Context and criticism

What you need to know

• You are examined on both African and non-African literature, so you must be able to move between them. Expect questions that assume knowledge of the concerns and forms of each, and never offer a text from the wrong section, which scores zero regardless of quality.
• The recurring concerns of modern African literature include the colonial encounter, independence and the disillusionment that followed, the pull between tradition and modernity, corruption and misrule, the position of women, migration and exile, and the claims of the community on the individual.
• African oral tradition supplies much of the technique as well as the subject matter: the proverb, the folktale, the praise poem, the dirge, the riddle, the song, call and response, and the figure of the storyteller or griot who addresses listeners directly.
• Written African literature absorbs those oral forms rather than abandoning them, so a novel may carry proverbs as a form of argument, a play may open with drumming and a chorus, and a poem may be built on the shape of a lament. When you identify such a feature, say what it imports: communal judgement, inherited wisdom, or the authority of the ancestors.
• A proverb in a text is doing more than ornamenting speech. It lets an older character settle an argument by appealing to shared wisdom, and when a younger character cannot answer in kind, the writer is showing the tradition losing its grip.
• Historical context changes what a work means. A play written under a military government reads as protest even where it never names the government; poetry written in the independence years carries hope that later writing deliberately withholds. Date the work, then ask what it could not say openly.
• Social context covers class, gender roles, religion, education and the economy of the world depicted. These determine what is possible for a character, which is why a decision that looks like weakness may be the only move available within that society.
• Context must serve the text. One or two sentences establishing circumstance, then straight back to incident, language and effect. An essay that spends half its length on history has stopped being a literature answer.
• For non-African texts, know the conventions of the period. Shakespeare's theatre played in daylight to a standing crowd, with little scenery, boys in the women's roles, and language carrying the work that scenery does now, which is why descriptions of place appear inside the dialogue.
• Romantic poetry values nature, feeling, imagination and the individual voice, often against industrial society. Modernist writing fragments form, distrusts straightforward narration and leaves meaning for the reader to assemble. Knowing the convention tells you whether a feature is a choice or simply the norm of the period.
• Resist treating African texts only as social documents and non-African texts only as art. Ambition, jealousy, grief and love run through both, and the strongest comparative answers show a shared human concern handled through different forms.
• Criticism is the organised discussion of literature, and the main approaches you may meet are formalist or practical criticism, which reads the text closely on its own terms; feminist criticism, which examines how women are represented and by whom; Marxist criticism, which reads class and economic power; and post-colonial criticism, which examines empire, language and who is permitted to speak.
• Use a critical opinion in three steps: state it briefly, apply it to a named moment in the text, then agree, qualify or disagree with your own evidence. A critic's name dropped into a paragraph without application adds nothing and often looks like padding.
• Your own reading, argued from the text, is worth more than a borrowed one recited. Examiners reward independent judgement supported by evidence, and they recognise crammed critical phrases immediately. The author's biography is not evidence; the text is.