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This book likens writers' incessant focus on racism, negative ethnicity, patriarchy and social stratification in societies to a naïve physician who prescribes analgesics to treat symptoms while the underlying cause of the disease seethes in the blood. In the same way, persons who consistently blame their reckless conduct and shabbiness miss the point if they do not transform the actual cause of the problem: the mind. While most literary scholars problematise gender disparities, racial and political othering, oppression, environment degradation, education matters, poor parenting and governance, they tend to disregard the root cause: modernism. This book finds a gap in this grey area to address the authentic cause of the symptoms that most literary writers and scholars treat. Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, systematisation and rationality, and dualism are at the heart of racism, corruption and other aforementioned symptoms. It is the contention of this study that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Prof. John Geofrey Mugubi
1. Interrogating the Individuated Self: Background of Modernism and Postmodernism
2. The Modern State and the Demise of Culture: Failure of Post Independent States in East African Fiction
3. Modernism and Automatisation: Mechanisation of Humanity in Contemporary East African Fiction
4. Modernism and Pathology: Othering and Self Fragmentation in Selected East African Fiction
5. Modernism and 'Great Literature': The Marking Guide and Death of the East African Literary Writer
6. SUMMARIES, CONCLUSIONS AND RESEARCH FINDINGS
Index
About the author
Dr. Andrew Nyongesa is currently a lecturer of literary studies and a writer of fiction. Some of his published works are The Endless Battle (2016), The Water Cycle (2018), Many in One and Other Stories (2019) and The Armageddon and Other Stories (2020), Say my Name and Other Stories from Home and Away all of which are based on postcolonialism and ecocriticism. His scholarly works include Cultural Fixity and Hybridity: Strategies of Resistance in Safi Abdi's Fiction, Otherness and Pathology: The Fragmented Self and madness in Contemporary Works of African Fiction and "Humanity and Mother Nature: Ecological Reading of Ole Kulet's Blossoms of the Savannah" by Kenya Studies Review. His research interests are postcolonialism, psychological criticism, Black Aesthetics and Eco-criticism.
Summary
Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, rationality and dualism are at the heart of racism, and corruption. This study contends that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.
