The Study On Black African Writing In The Novels By Ben·Okri

Nigerian middle-aged writer Ben Okri is one of the important representatives of contemporary Black African literature. He won a series of European Literature Prize in his twenties by virtue of his short stories. In particular,"The Famished Road"(1991), the highest British literary award-Booker Prize winning novel by him, is recognized as a milestone in African fiction at the end of the last century. American critic Henry Lewis Gates praised Okri’s works "Guide the African novels into the post-modern era". In this thesis, two novels named "The Famished Road" and "Songs of Enchantment" are taken as research examples for the analysis of his creation ideas of Black African literature.In the first part, the state-of-the-art of the domestic and foreign academic monographs, theses, and journal articles relate to the research of Okri’s literary works are summarized. Then the aim and significance of this topic are presented along with the general introduction of Okri’s literary works, in order to illustrate the scope and innovation of this thesis.The second part deals with the concepts-including Black African religions and philosophy, abiku imagery, animistic world view, and circulation time concept involved in the two literary works by Okri. Based on the combination of Latin American magic realism creative approach with European and American postmodern novel writing skills, Okri created the "African magic realism novel" with typical Black African features. This mode of literature writing is a use of the concept of the ’Myth holism" to contend with the " Eurocentrism", and provides a possible trend of the development of contemporary African literature.The third part, as a middle-generation writer of Black African in the post-colonialism context, Okri, on one hand, was affected by the Black African culture in his childhood, on the other hand, as a non-native language (English) African writer, was also influenced by Western culture in many ways. As a result, he inevitably has some characteristics from a post-colonial "Diaspora" writer. In this part, the analysis of the inevitable status quo of cultural hybridity and the national identity crisis phenomenon in the post-colonial period of Black African described in Okri’s two novels are conducted from two aspects, namely post-colonial "Diaspora" and cultural identity. This provides the necessary support for the interpretation of the Black Africans’ identity reconstruction in the special cultural context of the post-colonial period.In the fourth part, the status of the Black African where the abolished colonial rule was followed by the ongoing civil war and growing problems are illustrated from both violence narrative and political allegory aspects in Okri’s novels. In combination with the national allegory of the third world by Jameson, detailed analysis of the imagery of the "Road" in his literary works is conducted. After comparison of the original natural world in Black African and Western civilization, the understanding of the world and humanity was expressed in a semi-allegorical approach.This thesis offers a superficial way of understanding the mode of Okri’s Black African literature writing with some of the immature views and opinions of the author of this thesis. The aim is to attract the attention of domestic readers to the Black African literature and to reveal Okri’s unique position in the world’s contemporary literature and contributions, as well as the significance of the revelation of the ideological development of Chinese literature.