Department of Modern Languages
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Browsing Department of Modern Languages by Author "Afatsawo, D."
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Item From Negritude to “migritude”: the Janus-faced discourse on identity and integration in the African diaspora literature(2016-09-22) Adebowale, M.S.; Afatsawo, D.The concern of the new generation of African writers in the diaspora today is different from that of their predecessors of Negritude. The latter’s concern was to make black cultural heritage visible and to reclaim a place in the exchange among cultures and in so doing show pride in their Black African cultural values. In contrast, most of the new African writers in the diaspora are struggling to dissociate themselves somehow partially or completely from their African heritage thereby creating for themselves a new abstract place that Leonora Miano a writer from Cameroon called Afropea, which she defines as a place which is immaterial and internal for those who do not have the French root. The times of the Negritude have been replaced by those of the “migritude”, given that immigration and the problems of identity and integration are at the center of the concerns of most of those writers. The discourse of these African writers on identity and integration are often contradictory: sometimes they struggle to be recognized as French writers (as considered part of the French Literature) or at least cosmopolitan writers i.e. citizens of the world or even Francophone and other times they categorize themselves as writers and nothing more in order to avoid being classified as African writers. The objective of this paper is to analyze the “identity crisis” of these writers which makes them continuously live in an identity limbo.Item Incorporating the Literary Re-makes of the Classics into Today’s Literature Classroom: Some Experiential Reflections(2016-10-19) Afatsawo, D.; Boampong, J.In his Plagiat et créativité (treize enquêtes sur l’auteur et son autre) (2008), Jean-Louis Corneille traces creativity and plagiarism in several French authors who have incorporated slices of literary masterpieces into their creative works, and wonders whether it is possible to draw a clear line in literature between creativity and plagiarism and, if so, whether the literary enterprise is not missing out on the burst of creative energy that re-makes bring to other artistic realms like films and music. As an extension to Corneille’s thesis, my presentation discusses the efforts of a new and relatively obscure Spanish publishing house, Editores 451, to bring the classics to a new generation of readers through re-makes that it had commissioned a group of young Spanish writers to make of such Spanish classics as El Mío Cid, Lazarillo de Tormes, Bécquer’s Leyendas as well as of other European and American writers. In my presentation, I will address five fundamental questions, namely: a) What do we understand by a classic literary work, b) How has its meaning changed in and through time, c) What value system underpins the changes, d) In what ways is literary value added, and e) as teachers of language, how can we harness the potentialities of the literary re-makes to gain a new readership for the classics in the college literature classroom. Finally, I will suggest two novel ideas that I believe are worthy of our exploration for their potential benefits to both postgraduate students and faculty.