Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction

Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture

Andrew Nyongesa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032577609
• eBook ISBN: 9781003854807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book likens writers' incessant focus on racism, negative ethnicity, patriarchy and social stratification in societies to a naïve physician who prescribes analgesics to treat symptoms while the underlying cause of the disease seethes in the blood. In the same way, persons who consistently blame their reckless conduct and shabbiness miss the point if they do not transform the actual cause of the problem: the mind. While most literary scholars problematise gender disparities, racial and political othering, oppression, environment degradation, education matters, poor parenting and governance, they tend to disregard the root cause: modernism. This book finds a gap in this grey area to address the authentic cause of the symptoms that most literary writers and scholars treat. Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, systematisation and rationality, and dualism are at the heart of racism, corruption and other aforementioned symptoms. It is the contention of this study that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Interrogating the Individuated Self: Background of Modernism and Postmodernism
• 2 The Modern State and the Demise of Culture: Failure of Post-Independent States in East African Fiction
• 3 Modernism and Automatisation: Mechanisation of Humanity in Contemporary East African Fiction
• 4 Modernism and Pathology: Othering and Self-Fragmentation in Selected East African Fiction
• 5 Modernism and ‘Great Literature’: The Marking Guide and Death of the East African Literary Writer
• 6 Summaries, Conclusions and Research Findings
• Index