Unit 4 :- Translation studies

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8) Tejaswini Niranjana. “Introduction: History in Translation” Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context, 1992 

1) Abstract:-

For a while now, some of the most urgent debates in contemporary cultural and literary studies have emerged out of the troubled interface of poststructuralist theory and historical studies. In its most basic formulation, the problem is that of articulating radical political agendas within a deconstructive framework. For a discipline like literary studies, the raison d'être of which is the analysis of representation, the critique of representation coming from within has engendered profoundly self-reflexive anxieties. 

It is in the context of this crisis that Tejaswini Niranjana's examination of translation as critical practice is made possible. Her analysis seems to amplify and elaborate the possibilities of the claim made by other postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as feminists such as Jane Gallop and Nancy K. Miller, that deconstruction can be used in politically enabling ways. Insisting that a questioning of humanist or Enlightenment models of representation and translation "can underwrite a new practice of translation . . . reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance" (6), Niranjana persuasively shows that a critique of presence can be taken to its limits and yet not incapacitate the interventionist critic.

She begins by addressing what she sees as deconstructive criticism's failure to address the problem of colonialism, as well as the neglect by translation studies to ask questions about its own historicity. Contemporary critiques of representation have not extended themselves to the point of questioning the idea of translation, of re-presenting linguistic meaning in interlinguistic transfers. Translation is made possible by the belief in mimesis, which in turn assumes the purity of the original. Niranjana cites powerful examples from the post-colonial context to show how translation was "a significant technology of colonial domination" (21); the use of translation to codify Hindu law, for instance, is revealed as imperialist cathexis, "to create a subject position for the colonised" (19) which would "discipline and regulate the lives of" Hindu subjects (18). In other words, the notion of "original" text was itself used to fashion the native's essence-an instance of colonialism's attempt to erase heterogeneity.

2) Key Arguments:-

In the colonial context, a certain conceptual economy is created by the set of related questions that is the problematic of translation. Conventionally, translation depends on the Western philosophical notions of reality, representation, and knowledge. 

Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation. Paradoxically, translation also provides a place in "history" for the colonized.

She was, therefore, discuss the pertinence of the critique of historicism to a world undergoing decolonization, given the enduring nature of Hegelian presentation of the non-West and the model of teleological history that authorizes them, a questioning of the model could underwrite a new practice of translation.

In the final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I discuss the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space. Throughout the book, my discussion functions in all the registers philosophical, linguistic, and political-in which translation "works" under colonialism. If at any point I seem to dwell on only one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.

3) Main Analysis:-

Another aspect of post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.

A critique of historicism might show us a way of deconstructing the "pusillanimous" and "deceitful" Hindus of Mill and Hegel. Her concern here is not, of course, with the alleged misrepresentation of the "Hindus." Rather, I am trying to question the with holding of reciprocity and the essentializing of “difference” (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of co evalness) that permits a stereotypical construction of the other.

This kind of deployment of translation, I argue, colludes with or enables the construction of a teleological and hierarchical model of cultures that places Europe at I the pinnacle of civilization, and thus also provides a position ,for the colonized. 

This work belongs to the larger context of the “crisis” in "English" that is a consequence of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary studies in a rapidly decolonized world.

4) Conclusion :-

My central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for “History" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial“ perspective- that of an  emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates. 

Since it is part of her argument that the problematics of translation and the writing of history are inextricably bound together, She should briefly go over Spivak's main points regarding the "Subaltern historians. Their strategic use of post-structuralist ideas may help us see more clearly how the notions of history and translation she wish to reinscribe are not only enabled by the post-colonial critique of historiography but might also further strengthen that critique.

9) E.V. Ramakrishnan, “ Shifting Centres and Emerging Margins: Translation and the Shaping of the Modernist Poetic Discourse in Indian Poetry”, in Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Region, Modernity, 2017

1) Abstract :-

This article examines the role played by translation in shaping a modernist poetic sensibility in some of the major literary traditions of India in the twentieth century, between 1950 and 1970.The chapter will study examples from Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi, to understand how such translation of modern Western poets were used to breach the hegemony of prevailing literary sensibilities and poetics modes. Many Indian poets such as Buddhadeb Bose, Agyeya,Gopalakrishna Adiga, Dilip Chitre and Ayyappa Paniker were also translators. Translation from Africa and Latin America poetry played a significant role in this phase of modernism. Neruda and Parra were widely translated into India languages during this phase.

In this context, translation enacted a critical act of evaluation, a creative act of intervention, and performative act of legitimation,in evolving a new poetic during the modernist phase of Indian poetry. The term ‘translation ‘ to suggest a range of cultural practices, from critical commentary to creation of intertextual text. Andre Lefevere’s concept of translation as reflections/ rewriting , the chapter argues that ‘rewritings’ and ‘reflections’ found in the ‘less obvious form of criticism…,commentary, historiography , teaching, the collection of works in anthologies, the production of playshare also instance of translation. 

 An essay on T.S. Eliot in Bengali by Sudhindranayh Dutt, or scathing critique in Malayalam on the poetic practices of Vallathol Narayana Menon by Ayyappa Paniker, can also described as ‘ translational’ writing as they have elements of translation embedded in them.

2) Key Arguments :-

It has been argued that the Idea of a ‘Self-reflection or Self-validating’ literary text, which is central to modernist poetic, is rooted in an ideology of the aesthetic that was complicated with colonialism. 

