Critical criteria for selecting literary texts for schools
By Segun Adekoya
CRITICAL criteria are benchmarks, devices, principles, standards, and theoretical tools for reading, analysing and assessing literary texts, determining their worth, and ranking them on the basis of their aesthetic qualities and insights into life, social reality, and their specific thematic engagements. They are elements that authors employ to compose their texts, such as setting, plot-structure, characterisation, language, rhythm, theme, and point of view. A critic wants to find out if they are effectively or poorly utilized and if they are combined in a coherent manner that makes the final product beautiful and its message comprehensible. If the parts that compose a text war against one another and hinder meaning, can a rational justification be found for the chaos and dissonance? Are characters portrayed by the author fully developed, or are they symbolic? Is conflict developed and resolved? If resolved, is the strategy employed ingenious or mechanical? Is plot construction episodic, linear, convoluted, organic, or circular in design? Are there brakes? Does the plot end, or is it open-ended? Is the style adopted by the author appropriate and does it hold any respect for readers? Is the point of view consistent? Is the narrator credible? Are there several points of view? What ideological underpinnings inform each of the author’s devices and are they plausible? Do the choices achieve or frustrate the author’s intention? The posers are some of the questions that a literary critic asks while reviewing a book. Basically, critical criteria revolve around issues of what is written, how it is written, and the value of what is written. They dwell on beauty of form, sublimity of expression, and social relevance.
The answer to the question of validity of the critical criteria today is Yes and No. Critics are divided over the question. Some argue that the criteria, especially those pertaining to organic unity, mastery of form and style, and significance of meaning and thought, are immutable and universal, and authors who write having them at the back of their minds produce great literature of everlasting value. Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Alexander Pope, to mention a few, they claim, owe their greatness to following the old rules of literary composition, and their works continue to appeal to audiences and readers across vast historical periods all over the world.
Other critics insist that there are no eternal verities and all values are culture dependent and therefore fluid and relative. Structuralists argue that the author is dead and it is language that writes. Postmodernists reject grand narratives and hierarchization of texts and concentrate on differences rather than similarities. To them, the worth of The Bible is not greater than that of a short story. Post-structurslists take all interpretations as tentative, equal, and valid. Their position is minatory to literary criticism, as a disciple, and not helpful to teachers who have to read and grade examination scripts.
Literary principles for composing an epic, a mock-epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a pastoral are still valid, but a contemporary writer who is dealing with today’s problems must adhere to the truth of experience, which differs significantly from that of a Sophocles, an Aristophanes, a Milton, or an Alexander Pope. Ola Rotimi obeys the three Aristotelian laws of unity in The Gods Are Not to Blame but holds not deities but humanity responsible for their misfortunes. How many African leaders today possess qualities of an epic hero? Most are Lilliputians, easily compromise, betray their people, and make impossible conditions for creating an epic. Soyinka’s “Dawn” is a sonnet but with a marked structural difference. Adaptations and imitations, even when they repeat original texts, are nevertheless new inventions and characterised by difference, the mantra of deconstruction.
Science and technology combine to erode the very foundation on which the tragic view of the world in ancient Greece rested. Hence, the force of modern tragedy is drastically whittled down and does not have the same oppressive quality of inevitability on society as it had on imagination of ancient Greeks. Some critics even doubt if the reality that confronts humanity in the contemporary world can be properly perceived as pure tragedy. At best, going by the example of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, it is risible and comically tragic. The belief is strong among optimists that solutions to most existential and environmental problems already exist, but greed for profit and lack of political will delay and prevent action. However, the instrumentality of science and technology is yet to realise the dream of a world made perfect for all its inhabitants. Artificial intelligence holds great promise and gives hope that it will help humans to defeat death and its author. Nevertheless, the reality of tragic fatality persists because the powerful and wonderful tool of human liberation also has the potential of exterminating its inventors and benefactors.
The point is undeniable that context matters and influences interpretation of texts. A Western, radical, feminist audience that takes marriage as an institution created by men to oppress women and does not attach importance to fertility and human biological reproduction would not see anything tragic in JP Clark’s Song of a Goat. A sexually permissive twenty-first century society that protects human dignity of homosexuals and grants women abortion rights would read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with unbelief and pour scorn on Victorian ethics.
Critics of essentialism and the Great Tradition who posit that human nature is a myth would have a hard time convincing people that they do not share the same emotions and are not prey to imperfections.
Yet, the fact of human individuality, in spite of shared commonality, is indisputable. The foregoing is proof of the complexity of the human phenomenon that authors grapple with in their imaginative writing and critics struggle to understand with the aid of critical tools. There are no simple solutions.
