A structuralist interpretation of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels (using the genette schema of time in the presentation of narrative events)

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2012-06-05
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Abstract
This dissertation is a structuralist study and the aim is to apply a structuralist theory to an interpretation of the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah. In all, to date, Ayi Kwei Armah has five novels to his credit. These novels, in chronological order, are The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1969), Why Are We So Blest? (1972), To Thousand Season (1973) end The Healers (1978). All the five novels were produced within a span of ten years and in a literary epoch that has seen phenomenal changes in literary discourse. One of such changes is the emergence of Modernism which began comparatively recently, in fact, toward the end of the nineteenth century. The term modernism describes works of art which show a marked tendency to flout conventions in literary expression. Such works have been in existence since the later part of the nineteenth century. Professor Jeremy Hawthorn has explained the texture of modernist works. According to him, “modernist works tend to be self—conscious in v:ays that vary according to the genre and art form in question: they deliberately remind the reader or observer that they are art works, rather than seeking to serve as ‘windows on reality’”.1 What this means is that a modernist novel consistently invites the reader more to it own artistic edifice than to its inner substance. In other words, a modernist novel does not just aim to reflect reality but rather to express itself as a pure work of art thereby divorcing itself from veridical reality. That is to say that in a modernist novel the focus is on the structures of the work more then on the author or the society or on the substance of the work. Hence, there is, in the modernist novel, a shift from content to form and Conrad was one of the first to observe this tendency.
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A dissertation presented to the Department of Language, Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the award of M. A. comparative Literature.
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