• D.R.Nagaraj has pointed out that as nationalism became the ideology of the nation state. 

• How are we to evaluate the modernisms that emerged in the postcolonial phase in India? Critics such as Simon Gikandi,Susan Friedman, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and Aparna Dharwadker have argued that Non-Western modernism are not mere derivate versions of European hegemonic practice. 

• In the context of Bengali, as Amiya Dev has observed, ‘It was not because they imbibed modernism that the adbunik Bengali writers turned away from Rabindranath Tagore.In ‘The Necessity of poetry’, Dutta argues that the persistence of poetry through the ages in all societies ,particularly among the unsophisticated and the primitive, attest to its necessity. 

• Mardhekar points to their blind search for survival in a hostile world. The surreal image in the line, 'sadness has poisonous eyes made of glass, sums up the opaqueness of their vision and the toxic nature of their condemned existence unrelieved by any sense of benign order of life.

3) Main Analysis :-

The relation between ‘Modernity’ and ‘Modernism’ in Indian context , the purpose of discussion it may be broadly stated that Modernity designates an epochal period of wide-ranging transformations brought about by the advent of colonialism, capitalist economy, industrial mode of production. 

● The colonial Modernity informed literary and cultural movements, beginning from the reformist movement of the nineteenth century to the modernist movement of the mid-twentieth century. 

● The term ‘Modernism’ implies a literary/artistic movement that was characterised by experimentation, conscious rejection of the nationalist/ Romantic as well as popular. 

● The pistcolonial context adds a complex political dimension to the aesthetic of Indian Modernism.

The reception of Western modernist discourses in India was mediated by the dynamics of socio-political upheavals related to the formation of the nation state and the realignment of power structures in society. 

• Translation enables us to delineate the complex artistic and ideological undercurrents that shaped the course of modernism in Indian literature. 

• The three representative modernist authors from three separate Indian literary traditions Sudhindranath Dutta(1901-60) from Bengali, ,B.S.Mardhekar(1909-56) from marathi,and Ayyappa Paniker(1936-2004) from Malayalam. These three authors was bilingual and wrote essay in English as well as their own languages. Bengali emerged in 1930s and continued into the 40s and 50s, Marathi from 1950s to the 60s.

• Dutta's discussion of Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, Byron, Mallarmé and Yeats prove his mastery over Western thought. As a modernist poem, "The Camel-Bird' moves beyond the personal by embodying the condition of inertia that a colonised community is condemned to. 

● B. S. Mardhekar transformed Marathi poetry and its dire dynamics in terms of its vision, form and content. Mardhekar intervened in Marathi literary tradition as an insider who had mastered the insights given by an alien tradition.

● In 'Mice in the Wet Barrel Died', which became the iconic modernist poem of Marathi. The metaphor of the mice is meant to evoke the morbid and the malevolent in modern life. When this poem was originally published in Marathi, in Abhiruchi, it was met with several disapproving comments, leading to long discussions and even parodies of the poem in Marathi.

Ayyappa Paniker was a poet, critic and translator, who, apart from introducing world poetry to Malayalam readers

• The title, 'Kurukshetram', signifies the place where the epic battle that forms the central theme of the Mahabharata took place. The poem progresses through broken images from contemporary life, but there are also redemptive memories of forgotten harmonies that recur through the metaphor of the dream. The evocative rhythms of the poem provoke a profound disquiet that cannot be particularised. The self is seen as a site of struggle and conflict, but the modern men and women are denied the tragic dignity of epic heroes. 

• It is important to understand the indigenous roots/routes of modernity and modernism in all the three writers discussed above. They partake of the logic of a postcolonial society which had already developed internal critiques of Western modernity.

4) Conclusion :-

Thus, language became, for the modernists, the only reality that they could relate to. Their moment of recognition. enabled by the discourses of 'Western' modernism, was postcolonial in its essence. The self-reflexive mo(ve)ment was also made possible by the carrying across of not content or form, but an interior mode of being that questioned the prevailing limits of freedom.

Unit 3 :- Translation theory

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I am Asari Bhavyang from the Department of English and recently we have completed  Articles. It was very wonderful and we all enjoyed it. Dilip Barad sir has tried his best to explain to us. we have got thinking Activity task so, let's begin...

6) GN Devy, “Translation Theory: An Indian Perspective”, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature. 1993 

1) Abstract:-

This article is about the role of translation in communicating literary movements across linguistic borders. According to J. Hillis Miller ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.’Chaucer, Dryden, and the Pope used the tool of translation to recover a sense of order. The tradition of Anglo-Irish literature branched out of translating Irish works into English.No critic has taken a well-defined position on the place of translations in literary history. Origins of literary movements and literary traditions inhabit various acts of translation. Translations are popularly perceived as unoriginal, not much thought has been devoted to the aesthetics of translation.

2) Key Arguments:-

Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation proposed a threefold classification of translations: 

(a) those from one verbal order to another verbal order within the same language system

(b) those from one language system to another language system, and

(c) those from a verbal order to another system of signs (Jakobson, 1959, pp. 232– 9).

