Amechi Akwanya

In his article The Father\u27s Power in Breitbach\u27s Report on Bruno and Achebe\u27s A Man of the People Amechi N. Akwanya analyses Joseph Breitbach\u27s Report on Bruno and Chinua Achebe\u27s No Longer at Ease in order to lay bare the underlying processes of these texts. Undoubtedly the patterns of struggle in the two texts are political, but reading them in exclusively political terms has the consequence that the works are of no further interest once the putative political agenda is identified and described. Akwanya\u27s analysis discloses shared features in the two texts published within two years of each other. In Report on Bruno, there is a democratic system, where the people have their say but in A Man of the People they are kept in the dark about what is really going on and are manipulated and abused by those in power. Their resemblance is at the level of symbolism and this is what Akwanya attempts to unlock using René Girard\u27s theory of mimetic desire

Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman has been much discussed as a clash of tradition and modernity, with the Colonial District Officer, Mr Pilkings projecting British sensibilities as right reason itself, and can find nothing in him to rouse sympathy for the local people's traditional culture in which the King's Horseman is required to follow the king he serves in death. His sympathy towards them is the patronizing kind, which knows what is best for them, and would take the necessary steps to procure it for them, even against their strong opposition. However, despite the playwright himself suggesting that Mr Pilkings is a catalyser rather than a protagonist, he is clearly entangled as a participant in the relationships of struggle the drama unfolds, which comprise its internal driving force. The main struggle is of course between Elesin, the King's Horseman, and Iyaloja, 'Mother' of the Market, and 'mother of multitudes', the one antagonist pushing the movement of change by default, not by intention, the other demanding total compliance with the cultural tradition. Iyaloja's 'cultural resistance' burgeons with new and unchallengeable energy in the appearance of Olunde the Eleson's son, and by metonymical substitution, the King's faithful Horseman. It will be argued in this paper that the community had come to a threshold that would have led to a cultural revolution-as elaborated by Fredric Jameson-an abrupt and disorientating transition from one mode of production, one social practice to another. It remained only the successful withholding of sacrifice of a life. But the movement of change is interrupted by the almost magical appearance of Olunde.

Literary works are commonly analysed at the level of incidents succeeding one another, but there is also a vertical level of analysis where entities coexist, and by whose functioning the entire work can be apprehended as a totality. It is at this vertical level that archaic forms such a myths may be found to subsist as ‗textual generators', whereas their presence may at first register merely as an echo effect. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart displays numerous incidents which seem more or less self-contained, butare found to embody rich significance when connected to themythical night with agentive possibilities, which is encounteredvery early in the narrative. The effect is to connect all the scenes ofpain and suffering together into one unfolding tragedy pressing onto a moment of culmination. This paper will be guided in exploringthe vertical dimension of the narrative by the theory of mythicideation.

Authenticity is raised by Sartre as a fundamental issue in human existence. It becomes greatly complicated for human existence under colonialism, a situation which is not automatically remedied by political independence. Countries that have passed through colonial tutelage typically have a double inheritance: the cultural tradition which predated colonization and persisted alongside colonialism as the latter was setting up a formal sector aligned to its own interests, and the value system of the colonizing power which becomes diffused in a variety of ways within the indigenous group. Hybridity is one of the consequences of this dual heritage, creating uncertainty as to where and how to ascertain authenticity among the subjects. In Chinua Achebe's <i>Things fall apart </i>and <i>Anthills of the savannah</i>, colonialism yields characters who affiliate to the outsider, as they see in the newcomers an access route to power. It also unveils subjects who cling...

Thinking the present social tensions in Nigeria, there is a sense of a new chapter. There were earlier chapters, like the tensions over Sharia Law in the 1980s and the regional and ethnic rivalries that culminated in civil war in the 1960s. Newness here is as in mythopoiesis where the surface properties of a component of an old or received myth are substituted, without affecting the total significance of the myth. The result is that there is underlying sameness in the novelty. This is what occasions for this paper remembrance of Wole Soyinka's <i>Season of Anomy </i>in the functionality of a proverb. <i>Season of Anomy</i> is a work in which a converging pattern of actions, some in pursuit of profit motive, some in the way of exercise of power and domination, still others in selfless community-building efforts culminate in a vast and lethal explosion. This is anomy, but it is coming in <i>season. </i>The time of the reign of this particular ch...

Many readings of Chinua Achebe's novels come with expectations as regards the protagonists. To those whose expectations are not met, the tendency is to unleash moral judgments on these characters. Reading with an 'open' mind, on the other hand, really amounts to reading against the backdrop of the whole literary tradition, which would allow the spotting of similar and contrasting feature to existents in other works. Attempting such a reading is what enables us to see shared features with other literary works. Such are the romantic traits we see in the characters. In this paper, we shall explore the way in which the romantic traits of Achebe's characters reflect in their judgments and actions, giving rise to the particular quality of the tragedies they are caught up in.

In this paper, Okonkwo, the protagonist of<i> Things Fall Apart </i>is shown to be a light-bearer, who is not only followed by the narrative eye, but also becomes a contestant for leadership traditionally held by elders who have taken the highest titles in the land.

In literature, innocence is a state that does not endure, in that it is impacted by experience, becomes experience. This paper will draw from the literary tradition of figuration of changes from innocence to experience, especially in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience to help explore the experiences of the traumatized in some of Achebe's poems. Reflection on these archaic symbols is here hinged on the analytics of tragic irony as elaborated in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, leading to the major finding that the turmoil seen in several of Chinua Achebe's poems is usually the time of the impact of experience upon innocence, with violence randomly visited on the defenceless. But these poems seem to hint at a possibility of restoration of lost innocence.

Literature is studied in different ways and at different levels: as works, namely the productions of geniuses, or in Heidegger’s sense of made things, which at the same time share with natural things the sense of being by themselves and self-sufficient; literary works are also studied as part of cultural phenomena and part or even the expression of a cultural tradition. In certain historical reconstructions, they may also be discussed as milestones and representative portrayals of the ethos and sensibility of a period. Their study as things making up a class of phenomena which can be compared among themselves is another level which, like the approaches focusing on the work as a self-sufficient entity, calls for specific kinds of expertise. Originality as an artistic requirement may lead in the study of literature to emphasis on the unique and distinctive features, which are easily identified at the surface level, whereas comparative studies are in real terms a challenge to explore l...

Studies of Paul Celan’s work usually devote substantial sections to his and his family's experience of concentration camps during World War II and thus questions might be raised whether these are the issues of his poetry, whether these are anecdotal and of general interest or whether they are the things that comprise his poetry. This study is based on the view that language behaves quite differently in poetry than in the execution of its other functions including historical documentation. Representation is the language function here and the output is an artwork. Condemnation to extermination, ‘collective Jewish martyrdom’, as Bekker puts it, on the basis of one’s ethnic origin, the dire and dehumanizing experiences and the sense of the irrecuperable loss involved are undoubtedly at work in Paul Celan’s poetry, but the poems are nevertheless extraordinary works of art. The paper explores the relationship.

Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy is regarded by some as one of the masterpieces of African literature, but it presents challenges in reading, leading others, among them literary critics, to pronounce it a failure. There is therefore deep ambivalence over this novel, but it comes from the expectations with which the readers approach it. Literary works may share elements of structure, but that does not mean that they should all be read in the same way, with the same expectations. The history of criticism of African literature going back to the early 1970s has put in place a tradition in which literature is directly connected to the so-called social context as its referential and basis of intelligibility. In response, creative writing is increasingly in sync with this theory, and critics formed in this tradition expect each work to provide a window on that social context. It is taken in this article that this tradition of reading is the reason for the difficulty many have with Soyinka’s texts. Season of Anomy demands both close reading and application of heuristic devices from literary theory and criticism because it is indeed a literary work of art. The master narrative of the superman is applied here to motivate a literary analysis of the work. Opening up Season of Anomy in this way makes it apparent that we are dealing with a great work, deeply grounded in a tradition of art much older than the mid-20th-century theory of engagement, and not a failure of any sort.

The 'overwhelming existence' in Rilke's First Elegy is a being of the Angelic Order, terrible because even friendly contact with a human can result in the unintended annihilation of the weaker existence. In Eliot's Ash Wednesday, the role of the overwhelming existence is sustained by divinity itself and the moral character of this being as reflected in the language of the Speaker is benign as well as holy and arouses fear in the Speaker because of consciousness of having offended. But there is also in these poems a sense in which the existence of other things lacking the dignity and power of the angels or of divinity exercises a threat the subject cannot withstand, yielding a subject who has only voice. The poetic acts performed in virtue of the utterances of these voices are purely lyrical, without admixture of narration. But there are significant differences. Rilke's lyric is dominantly exclamatory with the underlying tone of ressentiment, and the Speaker's...

Arrow of God would be considered under Emile Durkheim's model of division of labour as a fairly more advanced society than Things Fall Apart because of the greater complexity of the social structure in the former novel. The world renowned masterpiece, by contrast, is fairly simple in its structure. The familial functions are the same in the two works. The husband and father is the official breadwinner and the manager of the family's resources, extending from land and homestead to food resources. He provides security and is the representative of the family group in the town's decision-making body. It is at the social level of organization that we see the disparity in structure and functions. Both are emergent societies, moving from a theocratic order to a democratic one. Along this path, Things Fall Apart is more advanced than Arrow of God, whereas the expectation should be that the one with greater division of labour should be the more advanced society. Neither, however,...

Although Chinua Achebe acknowledges Conrad's works to be 'permanent literature', his hostility towards them, especially Heart of Darkness, is well known; for he maintains that they have a racist sub-text. However, there are significant patterns of similarity that run among some of their works. In Conrad's Lord Jim and Achebe's No Longer at Ease, for instance, the heroes, both idealists, though of different tempers, experience the same kind of test of which the consequences of failure are a tragic reversal of fortunes. In his own test, which is deliberately set up as a police sting operation, Obi Okonkwo is defeated in all his ideals, his self-image reduced to rags. He is clearly aware of the extent of the disaster and sees that there is nothing any more to fight for. The trial that Jim is exposed to is as if designed by the higher powers, which invests his story with the air of a sublime tragedy, being that he is confronted by 'more than man'. But althoug...

T. Obinkaram Echewa"s The Land's Lord appears to be little known am ong African literary critics, but it is a narrative that explores the individual soul in such a way that it seems to reach far beyond that individual soul, achieving far wider significance. A reading of this novel based on the action represented m ay get caught up in the discourse and discursive practices of African traditional society and its familiar narrative strategies, whereas it is asking much deeper questions, questions of existence, self-cognition, and identity. One of the main characters of this novel, Philip, is centrally preoccupied with these questions. Sartre"s philosophy of authentic humanness is used in this study to make sense of Philip"s search, and to account for the other characters" struggles and the kinds of meanings they construct out of their experiences.

Nigeria is a mosaic of many ethno-linguistic groups, some large, many very small indeed, altogether numbering about 250. It is important however to remember that this nation came into being not by amalgamation of all these ethno-linguistic groups, but of two British Protectorates, Northern and Southern Nigeria, which could have gone on to develop independently like Northern and Southern Rhodesia. This act of Amalgamation in 1914 launched it into world political culture on the basis of European nation-state system rather than on the basis of local political institutions. Since this 1914 event, and particularly from the 1940s following the birth of nationalist movements, tensions have been developing, occasionally defined within a north-south cleavage, especially in the North which comprised one vast region in the pre-Civil War period, while the South comprised three regions, all independent minded. However, the serious problems that have threatened in some cases the holding together ...

Literary studies continues to draw from Plato and Aristotle as the fundamental concepts of the discipline were identified by those ancient philosophers. But the usage of the concepts has remained in divided to the present. Notions like mimesis, poetry, and art which refer to the dimension of human productivity to which criticism is applied have passed into ordinary language and general knowledge and therefore seem not to demand special effort to learnor require technical treatment. But it is necessary to understand them both technically and precisely in order that criticism and discourse analysis of literature may be able to know their object in opposition to other objects. As well as instruments for use in discovering their objects, those foundational concepts of the discipline of literary criticism and discourse analysis of literature are also the working tools for the study of those very objects. In this paper, we shall look at the founding concepts together with a few others bes...

What may legitimately be expected of art, as for any entity whatsoever, ought to depend on the nature of the entity itself, since action follows from being. The first order of business therefore in studying possible applications of art must be to try and determine its identity. This has not generally been the case in the history of literary studies, although it is common in literary appreciation to read back to the text from notions about what art is supposed to do. From Renaissance humanism until the early twentieth century, little is said about the being of art; a lot more is heard about what it could do and the argument was frequently defensive and shifty, not proceeding from first principles. This paper turns on Hegel’s account of art as constituting adequate in contrast to immediate existence, whereby it is raised to the status of an aesthetic object. It is on this aesthetic dimension that the effectivity of art and a possible functionality in fostering a common humanity may be...

