Achebe, Ngugi, Armah and Kipling : A comparative study of resilience
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Date
2023
Authors
Atal Amel
Taleb Nesrine
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University
Abstract
This present research studied the theme of resilience in all of Achebe’s Things fall apart, Ngugi’s A grain of wheat and Armah’s The beautyful ones are not yet born from both a dialogic and postcolonial approach. The aim of this dissertation is to draw thematic parallels between these postcolonial novels and Kipling’s poem entitled “If”; it seeks to unveil how Achebe, Ngugi and Armah embraced the Kiplingese poetic theme of resilience and engaged accordingly in a dialogue with it. Mainly, we have put emphasis on the personal motivations, conduct and ethical choices of the respective protagonists: Obierika, Mumbi and The Man to assess the significance of resilience in reflecting the African experience amidst the larger political and sociocultural forces. To achieve this goal, we relied on Bakhtin’s Dialogism combined with his prominent concepts of Stylization, Hidden Polemics and the Ideological nature of Characters developed in his books entitled The Dialogic imagination (1981) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). In addition, we supplemented our study with Aschroft’s analytical process of Appropriation and Abrogation introduced in The empire writes back: Theory and practice in postcolonial literature (2002), along with Fanon’s philosophical theories developed in his seminal work The wretched of the earth (1963). The findings of our analysis of the three novels under scrutiny showed to a certain degree a nuanced stylization of Kipling’s classical poem “If”, it revealed the extent to which the three protagonists stand as markers of this particular Kiplingese association. The writers in their attempt to amplify the voice of the African man in colonial and postcolonial eras, they adorned their narratives with polemics subtly challenging Kipling’s confinement of the ideals of resilience advocated in his canonical work.
Description
72p. ; 30cm(+CD-Rom)
Keywords
colonialism, dialogism, Kipling, resilience
Citation
Literature and Civilization