1st Edition

Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture

By Andrew Nyongesa Copyright 2024
144 Pages
by Routledge

144 Pages
by Routledge

144 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction by Prof. John Geofrey Mugubi

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

Biography

Andrew Nyongesa is currently a lecturer at Murang’a University of Technology (Kenya) and a writer of fiction. Some of his published works are The Endless Battle (2016), The Water Cycle (2018), Many in One and Other Stories (2019), The Armageddon and Other Stories (2020) and Say my Name and Other Stories from Home and Away (2021) all of which are based on postcolonialism and eco-criticism.  His scholarly works include Cultural Fixity and Hybridity: Strategies of Resistance in Safi Abdi’s Fiction, 'Conversation with “other”: Style and Pathology in Selected African Novels' by Journal of African Languages and Literary Studies, 'Humanity and Mother Nature: Ecological Reading of Ole Kulet’s Blossoms of the Savannah' by Kenya Studies Review and  'Wagar and Motley “Archaic” Vestiges:  A Postmodernist Reading of Contemporary Somalia Fiction' by Journal of Literary Studies. His latest publication is 'The Centre and Pathology: Postmodernist Reading of Madness in the Oppressor in Contemporary Fiction' by Cogent Arts and Humanities. His research interests are postcolonialism, postmodernism, speculative fiction, psychological criticism or stream of consciousness literature, Black aesthetics and eco-criticism. His PhD dissertation in the stream of consciousness literatures demonstrates his enthusiasm in mental health issues.