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apartis perhaps the most successful African novel and was recognized almost from its very first appearance as a world classic. One masterpiece is undoubtedly a great achievement for a writer; and few are able to produce more than one or two in a lifetime. In Achebe's case, where the acknowledged masterpiece is the author's very first work, there have been occasional remarks to the effect that it was a lucky shot, and nothing more. But the fact is that with all the attention mostlyon that first work, the others have not been given enough attention to determine their true worth. They certainly deserve serious and individual attention, each being distinctive as a narrative in terms of structure and overall significance and responsive to various different literary theories. Using identity theory, but thinking hermeneutically, this paper will shed new light on the author's five novels. The functioning of each major character at a critical junct...

Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman has been much discussed as a clash of tradition and modernity, with the Colonial District Officer, Mr Pilkings projecting British sensibilities as right reason itself, and can find nothing in him to rouse sympathy for the local people's traditional culture in which the King's Horseman is required to follow the king he serves in death. His sympathy towards them is the patronizing kind, which knows what is best for them, and would take the necessary steps to procure it for them, even against their strong opposition. However, despite the playwright himself suggesting that Mr Pilkings is a catalyser rather than a protagonist, he is clearly entangled as a participant in the relationships of struggle the drama unfolds, which comprise its internal driving force. The main struggle is of course between Elesin, the King's Horseman, and Iyaloja, 'Mother' of the Market, and 'mother of multitudes', the one antagonis...

Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah has often been called a ’political novel’ and directly linked to the experience of military rule in Nigeria, even though that country is not mentioned in the story. It leaves open the question what might be Achebe’s purpose in such an undertaking. Would he be trying to tell the people what they already know about their experience under military rule, or to provide guidelines, the dos and the don’ts to keep in view for successful military rule, or is he saying that military rule is all right as long as it is responsive to the needs of the people? This way of reading the novel may have discouraged literary criticism of it, as it tends to end in inane plot summaries. This paper takes the view that Anthills of the Savannah is a literary novel, which demands literary criticism. The approach followed here is to analyze the metaphors of the work in such a way that its form as a text, a woven pattern is apparent.

In his article "The Father's Power in Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Achebe's A Man of the People” Amechi N. Akwanya analyses Joseph Breitbach's Report on Bruno and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease in order to lay bare the underlying processes of these texts. Undoubtedly the patterns of struggle in the two texts are political, but reading them in exclusively political terms has the consequence that the works are of no further interest once the putative political agenda is identified and described. Akwanya's analysis discloses shared features in the two texts published within two years of each other. In Report on Bruno, there is a democratic system, where the people have their say but in A Man of the People they are kept in the dark about what is really going on and are manipulated and abused by those in power. Their resemblance is at the level of symbolism and this is what Akwanya attempts to unlock using René Girard's theory of mimetic desire.

"There is no common consensus on the definition of Marginality still in literal sense, we could understand it to be border line placement .The connectivity of present with past and future is being lost by the capitalist class which has further gained a pace due to Globalization .Now-a-days an individual has turned up to be puppet in the hands of capitalist society. The society is able to create a illusionary state of mind where the individual is living in present and want to enjoy all sort of pleasure in it where as it is more the effect of the Globalized capitalist class which is creating more wider and broader market for its business perspective. Human subjects who occupy this new space have not kept pace with evolution which produced it"

ABSTRACT Language, the condition of emergence of the human form as man is in its ancient determination poetry, a fact memorialized by the German poet Hölderlin in the immortal lines, ‘Full of merit, yet poetically, man / Dwells on this earth’. This at the same time signifies that the conditionalities of this emergence are part and parcel of what it means to be human. Discussions of literature/poetry today, however, tend to take the paths linking it to society and social practice, to history, and to the being and intentions of the artist. In many of the cases, there is a loop that leads to what it may be saying to the present, to the reader. In thus treating literature as a means of doing something, an instrument in general, there is a forgetting and intensification of the forgetting of basic facts about literature. In this paper, we read Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought to guide us in recalling to consciousness the being of poetry as a specific form, self-contained and self-sustaining.

Uses of the concept ‘national security’ are normally not strict in discriminating the ‘nation’ from the ‘state’ as is often the case in political theory. In this paper, therefore, the terms nation and state are used interchangeably, in Carneiro’s sense of ‘an autonomous political unit, encompassing many communities within its territory and having a centralized government with the power to collect taxes, draft men for work or war, and decree and enforce laws’ (www.anthonyflood.com/index.html). Whether we follow Carneiro in connecting the origin of these political entities to war and struggle for land resources or the ‘voluntarist’ account in Hunt and Sherman (1981) in which men are said to find it compelling in the interest of protecting their food sources to establish collectives, the position must be that issues of security have been central in statecraft from the outset. In the first scenario which is backed by archaeological evidence, the gains of war would have to be maintained ...

Literary studies has come to a pass where it is no longer certain that it is an academic discipline and on what conditions. First of all, the issues are confused. If literary studies is about social criticism and social commentary of the sort frequently seen in a great many of the essays we now read, there is hardly any reason to give this kind of preoccupation the formality of an academic department in a university. A great deal of newspaper journalism in Nigeria today is precisely about this. Social criticism in the public domain has the advantage of being up to date. The literary text is disadvantaged here, unless we are to do away with history and change altogether and maintain that life is pitched on a wheel of perpetual return, so that anything happening in Nigeria now can be made out even in Shakespeare, if we look closely. Secondly, we have come to a pass where persons trained in other disciplines are picking up literature casually at the secondary school level and are deliv...

Secondary education in Nigeria has been a source of concern for some time because of recurring poor performance of the students in the terminal certificate examination, suggesting serious shortfalls in the expected learning outcomes, in terms of skills and the acceptable level of knowledge acquisition requisite for advancement to higher education. Some of the reasons for this state of affairs may be traced back to poor foundation in primary education, some to the quality of instruction in the secondary schools and lack of proper guidance at this level, and some to inadequate facilities and teaching and learning aids. The news media often cite as a major causative factor distraction owing to wrong use and inordinate attachment to the gadgets of modern communication on the part of the students themselves. However, there are aspects of the problem which do not emanate from the school or social media, but from the home and the social environment. One such factor is poor parenting. In th...

... There are three first-person narrative voices in that story: Ikem's, Chris's, and Beatrice's. Not only does Beatrice's emerge as the ... Ordinarily, it is a function ofthe intimidating speech of power, the sort which the hero, Okonkwo, utters on behalf of the ndkhk ? the council of ...

Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman has been much discussed as a clash of tradition and modernity, with the Colonial District Officer, Mr Pilkings projecting British sensibilities as right reason itself, and can find nothing in him to rouse sympathy for the local people's traditional culture in which the King's Horseman is required to follow the king he serves in death. His sympathy towards them is the patronizing kind, which knows what is best for them, and would take the necessary steps to procure it for them, even against their strong opposition. However, despite the playwright himself suggesting that Mr Pilkings is a catalyser rather than a protagonist, he is clearly entangled as a participant in the relationships of struggle the drama unfolds, which comprise its internal driving force. The main struggle is of course between Elesin, the King's Horseman, and Iyaloja, 'Mother' of the Market, and 'mother of multitudes', the one antagonist pushing the movement of change by default, not by intention, the other demanding total compliance with the cultural tradition. Iyaloja's 'cultural resistance' burgeons with new and unchallengeable energy in the appearance of Olunde the Eleson's son, and by metonymical substitution, the King's faithful Horseman. It will be argued in this paper that the community had come to a threshold that would have led to a cultural revolution-as elaborated by Fredric Jameson-an abrupt and disorientating transition from one mode of production, one social practice to another. It remained only the successful withholding of sacrifice of a life. But the movement of change is interrupted by the almost magical appearance of Olunde.

The history of narrative literature in Nigeria goes back to the early 1950s. It is significant that this writing has been developing since the second generation following the founding of the new nation. Literature is a cultural product as well as a producer of culture. Thus Nigerian writing coincides with the emergence of a culture that is broadly Nigerian; and it is actively producing this Nigerian culture.
Furthermore, Nigerian writing is underlain by the history of the nation, going back to the very founding of the nation-state. The first phase of this literary history consists in the reconstruction of that historical event, and the mapping of the site of its occurrence. The second phase continues to track the history of the nation by means of the experiences of the exceptional individual.
The focus on the exceptional individual is carried over from the first phase of writing; but whereas the privileged space of the latter is rural, that of the former is urban. The contrast gives rise to the two motifs developed as two parts of the thesis. Only in very recent times has attention been shifting away from the epic or quasi-epic individual, who has dominated Nigerian fiction. Increasingly, the focus is on the ordinary individual; bringing to light the way in which his consciousness is being shaped by the public, social events, and the way in which those same events influence the narrative voice itself.
The emphasis is on the underlying motifs from the old pre-colonial ideology, which influence the fictional process. These are developed at length in the first part of the thesis, together with the interpretive motifs drawn from contemporary criticism; and they are used here for a rigorous reinterpretation of the better-known Nigerian works, and for the opening and mapping of the new and less well-known writings.

The word theory so frequently collocates with the scientific disciplines that some take it to be a scientific term. Conceived as a different order of intellectual productivity than the sciences, use of theory with respect to art therefore strikes some as inappropriate. But if organized knowledge about art is possible, and genuine knowledge about it distinguishable from non-genuine, it must be because theory is at work in this study. Theory as a general statement about something is in fact implicated in the production, consumption, and study of art. The rather insignificant role some critics associate with it in the study may be owing to use of habitual knowledge to the extent of forgetfulness of the need to reexamine and reassess the founding principles. An academic discipline must be wary if the founding principles have become part of everyday discourse and are transmitted as traditional and socially and culturally useful knowledge – if, in other words, the student of this discipline receives his/her basic notions from the social space. This paper examines the theory function in art studies from concern over the undue influence of everyday utilitarian notions of art on the academic study of art in Nigeria.

In the literary tradition covering more than two and a half thousand years, philosophy has been frequently mentioned in close proximity to literature, often as different ways of engaging more or less the same activity. We shall look at this matter briefly in the paper. What is not often said, even though many would probably not object to the idea is that literary criticism is a philosophical, rather than a scientific discipline, insofar as it is exercised by the need to understand, lacking the means to explain the phenomenon it is faced with. Three things really are at issue here: literature, literary studies/criticism, and philosophy. There are interrelationships among them, which is why some of the most important works relevant to the study of literary phenomena are by philosophers, normally the very greatest ones among them. We will not be exploring this history in detail, but only the engendering of literary criticism as a result of the philosophical interest in the literary, of which Plato and Aristotle were apparently the first to devote to it sustained attention. But we shall find that evolution and change within the history of criticism have been by following, sometimes without a conscious decision, the methods of reflection inaugurated in Aristotelian metaphysics in which philosophy is established as the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes.

The triangular relation of language-speech-communication, which is implied in the formal approaches to language study does capture a fact of experience, namely, that for a sizeable portion of humanity, language really means the spoken form and is therefore the ordinary and most direct means of communication apart from gestures, at any rate the most flexible. We can distinguish, however, linguistic structures which exist in the oral form only, without being in any way moves in communication. The words of ritual acts are a great example…. In ritual, language takes place purely as speech action; at the opposite end is ecriture (‘writing’), the linguistic structure which occurs only in the written form. These two linguistic forms do not aim to encode or transmit messages: in neither is language a medium. In ritual … language puts the intentional act of the community into effect; in ecriture, language itself is what takes place.

From the first appearance of the form in Nigeria, in the early work of Amos Tutuola, it is already possible to say that the Nigerian novel is traditional, in that it has sought consciously to meet the requirements of the art. It comes of age, that is, at the time it first begins calling forth critical efforts at interpretation and understanding by taking place in a form which is also traditionally very important for a literary culture, the form of the heroic narrative, in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. On the one hand, it is as if the tradition wishes to leave no one in doubt that it is literary; on the other, the movement from fantasy to the heroic is a kind of sign-signal that this is indeed a tradition.

Criticism is the name of a task established anciently in the Greek tradition with respect to the handling of art objects. Although this manner of attention to art objects was originally part of Greek popular culture, Aristotle dedicating an entire book to it, Poetics or On the Art of Poetry, and reaching into the depths of philosophy in search of explanation, suggests that it had gone beyond a feature of popular culture at his time. The book is treated by some as the representative work of his philosophy, while others suggest that it was first written as a set of lecture notes on the nature and study of literary art. Nevertheless, in the ‘Polemical Introduction’ in his mid-twentieth-century Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye had had to undertake a vigorous demonstration of the status of criticism as an academic discipline. This discipline came into existence because of an object which, of all human-made things, needs to be accounted for, in terms of its being as a distinct entity. It is the presupposition here that the features as well as the object of this discipline established anciently perdures over time and in all circumstances as the foundation which the discipline cannot forsake and still remain itself.