Introduction: Digging into Language

Abstract

Introduction: Digging into Language Flora Veit-Wild and Clarissa Vierke The original impetus for this special issue arose out of the research project “Changing Patterns of the Shona Novel from Zimbabwe: A Linguistic Literary Analysis” directed by Flora Veit-Wild at Humboldt University in Berlin. Starting from the premise that one of the glaring gaps in contemporary African studies is the fact that linguistic and literary scholarship have largely existed side by side instead of collaborating for mutual benefit, the project aimed to establish a model for bringing together literary and linguistic research tools and methods in the field of African-language literatures. The main work of the research team consisted in establishing a computer-generated linguistic corpus from three prominent Shona novels (Berlin Shona Novel Corpus) and, on this basis, in exploring perspectives for new readings of these literary works (for details see Veit-Wild’s essay in this volume). The project, which was funded by the German Research Council (DFG) and ran from 2013 to 2016, was carried out in close cooperation with a number of Zimbabwean scholars. In a similar vein to the Berlin-based project, Clarissa Vierke and a group of researchers at the University of Bayreuth embarked on an investigation into poetry as aesthetic practice in eastern Africa. Their research project, which began in 2016 and is also DFG-funded, seeks to consider the specific effect of poetry on life worlds in eastern Africa. Language is attributed a particular importance in this project since, according to its fundamental hypothesis, language in poetry has its own way of “speaking,” i.e., it evokes a specific aesthetic experience that makes it essentially different from non-poetic discourse. The common interest of the two research groups in looking into the linguistic set-up of literary texts and aesthetic practices gave rise to the idea of co-editing a special issue of RAL entitled “Reading Closely: Investigating Textuality in Afrophone Literatures.” The epithet “reading closely” marks the stance and the motto behind this collection of articles that aims to put literary texts from Africa and their critical reception on a par with other major literatures of the world, for whom “close reading” has long since been a widely used term and method of analysis. For reasons explained further below, our focus is on literary texts in African languages. The term “Afrophone” is used to distinguish them from texts written in languages of European origin (Europhone) such as Afrikaans, Nigerian English, or hybridized languages with a European language as a base. Our declared aim of “investigating” their “texuality” emphasizes the craftsmanship [End Page ix] that is at stake: language is the clay in the writer’s workshop and its literary usage needs to be examined with appropriate tools. Accordingly, our approach is guided by the following main questions: What does writing do in a particular text and how does it do it? (See the title of Bazerman and Prior’s book). And in our context, how do the specificities of an African language shape a literary text? How do authors writing in an African language creatively explore the linguistic particularities of the language they write in? Our endeavor can be considered as a plea not only for a more balanced consideration of African languages and the literatures written in them, but also for a more language-centered approach to literature from Africa, generally speaking. Contrary to many prevalent forms of textual analysis of African literatures that tend to quickly step over language to dig for the “meaning” of the text, the contributions in this issue dive into texts and unearth their coming-into-being in and through language. The focus on language rather than on a primarily “referential reading” is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s position: “what takes place in a narrative is from the referential . . . point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone . . . the unceasing celebration of its coming” (124). In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag pleads in a similar vein: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories” (10...