In Chomsky’s linguistics, the concept of semantic universals plays an important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism can be stretched. In actual practice, even in Europe, the translating consciousness treats the SL and TL as parts of a larger and continuous spectrum of various intersecting systems of verbal signs

J.C. Catford presents a comprehensive statement of theoretical formulation about the linguistics of translation in A Linguistic Theory of Translation, in which he seeks to isolate various linguistic levels of translation. His basic premise is that since translation is a linguistic act any theory of translation must emerge from linguistics: ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly, then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language – a general linguistic theory’ (Catford, 1965, p. vii).

During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy:

•  comparative studies for Europe, 
• Orientalism for the Orient, and
• anthropology for the rest of the world

After the ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, historical linguistics in Europe depended heavily on Orientalism. And after Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, linguistics started treating language with an anthropological curiosity.

3) Main Analysis:-

The Problems in Translation Study

The translation problem is not just a linguistic problem. It is an aesthetic and ideological problem with an important bearing on the question of literary history.

 Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another verbal system of signs. It is a replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of signs within a related language.

The Problems in Translation Study

The translation is not a transposition of significance or signs. After the act of translation is over, the original work still remains in its original position. The translation is rather an attempted revitalization of the original in another verbal order and temporal space. Like literary texts that continue to belong to their original periods and styles and also exist through successive chronological periods, translation at once approximates the original and transcends it.

problems of the relationship between origins and sequentiality

the very foundation of modern Indian literature was laid through acts of translation, whether by Jayadeva, Hemcandra, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, H.N. Apte, or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

4) Conclusion :-

Comparative literature implies that between two related languages there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be areas of significance that can never be shared.

 When the soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the relationship between form and essence, structure and significance are guided by this metaphysics.

The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of translation.

7) A.K. Ramanujan, “On Translating a Tamil Poem”, Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed Vinay Dharwadkar. Oxford University Press, 1999

1) Abstract:-

'How does one translate a poem from another time, another culture,another language? Ramanujan translated poems from Tamil were written two thousand years ago in a comer of south India, in a Dravidian language relatively untouched by the other classical language of India, Sanskrit. The subject of this paper is not the fascinating external history of this literature, but translation, the transport of poems from classical Tamil to modem English; the hazards, the damages in transit, the secret paths, and the lucky by passes.The chief difficulty of translation is its impossibility. Frost once even identified poetry as that which is lost in translation.

We know now that no translation can be 'literal,' or 'word for word'. That is where the impossibility lies. The only possible translation is a 'free' one. What is everyday in one language must be translated by what is everyday in the 'target' language also, and what is eccentric must find equally eccentric equivalents. In this article Ramanujan took various examples of Tamil poems that he translated into English and he described difficulties that he faced during translation.

2) Key Arguments :-

Evans-Pritchard, the anthropologist, used to say: If you translate all the European arguments for atheism into Azande, they would come out as arguments for God in. Azande. Such observations certainly disabuseus of the commonly-held notion of 'literal' translation.

Woollcott suggests that English does not have left branching possibilities, but they are a bit abnormal.

Hopkins and Dylan Thomas used those possibilities stunningly, as we see in Thomas's 'A Refusal to Moum the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London; both were Welshmen, and Welsh is a left-branching language.

Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry the leftward syntax is employed for special poetic effects-it alternates with other, more 'normal', types of English sentences. In Tamil poetry the leftward syntax is not eccentric, literary or offbeat. but part of everyday 'natural' speech.

One could not use Dylanese to translate Tamil, even though many of the above phrases from Thomas can be translated comfortably with the same word order in Tamil.

3) Main Analysis :-

The collocations and paradigms make for metonymies and metaphors, multiple contextual meanings clusters special to each language, quile untranslatable into another language like Tamil. Even when the elements of a system may be similar in two languages, like father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, etc., in kinShip, the system of relations and the feelings traditionally encouraged each relative are ali culturally sensitive and therefore part of the expressive repertoire of poets and novelists.

Ramanujan took two different poems about love (What She Said) and war (A Young Warrior) and made point that, when we move from one to the other we are struck by the associations across them forming a web not only of the akam and puram genres. But also of the five landscape.; with all their contents signifying moods. And the themes and motifs of love and war.

 Love and war become metaphors for one another. In the poem "A Leaf In Love And War" we see entwines the two themes of love and war - in an ironic juxtaposition. A wreath of nocci is worn by warrior in war poems a nocci leafskirt is given by a lover to his woman in love poem.

Example God Krishna: both lovers and warriors

Ramanujan take a closer look at the original of Kapilar's poem Ainkurunuru 203. And he point out that The word annay (in spoken Tamil, ammo), literally 'mother', is a familiar term of address for any woman, here a 'girl friend'. So I have translated it as 'friend', to make clear that the poem is not addressed to a mother (as some other poems are) but to a girl friend.

To translate is to 'metaphor', to 'carry across'. Translations are trans-positions, re enactments, interpretations. Some elements of the original cannot be transposed at all. One can often convey a sense of the original rhythm. but not the language-bound metre: one can mimic levels of diction, but not the actual sound of the original words.

4) Conclusion :-

the translation must not only represent,, but re present, the original. one walks a tightrope between the to-language and the from-language, in a double loyalty.a translator is an 'artist on oath'.

sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. at such times one draws consolation from parables like the following. 

if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeed in 'carrying' the poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

Unit 2: Comparative Literature

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I am Asari Bhavyang from the Department of English and recently we have completed  Articles. It was very wonderful and we all enjoyed it. Dilip Barad sir has tried his best to explain to us. we have got thinking Activity task so, let's begin...

4) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993. 

1) Abstract:-

Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space.

Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature.

 Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. The popular understanding of comparative literature means different cultures across the world.

2) Key Arguments:-

Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of postmodernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

"What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can a comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literature have a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study?"

→ Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.

→ The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

3) Main Analysis:-

The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents.

 Different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on.

Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when said:

"Everywhere there is a connection, everywhere there is an illustration. No single event, no single literature is adequately comprehended except in relation to other events, to other literature."

→ Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to "keep informed about foreign productions and advised anyone else to do the same. It is becoming more and more obvious to me," he remarked, "that poetry is the common property of all mankind."

→ Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline.

→ Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949, suggest that:

"Comparative Literature ...will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives, suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve."

4) Conclusion:-

The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.

→ Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. The work of scholars such as Toury, Lefevere, Hermans, Lembert, and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural change.

→ Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part.

→ Comparative Literature has always claimed that translation is a subcategory, but as translation studies establish themselves firmly as a subject-based in the inter-cultural study and offer a methodology of some rigor, both in terms of theoretical and descriptive work, so comparative literature appears less like a discipline and more like a branch of something else.

Seen in this way, the problem of the crisis could then be put into perspective and the long, unresolved debate on whether comparative literature is or is not a discipline in its own right could finally and definitely be shelved.

5) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207

1) Abstract:-

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World.

This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first-century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World.

This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first-century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

2) Key Arguments:-

Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being  Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social  networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer, will not  only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in  much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the  belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy,  interconnected world that never existed before)

Paul Gilroy analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment,  and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why many discussions of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty-first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002: p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective,  or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

Darnton’s assessment seriously that we are now in the fifth decade of the fourth information age in the history of humankind, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand not only the contours of the discipline of Comparative Literature  – and for that matter, the Humanities as a whole – from the perspective of information - and media-specific analysis, but that we also ought to come to terms with the epistemic disjunction between our digital age and everything that came before it.

Walter Benjamin did in  The Arcades Project (1928 – 40; 1999), it is necessary, I believe, to interrogate both the media and methodologies for the study of literature, culture, and society. 

The “ problem ” of Comparative Literature is to figure out how to take seriously the range of new authoring, annotation, and sharing platforms that have transformed global cultural production.

3) Main Analysis:-

• Comparative Media Studies:-

For Nelson, hypertext is a:-
Body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper [ … ] Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world’s written knowledge.
Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets.
Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets.

Jerome McGann argues with regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

• Comparative Data Studies:-

Lev Manovich and Noah  Wardrip - Fruin, the field of “ cultural analytics ” has emerged over the past five years to bring the tools of high - end computational analysis and data visualization to dissect large-scale cultural datasets.

Jerome McGann argues with regard to the first in his elegant analysis of “ radiant textuality, ” the differences between the codex and the electronic versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies:-

James Boyle points out, there are many corporate entities eager to regulate the public domain and control the “ commons of the mind. ” 10 For Boyle, the real danger is not unauthorized file-sharing but “ failed sharing ” due to enclosures and strictures placed upon the world of the creative commons (Boyle, 2008: p. 182).

Scholars such as McKenzie Wark and  Kathleen Fitzpatrick have even “ published ” early versions of their entire books on  Commentpress.

4) Conclusion:-

This article mainly focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages  (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for knowledge creation and  distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

The Only Story

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I am Asari Bhavyang from Department of English and recently we have completed a discussion on novel "The Only Story ". It was a very wonderful novel and we all enjoyed it. Dilip Barad sir has tried his best to explain to us. we have got thinking Activity task so, let's begin...

Julian Barnes :-

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize - Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005), and won the prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

Following an education at the City of London School and Merton College, Oxford, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Subsequently, he worked as a literary editor and film critic. He now writes full-time. His brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specialized in Ancient Philosophy.

 1) Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically  

As we know that this Novel is a Meomoery novel its narrative pattern is a first-person narration, second-person narration, and third-person narration. Paul goes on to introduce another feature of memory that will shape his story. we also get to know about the time period that is divided into three parts. In the first part, we came to know the story when Paul Roberts was 69-70 years old.  Then in the second part, we get to know the story of paul Before 15-20 Years of his life. so, we can see that story is not going in one flow but it is Meomery's novel so, paul is remembering his past and telling about his past life by remembering it.

Trauma is Memory

Imperfection of Memory

Meomory Priority

Memory and Morality

History is collective memory = Memory is personal history 

2) Postmodern Novel:- we have seen tat julian barns brings post modernity in his work and when something is happening then it is commented . This novel also talk about the Existentialism. 

“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. You may point out –correctly –that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.”.

3) Theme of Love  :- 

Love is not alone but we can see that with love Duty , religion, family all are parsul of the life and we have to move with all this things. 

Laconian Intterpretation :-

Remeber , as you read this small book, generally and specificallyabout love, remember that suffering is after all , the latin root for passion"Ellen prentiss campbell

The etymology of passion :- patior = Suffering

                                               Intense desire = Sexusl in nature 

• Rational or irrational 

• modern version = unclear

• intense desire = pain and suffering ( action )   

• hey can strengthen social bonds. Completing a crossword puzzle on your own is impressive, but you should never feel bad if you need to ask for help. ...

• They improve your vocabulary. ...

