Browsing by Author "Opali, Fred"

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    The necessity and implications of creative power or poetic authority in Wole Soyinka and Okot p’Bitek.
    (NUST, Department of Communication., 2009) Opali, Fred
    Wole Soyinka and Okot p’Bitek see Ogun and Lawino as their deities without whose blessing they cannot create poetry. My paper treats the case in which Soyinka ands Okot p’Bitek in their anxiety, pursue the creative tradition practised by the major English Romantics. In the same vein they express the need to attain authority to create poetry before beginning to speak for and on behalf of their trapped societies. As its theoretical base, the paper is informed by intertextuality as espoused especially by Harold Bloom and Jonathan Culler in their theories of influence. The paper begins by a brief presentation of the contexts that inform and significantly enrich the poetry of Soyinka and p’Bitek. From this position, the paper then considers the process, necessity, and implications of attaining creative power or poetic authority and concludes by examining the necessity in the mind of the poet-initiate in the creative process of a presence or equivalence. It observes that it is only creative artists in this condition who can attain poetic authority. Throughout the paper, the extent to which Soyinka and Okot p’Bitek extend the range of romantic continuity and intra-poetic relations in their poetry is indicated. The paper concludes by giving a brief evaluation of the Romantic inclination that the two poets display.
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    Okot p’Bitek’s revision of aspects of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "The Mask of Anarchy".
    (NUST, Department of English Communication., 2009) Opali, Fred
    This paper examines the extent to which Okot p’Bitek revises aspects of Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy. It begins by establishing the theoretical background to revisionism and takes as its working statement a key passage from Wordsworth. The substance of this passage is pursued and related to Johnsonian newness which, implicitly, is a neo-classical revision of the Wordsworthian stance. This position is pursued further in twentieth-century theoretical views as espoused by T.S.Eliot especially his view about relationships between texts. This section ends by drawing Harold Bloom into the paper’s theoretical framework and indicating which of his revisionary ratios are seen in p’Bitek’s revision of Shelley’s poem. The next section of the paper justifies p’Bitek’s revisionism and the third part applies two of Bloom’s revisionary ratios to Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Prisoner and Song of Soldier. The paper ends by assessing p’Bitek’s anxiety. It affirms that p’Bitek achieves identity and poetic distinction in revising aspects of The Mask of Anarchy.