When one scholar published a book-length study of the writings of Wole Soyinka in 1993 and gave it the title Wole Soyinka Revisited, he was reflecting in that title the fact that at the time, there were already about eight other book-length studies or monographs on the Nigerian author in print. Since then, the number of books and monographs on Soyinka has grown steadily to the point that to date, studies devoted exclusively to Soyinka's works number more than a dozen and a half. And this is without reference to important works like Jonathan Peters' A Dance of Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka (1978), Tejumola Olaniyan's Scars of Conquests, Masks of Resistance (1995) and Kole Omotoso's Achebe or Soyinka (1996) which involve exhaustive comparison of Soyinka's writings with the works of other major African authors or writers from the African diaspora. Moreover, there are at least five collections of critical essays on Soyinka's works, with others planned or projected. Finally, there are several special issues of academic journals devoted specifically to the many facets of Soyinka's works and career.

Given this impressive number of full-length and full-scale studies of Soyinka, it does seem obligatory to explain why I or anyone else should set out to do yet another study of the Nigerian author.

Soyinka's achievement in drama, relative to the other forms and genres of literary expression, is a fascinating combination and synthesis of individual talent and sensibility, formal institutional training and practical theatre experience, and the weight of received, subliminally absorbed cultural tradition. His early work in the British theatre at a time of important aesthetic and political redirection in that theatre has been amply documented, though not critically assessed.

The plays discussed in this chapter are amongst Soyinka's most ambitious and most memorable dramas, but are also the most pessimistic in his dramatic corpus: A Dance of the Forests, The Road, Madmen and Specialists, Death and the King's Horseman and The Bacchae of Euripides. Moreover, in terms of form and craft, and of language and ideas, Soyinka is at his most resourceful and most vigorous in this group of dark, brooding plays. Because each of these plays deals with, or derives directly from a major historical event or crisis, the dramatist's artistic resourcefulness in the plays seems in turn to be linked to that element in his career as a dramatist that we have identified in Chapter 3 of this study as the imperative of appropriate response.

In his important book, Forms of Attention, the English scholar and critic, Frank Kermode, has suggested that the fate of literature, the survival of literature, depends ultimately on the degree to which it continues to be talked about. Consistent with the title of the book, Kermode also makes the qualification that a lot depends, not just on literature continuing to get talked about, but also on how it is talked about, on the “forms of attention” that individual authors and entire literary traditions receive. The works and career of Soyinka amply demonstrate that it is also of significance who talks about literature or the corpus of a particular author with regard to its sources, impact and legacy.

Within the entire body of Soyinka's writings, the fictional and nonfictional prose works constitute the most uneven group of works. This poses a formidable challenge for scholars and critics.

More than three decades after the publication of Soyinka's first volume of poetry, Idanre and Other Poems, the preface poem to that volume now appears as a reflexive metacommentary that is radically at variance with generally held critical opinions on the contents of the volume itself and, more generally, on Soyinka's reputation as a poet. A quatrain without end-rhymes, the wistful etherialism of this preface poem suggests a beguilingly harmonious, even trouble-free pact between the poet and his muse, and between the poet and his audience that virtually no critic now associates with Soyinka's writings, least of all his poetry. The poem is short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

All the book length studies, the monographs, and the innumerable essays on Wole Soyinka's writings and career take as their starting point his stupendous literary productivity: some thirty-five titles since he began writing in the late 1950s, and a career in the theatre, popular culture and political activism matching his literary corpus in scope, originality and propensity for generating controversy.

Abstract

Methodological Preliminaries

I would like to address the remarks made in Fodor and Lepore's (henceforth, FL), “The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Critical Reflections on James Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon” (in this volume), regarding the research program outlined in Pustejovsky (1995). My response focuses on two themes: FL's misreadings and misinterpretations of the substance as well as the details of the book, and the generally misguided and unconstructive view of the study of semantics and natural language meaning inherent in their approach.

In contrast to this approach, I have proposed a framework, Generative Lexicon Theory, that faces the empirically hard problems of how words can have different meanings in different contexts, how new senses can emerge compositionally, and how semantic types predictably map to syntactic forms in language. The theory accomplishes this by means of a semantic typing system encoding generative factors, called “qualia structures,” into each lexical item. Operating over these structures are compositional rules incorporating specific devices for capturing the contextual determination of an expression's meaning.

Abstract

Introduction

“Unlike the mental grammar, the mental dictionary has had no cachet. It seems like nothing more than a humdrum list of words, each transcribed into the head by dullwitted rote memorization. In the preface to his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson wrote: “It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries.” Johnson's own dictionary defines lexicographer as “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. […] we will see that the stereotype is unfair. The world of words is just as wondrous as the word of syntax, or even more so” (Pinker, 1995, 126-127).

Abstract

Introduction

Investigations within the generative perspective aim at modeling, by means of a small number of rules, principles and constraints, linguistic phenomena (either morphological, syntactic or semantic) at a high level of abstraction, level that seems to be appropriate for research on multilinguism and language learning. These works, among other things, attempt at modeling a certain form of “creativity” in language: from a limited number of linguistic resources, a potentially infinite set of surface forms can be generated.

Among works within the generative perspective, let us concentrate on the Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995), which has settled in the past years one of the most innovative perspective in lexical semantics. This approach introduces an abstract model radically opposed to “flat” sense enumeration lexicons. This approach, which is now well-known, is based (1) on the close cooperation of three lexical semantic structures: the argument structure (including selectional restrictions), the aspectual structure, and the Qualia structure; (2) on a detailed type theory and a type coercion procedure; and (3) on a refined theory of compositionality.