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"When the first African novels emerged in the 1960s and subsequent decades, critics privileged the realist mode for its capacity to project a historically-grounded, anti-colonial politics. But the celebration of overtly realist novels as direct and unmediated records of social life typically entailed the neglect of their formal content as well as the derogation of other formally dissident or complex examples. Later, when the economic and political failures of the new independent African states had become clear to see, the pendulum of critical opinion swung the other way. Critics now exalted anti-mimetic novels (especially ones containing oral and popular genres like allegory, fable and animism), praising them for their artfulness and disinterestedness. As critic Susan Andrade has noted, neither of these approaches acknowledged the artfulness of realism or the politics of anti-mimeticism. In a survey incorporating many ground-breaking novels of the last half century, this module will introduce students to the history and development of the novel in Africa, asking how and why African writers have engaged and negotiated or departed from realism across a range of historical moments and regional contexts. In doing so, careful consideration will be given not only to generic form but also to questions of social authority, “authenticity”, transmission and to the gendered and/or queer dimensions of the texts under discussion. Prescribed authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah, Bessie Head, Nuruddin Farah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zoë Wicomb, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. "
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