Nigeria: The Critics and Contemporary Literary Criticism

24 June 2007
opinion

Not few a literary critic, especially in Nigeria, a third world country grappling with the arduous challenge of overcoming its developmental worries, suffered the agonizing palpitation occasioned by Abiola Irele's 1988 bitter pill of a statement that"it must seem strictly odd, at the best of times, that an individual should devote an entire active life to reading and producing commentaries upon what others have written," as this writer asserts.

NEARLY twenty years after Irele's comment, the regrettably parlous state of Nigerian literary criticism suggests that the critical edifice is succumbing to an erroneous mentality conceived around its functionality. It is not as if the Nigerian critical establishment has ever achieved the ideal status which it has so exuberantly prescribed for itself, even in those glorious heydays of the legendary practitioners. After all, from as far as we can remember, the demonstration of various shades of disenchantment, dissatisfaction and even disillusionment at the Nigerian, nay, African critical attitude, has characterized its existence. There has never been an era of Nigerian literary criticism that summarily escaped its own caustic lashes. We have been outraged by the "anthropologically curious" triumvirate of Anne Tibble, Judith Gleason, Margaret Laurence as we have been suspicious of the warm literary midwifery of the G. D. Killams, Gerald Mores and Eustace Palmers.

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