It is erroneous to claim, as the topic of the present panel discussion suggests, that emerging writers are not taught in African educational institutions. Perhaps, what is meant by their “absence” is their underrepresentation, which is irrefragable.
The reading list for the 2026 – 2030 West African School Certificate Examination includes two novels, Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die and Elma Shaw’s Redemption Road, one play, Bosede Ademilua-Afolayan’s Once Upon an Elephant, and two poems, Elizabeth L. A. Kamara’s ‘New Tongue’ and S. O. H. Afriyie-Vidza’s ‘Hearty Garlands.’ They are all third-generation African writers.
At the tertiary level, the National Universities Commission currently provides 70% core course content, while each university adds a 30% supplement. Thus, there is room for course coordinators to use their initiative and add literary texts by emerging African writers. At the National Open University of Nigeria, ENG 114, Introduction to Nigerian Literature, has content on New Nigerian Poets, New Nigerian Novelists, and New Nigerian Playwrights. Third-generation Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Helen Oyeyemi, Helon Habila, Kaine Agary, Tess Onwueme, Onyeka Francisca Onyekuba, Chinelo Okparanta, Chinyere Grace Okafor, Chigozie Obioma, Elnathan John, Segun Afolabi, feature prominently in the curriculum.
Prof. Segun Adekoya
It is practically impossible to put all published literary texts on school curricula, because of limitations of space and time; selection of the best written and the most appropriate to illustrate literary concepts, a movement, a theory, or the literature of a period is therefore unavoidable. It might appear simple. However, as demonstrated by Aristophanes in The Frogs, it is an arduous task. All objective critical criteria are not enough to execute it. After putting writings of Aeschylus and Euripides on the scales and weighing them line by line, Dionysus finds, to his dismay, that he still cannot make a decision. In the end, he settles the recondite matter, not by logical ratiocination, but by recourse to emotion. He chooses the former writer and declares, “My choice shall fall on him my soul desires!” The statement highlights the importance and relevance of I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment, which exposes errors of critical assessment that are traceable to ideological biases, personal beliefs and experiences, irrelevant associations, and stock responses, and makes valuable suggestions on how to overcome them. There is a strong element of subjectivity in literary criticism. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Every reader seeks themselves in texts and pretends to be objective. As Alexander Pope posits in “An Essay on Criticism,” “A perfect Judge will read each work of Wit / With the same spirit that its author writ.”
Nevertheless, the education system has erected structures for training literary critics and determining who is qualified to do the work. Emerging writers would do well to pay close attention to canons that the literary establishment has set up as gold standards. In any case, the world is a marketplace in which competition is the rule. Newcomers to the market are bound to compete with the old and fight for recognition and space.
At any point in time in a class-riven society, there are two cultures, high and low, which are respectively expressed by bourgeois/elite literature and popular literature. However, a writer who is classified in one period as low/popular, like Shakespeare, can gain fame and recognition over time and join the ranks of the canonized. Canon formation is a continuous process. Emerging writers, therefore, should not despair and give up writing.
There is nothing wrong in turning tables, overthrowing canons, and violating aesthetic norms and literary principles, but emerging subversive writers must first strive to have a thorough understanding of the rules that they want to bend and the conventions and norms from which they seek to deviate. The style and tone of emerging writers are certainly more truculent, more open, more direct, and more irreverent than those of the first and second generations of African writers, which is a reflection of worsening living conditions on the continent. However, subtlety of style and tone, as discernible in the writing of the latter group, is a mark of sophistication and captures the “seeming” of art, its neither-nor character, part fiction and part reality.
There is a necessity to create space for queer literature in school curricula, but legislation in many African countries against homosexuality is a major handicap.
Some writers do not feature at all in either school curricula or literary discourse because their work is not accessible, which raises the problems of self-publishing and book distribution. Books published in some African countries are not readily available in other parts of the continent, especially after the demise of big publishers like Heinemann (African Writers Series) and Oxford University Press. Many existing publishers are not interested in book distribution. Teachers can teach only texts to which they have access. The prevalent practice is that authors pay for publishing, collect copies, and distribute them by themselves. Government can salvage the situation by ensuring that at least one copy of every text published in Nigeria is available in every public and school library. Teachers of literature are encouraged to be more audacious and more adventurous in selecting texts for study. Even a literary text that is void of merit and quality could be useful in a Creative Writing class to illustrate how not to write and what is to be avoided. After all, the Ten Commandments in the Scripture teach by the negative. Writers who are well connected could get their books on school curricula, whatever their shortcomings, for the same reason. But the best road to travel is the craggy and rugged one that builds up confidence and strength, for it enables a quester to journey far and achieve greatness that is unimpugnable.
Adekoya teaches literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria
