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Eileen Julien. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. 181 pages.
The relationship between the modern African novel and narratives recorded from oral sources is of considerable interest to those seeking to distinguish the African version of the novel from what is often viewed as its European progenitor. Eileen Julien has advanced considerably the discussion of this relationship by challenging many commonly held assumptions about this particular interface in world literature.
Her re-examination begins in Part One, "Of Origins and Orality," with two provocative chapters on the issues rooted in that relationship, "The Search for Continuity and Authenticity" and "An Impoverished Paradigm," the attempt to determine the oral nature of oral texts and the specific qualities of the novel. A transitional chapter, "The Importance of Genre," appears as the introduction to Part Two in which she then launches into six chapters devoted to particular works, five in French and one in English. The two chapters of Part One and this third chapter, taken together, constitute a major challenge to scholars who have worked on aspects of orality and...