AFRICAN LITERATURE

Prepared by: Ms. Mara Camille B. Nañez

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World
EXPRESSIONS IN AFRICA
• Lekker - Lekker [lek-uh] is a widely used term indicating
that something... ‘great’ or … ‘nice’.
• Yebo - Yebo is “yes” in Zulu and commonly used for
anything affirmative.
• Eish(!) – ouch!
• Robot - Street light/traffic light (turn left at the robot).
• Howzit? - Forget spaces and extra syllables when
asking someone how it’s going – smash it all into one
word, howzit.
GEOGRAPHY:
• 54 nations which make
up Africa. LITERATURE:
• A.k.a “The Dark • commonalities shared
Continent”
• commonalities shared in literature
by literature which • African literature can
comes from the continent only be written in
as a whole.
• Africa is the world’s African languages and
hottest continent. also written by an
• Africa’s Sahara desert is African.
bigger than the USA.
 COMMON LITERARY THEMES:
LITERARY PERIODS: • Tradition
• Pre-colonial (1700): Oral • Modernity
Literature • Indigenous
• Colonial African (1789): • Foreign
European • Community
• Regime Middle Ages • Individualism
• Socialism
(1800) – Arabic Alphabet • Capitalism
was introduced • Development
• Post-colonial period • Freedom
(1950-1960) • Self-reliance
• Contemporary Period • Nationality
(2000)
LITERARY
CHARACTERISTICS: LITERARY
• Oral literature - stories, CHARACTERISTICS:
dramas, riddles, • Oral histories - myths,
histories, myths, songs, and proverbs
additionally serve to
proverbs, and other remind whole
expressions, is communities of their
frequently employed to ancestors' heroic deeds,
educate and entertain their past, and the
children precedents for their
customs and traditions.
LITERARY TEXTS AND AUTHORS:

ALBERT CHINUALUMOGRU ACHEBE

“Father of African Literature”
• Nigerian novelist
• “Things Fall Apart” 1959
• Multi-awarded author
LITERARY TEXTS AND AUTHORS:

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o ( James Ngugi)

Kenyan Author
• Kenyan novelist
• Petal of Blood 1977 – exposition
of Kenyan injustices
LITERARY TEXTS AND AUTHORS:

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka

(Wole Soyinka)
Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist
Kenyan novelist
• Multi-awarded author
- Comparative literature
- Nobel Prize in Literature
LITERARY TEXTS AND AUTHORS:

Diriye Osman
Somali-British
• short story writer, essayist, critic and visual
artist. He is the author of the short story
collection Fairytales For Lost Children,
which won the 2014 Polari First Book Prize.
LITERARY TEXTS AND AUTHORS:

Warsan Shire
Somali-British
• is a Somali British writer and poet born in
Nairobi and raised in London.
• Wrote chapbooks “Teaching My Mother How
to Give Birth” and “Her Blue Body”
• wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning
visual album Lemonade and the Disney film Black Is King
in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Write your interpretation of the
poetry below:
 EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Prepared by: Ms. Mara Camille B. Nanez

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World
Greece and Rome are considered the birthplace of European
Literature. Literary pieces were conserved, remolded, and spread
through Christianity and thus communicated to the diverse
vernacular languages of the European Continent, both in the
Western Hemisphere, and other regions the Europeans settled in.
Today, this body of writing displays a unity in its main features
making it different from the literatures of the rest of the world.
 The birth of the European literature
can be traced back to circa 750 BC. It
ANCIENT PERIOD was the time when two significant
750BC – 450 literary works were developed.
 The Greek drama flourished during the 5th and 4th
centuries BCE. The playwright of comedy (like
Aristophanes) and tragedy (namely: Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripedes) became popular in this
time. Notable lyrical poets like Pindar and Sappho
CLASSICAL PERIOD were also famous. The varied works of the great
philosophers: Plato and Aristotle were also eminent.
450 – 1066
 Medieval, “belonging to the Middle Ages,” denotes the
literature of both Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean
from the founding of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine, Empire
about 300 AD for medieval Greek, to the period following
the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from about
the time of Charlemagne and the “Carolingian
MEDIEVAL PERIOD Renaissance” he fostered in France (c. 800) to the end of
the 15th century for most written vernacular literatures.
1066 – 1500
 Renaissance (“Rebirth”) refers to the
historical period in Europe that occurred after
the Middle Ages.
(1) the new interest in education
RENAISSANCE PERIOD (2) the new form of Christianity
1485 – 1680 (3) the journeys of the great explorers
FAMOUS WORKS AND AUTHORS:
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Dante Alighieri: Divina Commedia
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron
John Milton: Paradise Lost
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince
Petrarch: Canzoniere, Trionfi Sir Thomas More, Utopia
William Shakespeare: King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth,
Romeo and Juliet
 “Age of Enlightenment,” the Age of Reason
aims not to grab a hold on a useful half-truth
but to cause misperception in the overall
picture, because the predominance of reason
AGE OF REASON had also been a mark of certain periods of the
1650 – 1800 previous era.
FAMOUS WORKS AND AUTHORS:
Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Denis Diderot: Encyclopedie
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract,
Emile, and Confessions.
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of
Women
Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
Voltaire: Cand
 Romanticism was the principal literary
movement of the initial part of the 19th
century, in which literature had its origins
ROMANTIC PERIOD in the “Sturm und Drang” period in
1650 – 1800 Germany. A consciousness of this first
phase of Romanticism is an important
modification to the usual impression of
Romantic literature as something that
began in English poetry with William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” in
1798.
 Modernism, like realism, provided critique
of morality of the people belonging to the
middle-class society. Writers during this
MODERNISM PERIOD period explored new forms and styles of
1870 – 1965 writing, which paved way to a technique
called “stream of consciousness.”
Developed by Marcel Proust, “stream of
consciousness” is a style that allowed the
author to explore all of the facets of their
thought processes in the absence of any
suggested formatting rules.
 Characterized by an unusual mix of high
and low culture, this period served as the
POST-MODERNISM PERIOD literary and societal response to the
1965 – present horrifying events of World War II and
elitism of high modernism. Fragmentation,
paradox, and narrators that are difficult to
define are common. The style of writing
evokes the absence of tradition in a
modern consumer-driven, technologically
based society.
 PETA #4:
per house
Produce a radio drama given the selected
stories below from European Literature:
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
• Divine Comedy – Dante Alighierri
• Beowulf
• The Confessions of St. Augustine