Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture

African Nobel laureate Soyinka ( Ake: The Years of Childhood ) here assembles 19 erudite and outspoken essays on topics as diverse as the plays of Aristophanes; Shakespeare's influence on Arabic writers; and literary theorist Roland Barthes. Most of the pieces--and certainly the most impassioned and polemical of them--examine the conflicted state of African literature. Soyinka singles out for attack writers whom he calls ``neo-Tarzanists,'' whose work treats African cultures with uninformed condescension. Even the great realist novelist Chinua Achebe is faulted; the salvation of African literature, Soyinka contends, lies not in any realist mode but in an approach that engages the music, myths and rituals of African peoples without anthropological distance or sentimentality. This collection is impressively wide-ranging, difficult and unsparing in its critical depth and edge. (May)