5. CRITICAL WRITING RESPONSE Analysing a Conflict The central conflict of this story, as in much of Achebe’s fiction, is between the old ways and the new. This conflict takes many forms: rural versus urban lifestyles, arranges marriages vs. love marriages and, housewives vs. career women. Choose one of these conflicts. In a brief essay, describe the conflict and discuss how it is, or is not, resolved by the story’s end. At the end of your essay, describe your own response to the issues raised by this conflict.