Intertextuality As A Vital Aspect Of Literary Creativity: A Study of Chimamanda’s Purple Hibiscus (Published)
Some critical theories have evolved over the years following Plato’s inauguration of enquiries into the nature and value of literature. Some of them are mimesis, pragmatism, autobiography, and so on. Each theory covers a certain province in the universe of literary creativity and criticism. Mimetic theory for instance is concerned with literature as imitation; and pragmatic theory seeks to ascertain the effect of literature on individuals and society. Autobiographical theory dwells on the creative writer and their inspiration; and Reader Response theory describes the position of the reader in the creative process; while formalism designates and treats the text as an autonomous entity. One aspect of literary creativity and criticism, intertextuality, has however not been given so much attention despite its enormous presence in the arena of modern literary practicum. Foregrounded by German Julia Kristeva as a vital aspect of literary creativity, intertextuality designates a literary text as a field for the display of influences by some other texts written before it. This study undertakes a critical validation of Kristeva’s postulation with an intertextual survey of the world of Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. It was discovered that Purple Hibiscus shows evidences of her having read innumerable literary texts prior to her writing it, so that the novel demonstrates identifiable inter-textual relationship with a lot of other literary works written before it.
Keywords: Chimamanda Adichie, Chinua Achebe, Intertextuality, Julia Kristeva, Purple Hibiscus
Romantic Ecologism: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the False Eco-criticism Tributes (Published)
Colonial and postcolonial environmental criticisms of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA) have attributed to the novel eco-critical consciousness of significance, apparently ignoring the concern for environmental sustainability that is the foundation of current arts and humanities endeavour into the environmental discourses. On the strength of representations of human and non-human nature in the novel, critics have adjudged the novel to be a quintessence of the ecocritical ideal. Against some of the conceptual underpinnings of foremost ecocriticism postulations, ecological consciousness attributed to TFA are contested in this present study as false and misleading. The utilitarian values of ecocriticism and the remediating goal of literature in environmental studies, which are absent in the primary text and many of its secondary readings, are recommended as the basis for attributing ecocritical consciousness to texts. Natural entities and practices in the novel are contested as contextualization devices, employed by the author, for situating characters and events in their organic, pre-colonial African setting, and are described in this paper as the lost ecological values of Africa that are decried by contemporary critics of the global impacts of the science and technological cultures on the environment. This study employs ecocriticism as its theoretical basis.
Keywords: African literature, Chinua Achebe, Ecocriticism, Environment, Literature, postcolonial literature