• They increase your knowledge base. ...

• They can relieve stress. ...

• They boost your mood.

when passion turns into suffering then it is life changing or we can say life defining it is mostly about youth to age and infatuation to wearines. Joan tells us that old lady is silent looker and she won cross world puzzle by cheating . 

suasan is having 3 love story one with Gerald then Gardan then paul.for man love is life of part and for women love is whole Existance.

"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."

This sentence, which introduced this most recent book of Julian Barnes to his potential readers, was pretty much my Achilles heel from Page 1. I don’t quite understand how you can adjust the levels of love, like making marks on a burette and letting the content drip as per your desire of colour and consistency of the final emotion. Quantifying love is beyond my comprehension.

And yet, there is a certain granular tenderness in this story of a young man and his (almost) thirty years senior lover that prevents this love story from turning into a chore.

4) Critique of Crosswords :-

A symbol is anything that alludes to something else, usually something abstract, such as an idea or belief. A literary symbol is an object, a person, a situation, or an action that has a literal meaning in a storey but suggests or represents other meanings.

In 'The Only Story,' Julian Barnes captures the nuances of social life in twentieth-century England. The crossword puzzle was such an important part of this traditional British pastime that several characters in this novel were found meaningfully engaged with it.

t is said that Crossword puzzles have several benefits like:

5) Paul - the unreliable narrator :- 

we can see that this novel is unreliable narration and he is not telling all things openly we can see and feel that he is hiding something from us . we also get to know that he is only telling us about some selected thing which he wanted to share . it is subjective truth and we can see the biaes in his statement. he is argugging with himself and with reader. He has change the story as demanded to the readers. meomery is divided into two parts :- sorts and sifts.

6) Susan - madwoman in the attic :-

we can just assume that because of Paul sausan is in this condition that she has to become mad and there is no one who can help her we can see at the end that how there is susan one daughter who call Paul but at the end also we can see the madness we can also say the madness of love. during her life she was having three love relationship first was from Gerald and then second was from Gardan and last was from Paul . 

7) Joan - one who understood existential enigma :-

Through the warping, colored, protective lens of memory. And, Paul goes on to introduce another feature of memory that will shape his story: “I would guess that memory prioritizes whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first.” His will be, he’s advising us, a story with a time line and an arc: happy first things first, upswing, downswing. He hints, and we expect, narrative structured along classical lines: a beginning, middle, and an end. Which is exactly what Paul delivers. Dr. Johnson would be pleased with this careful three-part structure. The narrative proceeds—in flash-back from distant to recent past—along a chronological trajectory, formally divided into three separate sections titled: One, Two, and Three.

8) Whom do you think is responsible for the tragedy in the story? Explain with reasons.

I think that Joan is responsible for the tragedy because there is something that he is hiding from the reader and that is a reason that that we are only getting some good parts of Joan life there might be something fishy.

The Joys of Motherhood

Buchi Emecheta:-

 Buchi Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence, and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honors, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world.... women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical."

From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she was a community worker.

Following her success as an author, Emecheta traveled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From 1980 to 1981, she was a senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria. In 1982 she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, as well as holding a fellowship at the University of London in 1986. From 1982 to 1983 Buchi Emecheta, together with her journalist son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company.

Double colonization of women:-

The Joys of Motherhood is a novel that gives the impression that it might well appeal to western feminists. With motherhood as its theme, and the irony of its title, it appears to be part of the significant body of feminist literature concerned with women's experience of motherhood in patriarchal cultures. John Updike, in his review for The New Yorker, calls it "a graceful, touching, ironically titled tale that bears a plain feminist message". However, the messages contained in Buchi Emecheta's tale are neither plain nor traditionally feminist.

