Abstract:
This paper attempts to explore the representation of violence and criminality in literary works, with limited focus on select Nigerian novels. In the study of literature as the language of representation, Aristotle’s concept of mimesis has come to stay as representation. However, for many a modern realistic critic, mimesis implies that literary criticism will be vacuous and trite if it does not consider the writing and reading environment. But even in reflecting the society, literature and literary criticism still maintain the otherness status of the art. Thus, from a Marxist and Post colonialist perspectives, this paper shall advance Northrop Frye’s view that the critic is no longer imaginatively subjected to a literary work but tries to make sense out of it, not by going to some historical contexts or by commenting on the immediate experience of reading, but by seeing its structure within literature and literature within culture. Here, we bear in mind that culture is dynamic and has language as its vehicle and the critic deals with language as represented in the work under scrutiny. Violence and criminality have animated the words in F.O Orabueze’s Men Behind the Masks, Adamu Kyuka Usman’s Hope in Anarchy and Mekinzewi’s And the Dead Sing… Justice. These artists have incorporated and built on the basic form patterns of language to create art from these global phenomena that have assumed the proportion of “modern culture.” In identifying loss of social value as the bane of violence and criminality and proffering intellectual militancy as a possible solution, this critic still relies on Northrop Frye’s view that literary criticism is both centripetal and centrifugal, that is, moving inwardly towards the structure of a text and outwardly toward the society and the outer world; one relying on syntax and lexical choice to delineate characters and establish mood and the other relying on the elements of history and visual aesthetics to draw conclusions. It is the beauty of literature to hold this apparent contradiction in creative tension.
