tinati

Okay, I read earnestly all the way to page 127, but this literary criticism is still all beyond me. Many references to works I've not only not read, but never heard of. Maybe I'll come back to this after I've read a lot more of the literature. I did get some names for further reading: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Robert Serumaga (Uganda), Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), Yambo Ouloguem (Mali), Camara Leye (Guinea), Mongo Beti (Cameroon), Amos Tutuola (Nigeria), William Conton (Sierra Leone), Lewis Nkosi (South Africa), Peter Abrahams (South Africa), Alex La Guma (South Africa). Also, there was one passage that really spoke to me, on page 97, in The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies: We are familiar, probably even excruciatingly bored, with the question: For whom does the writer write? Very rarely is the same degree of social angst encountered in the case of the critic. Indeed the question is very rarely posed: For whom does the critic write? For Mr Dele Bus-Stop of Idi-Oro? Or for the Appointments and Promotions Committee and the learned Journals International Syndicate of Berne, Harvard, Nairobi, Oxford, or Prague? Unquestionably there is an intellectual cop-out in the career of any critic who covers reams of paper with unceasing lament on the failure of this or that writer to write for the masses of the people, when he himself assiduously engages, with a remorseless exclusivity, only the incestuous productivity of his own academic - that is, bourgeois-situated - literature. It is a very convenient case of having one's cake and eating it, or feeding on it, yet damning the output of producers of literatures in one's own community - often in the most scabrous, dismissive language - over and over again, treading the same grooves, looking for something new to say and never finding it, pouncing on the latest product of the same pariah writer like a famished voyager, building up CV's at the expense of the condemned productivity - the genuine productivity, not the parasitic kind which is the critic's - indeed, teaching it at all. 'Reactionary', 'elitist', 'privileged', 'a splurge of romantic decadence', 'articulator of the neo-colonial agent class' . . . well then, what is the critic doing?

2022-10-29 03:33