In fact, the morals of Nnu Ego's story are disclosed in a literary style that is only fleetingly satisfactory, or even familiar, to the western feminist reader. Despite its subject matter, the novel rejects the feminist codes normally associated with motherhood. Instead of utilizing the celebratory or critical gestures towards motherhood that we normally associate with feminist discourse, The Joys of Motherhood draws us into unfamiliar territory where the relationship of motherhood to female subjectivity becomes everything or nothing.
To begin, I would like to summarise what we might mean by western feminist interpretations of the woman-authored African text. Female-authored Third World literature became popular with feminist publishers and readers in the First World for a number of reasons. As a postcolonial and literary rendering of English, it represented at once an engagement with, and alienation from, a language that Euro-American feminists have identified as oppressive and man-made, responding, therefore with frustration about the restrictions placed upon women writers historically, especially in Europe. Secondly, it rejected or disrupted male European forms of writing previously assumed to be normative.
Conventional feminist responses to The Joys of Motherhood are unsettled by an unfixed, third-person narrative that maps the life of one woman, and the cultural and self-constructed expectations of motherhood to which she is subjected. The maternal body itself directs the narrative, which is structured around the ability of its central character, Nnu Ego, to bear children. While the novel contains a series of epiphanies as Nnu Ego confronts personal and social crises, it is not a quest novel in the European sense of the tradition. Her purpose is not to achieve liberation or even self-knowledge, but to bring into the world many healthy sons who will care for her in old age. Her dependence upon her maternal body to provide her with identity, status and, finally, personal welfare, defies the conventions of the Euro-American feminist quest in which women's pre-ordained roles as wives and mothers are consciously over-turned. Instead, Nnu Ego represents women who, from birth, are assigned as chattels. Their true value becomes known once they are old enough to marry and conceive children, in particular sons. So, while women are extremely important in one way, their status is completely lost, or is never gained, if this maternal expectation remains unfulfilled. While relating the crisis of motherhood that disrupts and then destroys the life of Nnu Ego, the unstable narrative itself exposes the difficulties of defining female subjectivity beyond the constraints of fertility and motherhood. Consequently, the troubles that Nnu Ego encounters in her life are mirrored in the text, which seems either unable or unwilling to fix female identity beyond the condition of motherhood.
The narrative hints that the elusive "real woman" might lie in the powerful image of Nnu Ego's own mother, Ona. On her deathbed she urges her lover, Agdabi, to allow their daughter to have a life of her own. Through this scene, Ona asserts that a real woman is someone whose feelings of worth do not depend on fulfilling the expectations of a father and husband; in other words, a woman who does not define herself as a chattel, but as an independent individual. Ona's refusal to marry is ostensibly to please her father, but we learn that the real reason is to allow her to maintain her sexual and economic independence. Agdabi's interpretation of Ona's dying wish is, however, quite different from what one may assume given Ona's ideas concerning women's independence.  He believes that for his daughter to achieve womanhood, she must be married and become a mother of sons and, to do this successfully, she must accept the authority of her father and husband.  The conflict between dominant cultural constructions of womanhood—to which Nnu Ego is compelled to adhere—and an untrammelled female subjectivity symbolised by her mother Ona is established early in the text. This dichotomy concerning female identity underlies the novel's ambiguities, and causes the series of events that lead to Nnu Ego's decline. It is her untimely death that permits narrative closure and emphasises both the danger and the hopelessness of her quest.
The novel opens in Lagos in 1934 with the cinematic image of Nnu Ego running wildly through the streets after discovering the body of her dead baby.  She is sightless, wordless, and formless. With no identity outside the designation of mother, she feels she is incapable of existing.  A fellow Igbo who encounters the despairing woman prevents her suicide and, from this point, Nnu Ego's journey through life unfolds before her like the life of a person who is about to drown. The narrator's reference to drowning warns the reader that the story we are about to experience is the story of a person who will not survive. Nnu Ego's failure to conceive in the first months of marriage seriously affects the rest of her life. She becomes emotionally unstable and is beaten and finally rejected by her husband. She is returned to her father, who by custom is obliged to find her another husband. She is required to travel to Lagos, far from her tribal connections, to live with her new husband Nnaife, a man whom she finds repellent.
Nnu Ego's reaction to Nnaife (translated from Igbo means "Little Father", another of the novel's many paradoxes) indicates her own ideas about what constitutes masculinity. She says that "with a belly like a pregnant cow", and his hair worn in the long style of a mourning widow, Nnaife has the appearance and demeanour of a middle-aged woman. To Nnu Ego and the society in which she lives, a middle-aged widow has, of course, no value. She is husband-less and past her childbearing years. Through Nnu Ego's harsh appraisal, the reader learns that the colonisation by, and servitude to, the British has not just emasculated Igbo men like Nnaife, but also made them worthless. In a society in which domestic servitude is equated with femininity, their loss of power is confirmed by their feminine appearance. Nnu Ego also notes with some irony that the economic exploitation of men like Nnaife is tantamount to slavery, which colonial rule has nevertheless deemed immoral and has made illegal for indigenous Nigerians to practice.
Throughout the text, as in Emecheta's other work, marriage and motherhood are constructed as modern allegories for slavery.  In The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego works extremely hard for very little money to feed and educate her children. In addition, the unexpected and enduring love she has for her children becomes itself a form of emotional bondage from which escape is impossible. The narrative makes a series of connections between marriage, motherhood, slavery, and colonisation: all form a unique literary discourse that has the potential to be shared by other women writers of the Black Diaspora.  A literature that acknowledges a common history of slavery and colonisation, overlaid with contemporary representations of marriage and motherhood, is capable of uniting the political concerns of Black women in different parts of the world, and also of stressing the importance of the individual in the face of change.
Throughout the text, we are frequently reminded of Nnu Ego's chi, a spirit who accompanies her throughout her life and who is responsible for both her good and bad fortune. Nnu Ego's chi is the spirit of a slave woman who was buried alive with her dead mistress, the senior wife of Nnu Ego's father. With the difficult circumstances that befall Nnu Ego in adulthood—infertility, poverty, hunger, and exploitation—the chi appears to impose upon the living woman her own lowly rank, and what Nnu Ego perceives as the slave's revenge provides her with an explanation for her misfortune.
Nnu Ego is overjoyed when she discovers she is capable of conceiving after all and she is able to enjoy, for a brief period pregnancy and motherhood unimpeded by tradition in which motherhood is constructed as a duty to the father and husband. Her new-found ability to bear children does not only satisfy her maternal longings and fulfil social expectations, it provides her with the only form of feminine identity she is permitted, or can contemplate: motherhood. After her son's birth, she feels like a "real woman" and is gratified that there will be somebody left behind to refer to her as "mother". Thus Nnu Ego's overriding desire to be a mother is important for her in death as well as in life. Immediately after her first child dies in infancy, Nnu Ego publicly attempts suicide by trying to fall from a busy bridge.  A bystander comments that she is not mad but that, "she has only just lost the baby that told the world that she was not barren". Later in the novel, in a contest between mother and father for control over the oldest son, Nnaife's younger wife tells Nnu Ego that, "In Ibuza sons help their father more than they ever help their mother.  A mother's joy is only in the name". Here, Adaku reminds Nnu Ego that the joy of motherhood is only ever an illusion; that mothers cannot expect to gain happiness from the children themselves, only a kind of happiness gained from the knowledge of the status that motherhood brings. Adaku here expresses the wisdom that continues to elude Nnu Ego and, for a period in the narrative, she represents the voice of modern Black feminism.
The image of Africa as female recurs in anti-colonial, as well as colonial discourses. In an appropriation of the Mother Africa trope by anti-colonial male writers, Africa is frequently represented as the figure of a woman, who is on the one hand, young, beautiful, and fertile, and on the other, "raped", degraded, and impoverished. Stratton argues that these contradictory images do not reflect genuine concerns for the economic and political position of African women, but instead represent a projection of the degradation that men feel as a result of colonisation. Despite this, mothers and motherhood remain a powerful symbolic force in both male- and female-authored Black literature. In a parallel reading of the Joys of Motherhood with Alice Walker's Meridian, Barbara Christian asserts that matrilineal connection is an important theme for women writers of the Black Diaspora because it counters the damage to the family caused by slavery and European colonisation. To Christian, textual representations of the joys and sorrows of motherhood are capable of emphasising the historical and cultural connections between Black women worldwide. But, possibly because of the apparent permanence of motherhood in the face of unrelenting political and social change, African male writers have represented women as politically static and ahistorical.
The Joys of Motherhood and Meridian vigorously re-write this assumption, revealing women as both victims and agents of change. For the female African writer, the mother figure is also capable of bridging the gap between the oral storyteller and the creator of the written word, thus strengthening the connection between women's traditional role and that of the published author in English. Most importantly, however, the image of the mother is capable of re-assigning the figure of women in African literary discourse. According to Stratton, whether a woman is "canonised as mother or stigmatised as prostitute, the designation is degrading, for he [the male writer/narrator] does the naming and her experience as a woman is trivialised and distorted" (52). Stratton proposes that pregnancy and childbirth in male-authored African literature have come to signify the writer/narrator's own interpretation of his nation's history, in particular, how each pregnancy might indicate the potential for a new beginning for the nation as well as his own renewed potency.  Female-authored representations of women and motherhood are capable of re-writing these metaphors. The Joys of Motherhood addresses the false consciousness of the Mother Africa trope through the life story of Nnu Ego. By relocating motherhood from metaphor to social realism, Emecheta critiques the ways in which the myths of motherhood are imposed on Nigerian women and also re-writes the Mother Africa trope of anti-colonial discourse. As Stratton notes, The Joys of Motherhood succeeds in exposing the unreliable male-authored narratives of African nationalism, narratives in which lofty ideas of nationhood are masculine in nature, while social and political difficulties that beset the newly independent nation are presented as feminine.
 Despite Emecheta's refusal to subscribe to literary nationalism practised by her male counterparts, an important comparison between Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood can be made. Emecheta and Achebe are both Igbo writers for whom the novel in English is a means to inscribe and assert the African subject in literary discourse, and whose writing is overlaid with concern about the survival and well-being of the Igbo people. If we look at the texts as parables about individuals, subjected to overwhelming change, who in failing to adapt to these changes do not survive, then there are a number of meaningful similarities. Okonkwo and Nnu Ego symbolise both the positive and negative aspects of their tribal culture. The conflict that they encounter throughout their adult lives echoes their nation's tension between tradition and modernity and, through their own struggle to survive, they anticipate Nigeria's struggle for political independence. The novels are set in different times in Nigeria's history: Things Fall Apart takes place in the 1890s, and The Joys of Motherhood during the middle of the twentieth century. In Achebe's novel, Okonkwo is paralysed by the changes he is forced to consider as colonisation and Christianity threaten his traditional beliefs. As the daughter of a powerful chief, Nnu Ego is compelled to follow the customs of her father's generation but in an urban, colonial environment in which they have little relevance. 

