LIT 5235 Fall 2023 Okonkwo

If dated from the slave autobiographies, one could argue that life-writing—factual, mediated, and/or fictional—has had a centuries-old history in Black Atlantic literary imagination. In this reading-intensive seminar, our focus is on representative coming-of-age narratives by African authors. As some scholars have suggested, the African bildungsroman, when juxtaposed against its German, French, and English antecedents and contemporaries, instantiates the problematic of generic conformity and deviance. A subunit of modern and postcolonial African literature, the African bildungsroman sometimes comports with the “classical” European model, especially the latter’s privileging of personal reading and mentorship. In other cases, though, it “writes back” to and unravels the problems raised by the European model’s subordination of community to youth and individualism/individual growth. Our aim in this course will be to examine the above issues toward close readings of the African works in their own right. Focal authors include: Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir, roman, trans. as The Dark Child; Mongo Beti, The Poor Christ of Bomba; Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep Not, Child; Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood; Lewis Nkosi, Mating Birds; Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus; Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl; and Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation