The Arts-Muse Fair

                                    A significant role of literature is that it enables us “make sense of our   experiences…(and at the same time allows us) assign meaning and value to our lives.” 1   One way this has happened is by giving man the ability to create a story-world. That story-world has been with mankind from the beginning of creation as an oral art before evolving into the textual format. The story-world of course is that universe which is a representation of the place where the human exists. It is not an Edenic place because man no longer lives in that Garden of perfection that has been long lost. In the 17 th Century, the English Poet John Milton wrote an Epic Poem called Paradise Lost. Milton based the ten-part poem   “on the biblical  story of the  Fall of Man : the temptation of  Adam and Eve  by the  fallen angel   Sa...

WORLD LITERATURE The idea of a World literature might have been mooted earlier than the 20th Century. However, the concept has been readily traced to the works of Wolfgang von Goethe of Germany in the first quarter of the 20th Century. From the different submissions by scholars on his life, opinions and works, it can be deduced that Goethe's concern about prevalent acrimony and wars among European and non-European nations in his lifetime combined with his firm belief in the efficacy and immense redeeming potentiality of literature to make him conceive, propose and pursue a unifying literary practice of the global communities/nations. The literature he conceived was so important that he preached that, National literature does not mean much at present. It is time for the era of World literature and everybody must endeavour to accelerate this epoch. Goethe, 1927. In his close study of Goethe's life and work, Birus (2017) arrived at the conclusion that the Germa...

Issues In The Evaluation Of Contemporary African Literature   By Prof. Saleh Abdu. INTRODUCTION Like the stated theme of this year's ANA International Convention, although shorter, my chosen topic is broad and is designed to proffer a wide, instead of deep and argumentative, posture. This relieves me of engaging in hard and tortuous textual exegesis in the usually bent and twisted critical parlance to uphold a line of argument. Not pursuing any of today's sub-themes, I set out to explore and by so doing remind you, by highlighting, of some historical epochs and extant signposts in preceding critical evaluation of African literature. All these are presented as a prelude to assessing African literature (with)in (the comity of) World Literature(s). I hope my paper will serve sufficiently to bring to the fore of today's discourse the healthy inevitability of heterogeny in matters of global cultural discourse and the likely misplaced fallacy of homogen...