In their depiction of the inability of the individual to adapt to modernity, the texts invoke Franz Fanon's manifesto for the survival of Africa which proposes that the people must discard all the harmful customs of pre-European contact and adhere only to those that are capable of nurturing the people. At the same time, Fanon urges Africans to take the positive things from European colonisation and disregard the rest. Nnaife's second wife, Adaku, recognises the need to do this if she and her children are to flourish. She picks and chooses from tradition and modernity, discarding the customs that will disadvantage her like being a virtuous wife to Nnaife. As a consequence, she and her daughters thrive. In contrast, Nnu Ego remains loyal to her husband to the bitter end. In a delightful but ultimately destructive twist of fate, her testimony in the British colonial court as the good, traditional wife is what ruins Nnaife's case and lands him in prison. So the virtuous senior wife whom Nnaife has exploited throughout her life is the very person who unwittingly brings about his undoing.
Their son, Oshia, on the other hand, relinquishes all his traditional obligations. According to custom, he is responsible for the emotional and physical well-being of his ageing parents, and his failure to provide for them means they can survive neither the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, nor the painful awareness of their son's neglect. Unlike Adaku, Oshia rejects tradition outright. In this way, he represents the migrant African who takes advantage of all the things that colonisation and independence have to offer, but turns his back on the transformed, but troubled, nation and mother, leaving it and her to flounder. Here the text articulates the connection between the plight of women and the plight of Africa, a connection dominating texts by anti-colonial male writers. But Emecheta never reduces the woman/mother to a symbol for the nation. The novel's concerns are about the condition and status of real women and mothers. If there is a plain feminist message in the Joys of Motherhood, as Updike suggests, then it is borne by the absent mother, Ona, and enacted by the junior wife, Adaku: women must, when they can, seize the right to control their lives if they and their people are to survive.

