Using literary semiotics and narratology as the only criteria, and starting from the hypothesis according to which J. M. Coetzee writes slowness in Slow Man, the article shows how Slow Man is made weighty, and why it evolves sluggishly. With an actant character saddled with the epithet "Slow Man", a designation embodying slowness, Slow Man claims to be a slow novel generated by retardation devices like speech acts narrative, polyglotism, fragmentation, epistolarity, and narrative embeddednesss. Those roadblocks prevent flashy reading, promote "slow reading", a leisurely and innovative reading by which the reader is brought to become a textual cooperator in the actualization process of Slow Man's meaning.
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an influential novel in African literature for three reasons. First, it is a novel meant to promote African culture; second, it is a narrative about where things went wrong with Africans; and third, it is a prose text which contributed to Achebe’s worldwide recognition. It contains Achebe’s rejection of the degrading representation of Africans by European writers, and fosters Africa’s traditional values and humanism. The excesses of Igbo customs led the protagonist to flagrant misuse of power. The novel’s scriptural innovations bring fame to Achebe who is considered as the “Asiwaju” (Leader) of African literature, the “founding father of African fiction”, or again the “Eagle on Iroko”.
Todorov’s syntactic, verbal and semantic aspects of the literary text, onomastics and Mauron’s psychocriticism, underlie this paper whose goal is to show that Chinua Achebe’s “Chike’s School Days” is an autrebiography verbalizing Achebe’s early schooling. As two major thematic Ariadne’s threads, the religious, familial and onomastic connections between Chike and Achebe, as well as Achebe’s untimely love for Shakespeare’s language, have been used to compose an autrebiograhical short story, a shortened fiction about the self, which is narrated not in the first-person (“I”), but rather in the third-person (“He”). It is with such a detachment device that Achebe writes about Chike, a character who is nobody else but his double.
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