Kwara State University
Saeedat ALIYU
Designation: Senior Lecturer
Department: Linguistics African and European Languages
| My Publications | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S/N | Title | Abstract | Authors | Volume Numbers | Publication Type | Publication Date | Link | |
| 1 | Nostalgia as aesthetic in Tanure Ojaide’s In the House of Words |
Nostalgia as a literary aesthetic in Tanure Ojaide’s In the House of Words encodes both experiential and politicized perspectives of the poet persona in the ways he reminisces about the past to project into the future. These perspectives; experiential and political, coalesce in the way the persona ruminates about spaces he had called home before immigrating to the United States and his subsequent reimagining and reencountering of spaces both physical and social. This paper seeks to explore, through psychoanalysis of the journey of the persona in the selected collection of poems, how the conflation of nostalgic perspectives enhance the intensity of the persona’s emotional encounters and also how it enables the poet to push his ideology of a socio-economic and political society. The paper finds that nostalgia becomes an aesthetic which Ojaide engages in to foreground his connection to a socio-cultural and physical environment and to enhance the functional role of his art. This paper concludes that foundational landmarks, both physical and abstract, play pivotal roles in the ways poets discuss the past and the present and how they depict the future of their choice. KEYWORDS: poetry, nostalgia, aesthetic, landscapes, psychoanalysis, Ojaide | Aliyu, S.B. | ISBN: 978-1-7335872-2-8 | Tanure Ojaide: Life Literature, and the Environment (Essays). Onookome Okome (University of Alberta, Canada) & Obari Gomba (University of Port-Harcourt) (eds.) Cissus World Press USA | 2019-01-01 | ||