Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture

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Pantheon Books, 1993 - 305 pages
By "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest" (New York Times), Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage is a fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multi-culturalism. This volume brings together nineteen iconoclastic essays from the past twenty-five years on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics - many of which are published here for the first time. Whether he is discoursing on the idea of "negritude" in "From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image" or on protest literature in "The Writer in a Modern African State"; debunking the orthodoxies of contemporary literary criticism in "The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies"; offering surprising readings of Shakespeare and Aristophanes; expounding on the tragedy of "the recurrent cycle of human stupidity"; skewering intellectual demigods or his own critics, Soyinka is never less than profound and incisive. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gives a startling vision of culture in our times.

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Contents

Towards a True Theatre
3
A Reassessment of the African Literary Image
7
The Writer in a Modern African State
15
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

Wole Soyinka was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State of Nigeria on July 13, 1934. He attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before receiving a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England in 1958. He has held research and teaching appointments at several universities including the University of Ibadan, the University of Ife, Cornell University, Emory University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Loyola Marymount. He is a distinguished playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, political activist, and literary scholar. His plays include The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides, A Play for Giants, Death and the King's Horsemen, From Zia with Love, The Beatification of Area Boy, and King Baabu. His collections of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems, A Shuttle in the Crypt, and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. His novels include The Interpreters, which won the 1968 Jock Campbell Literary Award, and Season of Anomy. His autobiographical works include Ake: The Years of Childhood, Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Memoir of the Nigerian Crisis, and You Must Set Forth at Dawn. His literary essays collections include Myth, Literature and the African World and Art, Dialogue and Outrage. During the civil war in Nigeria, he appealed for cease-fire in an article. Accused of treason, he was held in solitary confinement for 22 months. Two of his works, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka and Poems from Prison, were secretly written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

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