A Principle for the New Nigerian Criticism
Because we aim to interest the Nigerian public in literature with literary criticism, our language should not be as private and subversive as the language of the writers whose works we aim to demystify.
In every work of genius,’ observes the American essayist and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘we recognize our own rejected thoughts—they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’ Indeed, I find my thoughts coming back to me ‘with a certain alienated majesty’ from our critics’ recent argumentations about the new Nigerian literature. However, not all of their positions obviously were my ‘rejected thoughts’. Some I completely disagree with. And those that were actually echoes of my thoughts about the state of our literature were so rejected, among other motives, because of my understood inability to articulate them at the time of our acquaintance. However, it seems to me, from this hive of opinions, we are so invested in foregrounding our national identity onto our new literature that the critical practice itself has taken a back seat. The performance of literary criticism has been, rather unhelpfully, relegated for the theoretical reconstitution of our literature. Even though this reconstitution is also an important performance of criticism, our active disregard for discussing the principles of literary criticism—the ways and manners in which we read literature—nonetheless is a hindrance to the critical culture of reading we aim to establish through our theoretical insistences...
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