A Dance of the Forests

Major Themes - A Dance of the Forests 

Wole Soyinka:-

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, “The 1960 Masks” and in 1964, the “Orisun Theatre Company”, in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero’s Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed 1960, publ.1963), Kongi’s Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka’s serious philosophic plays are (apart from “The Swamp Dwellers“) The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The Road ( 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka’s latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer’s thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents’ warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

Soyinka’s poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988).

A Dance of the Forests:-

One of Wole Soyinka's most well-known plays, A Dance of the Forests, was commissioned as part of a larger celebration of Nigerian independence. It was a divisive play that enraged many Nigerians at the time of its release, owing to its indictment of political corruption in the country.

Soyinka returned to Nigeria in 1959, after attending university in England, to write this play, immersing himself in Yoruba folklore as a way of reconnecting with his homeland. The play is about a group of mortals who summon the spirits of the dead in the hopes that these wiser spirits will help them guide them, only to discover that the spirits are just as petty and flawed as they are.

Many have interpreted the play as a cautionary tale for Nigerians on the occasion of their newfound independence, reminding them to be critical and seeking, and warning them not to become complacent. It also serves as a metaphor for not romanticising pre-colonial Africa and remaining vigilant. When Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, A Dance of the Forests was cited as one of his crowning achievements, and he was referred to as "one of the finest poetical playwrights who have written in English."

Major Themes - A Dance of the Forests:-

1. Atonement

The play's central theme is atonement. The Dead Man and Dead Woman are brought back to life so that the four mortals who mistreated them in the past will recognize and atone for their transgressions. While the mortals are unaware for much of the play, they eventually realize that the Dead Man and Dead Woman's visitation is to teach them a lesson, and by the end, they have gone through a kind of conversion, realizing that they have sinned before.

2. Corrupted Power

Another major theme in the play is corrupted power, as exemplified by the characters of Mata Kharibu and Madame Tortoise. As we are taken back to the king's palace, we see that Madame Tortoise uses her beauty and power over men to sow discord. Mata Kharibu is also corrupted by his immense power, as evidenced by his insistence on his soldiers fighting against their better judgement and his merciless punishment of free thought. Wole Soyinka tells a storey that teaches the reader that all power is corruptible and that just because someone is given authority does not mean they are a good or ethical person.

3. Wounds & Trauma

The play depicts how people carry trauma and wounds from their past with them, and how everyone has some sensitive part of their biography that haunts and hurts them. The Forest Head is aware of this and works to bring these wounds to light in the hope that those who have been hurt in the past can move on.
4. The Past
Despite the fact that it takes place over the course of a single day, the play does not have a strictly linear structure. The narrative, as we quickly learn, is about past sins, and each mortal character has multiple identities, representing both who they are in the present and who they once were in the past. The present is layered on top of the past, as if to imply that nothing from our past is ever truly gone, that we are descended from patterns and events that came before us and continue to affect us in the present. The play's plot revolves around how humans must overcome and learn from their pasts.

5. Nature

The play takes place in a forest, and throughout, various elements of the natural world come to life to take part in the reckoning that is taking place with the mortals. The Forest Head is a spirit who presides over the forest, and during the welcoming of the Dead Man and Dead Woman, various spirits of different natural elements are called upon to speak their piece. These include Spirit of the Rivers, Spirit of the Palms, Spirits of the Volcanos, and others. All of these elements of nature are personified through verse, showing us the connection between the human and the natural world.

6. Birth 

One of the unresolved features of the Dead Woman is the fact that she was killed while pregnant with a child. She returns to the world of the living still with a pregnant belly, and during the welcome ritual, the fetus appears as a Half-Child, who is caught between being influenced by the spirit world and remaining with his mother. The Half-Child is a tragic figure, as he was never given the relief of life, and when he is given a chance to speak he says, "I who yet await a mother/Feel this dread/Feel this dread,/I who flee from womb/To branded womb cry it now/I'll be born dead/I'll be born dead." The figure of the child is a tragic one, standing in as the ultimate symbol for the wrongs done to the Dead Man and Dead Woman, and the unresolvedness of their plight.

7. Ritual:-

Rituals and tradition are another major themes as well as a formal element of the play. Throughout, we see the characters going through the motions in order to gain a better understanding of their circumstances. The ceremony for the mortals' self-discovery, in which the mortals must relive their crimes, the Dead Man and Dead Woman must be questioned, and the mortals must reveal their secret wrongs, is one of these rituals.

Another ritual that takes place is the Dance of Welcome, in which the forest spirits perform and deliver monologues. The Dance of the Half-Child then decides where the unborn child will go. Rituals, dances, and formal representations are frequently used to stand in for literal events. Indeed, the entire play can be seen as a collection of the various formalized rituals that comprise the narrative.