Influential Writers: From Munro to Achebe – Exploring Literary Landscapes
Alice Munro
Alice Munro is one of the most important short-story writers of her generation. Her fiction combines spareness and realism with magisteral vision and expansiveness. Munro’s signature approach to the short story, in which she uses a simple style to produce complex and potent effects, has influenced many of her contemporaries. She has published several collections of short stories, and most of them are written in the first person, often from the perspective of women whose voices and experiences suggest the author’s own story.
She was born in Wingham, Ontario, and began to write in her teens. In 1949, she enrolled in the University of Western Ontario, but she left two years later to marry and raise three daughters. She sets her stories in small towns or villages, where poverty is stamped on all facets of life, and where women confront the triple binds of economic, gender, and cultural confinement. Through a precise and particular emphasis on setting and character, she evokes rural Canadian life in the decades following mid-century when modernity and the promise of the future are crowded out by a hardening sense of the past.
In an early writing, Munro describes an approach to the outside world that effectively captures her sense of the mystery within the ordinary—the hallmark of her realist style. This aura of openness and suggestion, conveyed through “next-door language,” gives Munro’s stories their haunting aspect, their quality of movement, rippling and widening from the small-scale to the magnificent. The story included here, “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” exemplifies her ability to imbue “fragments, moments, suggestions” with fullness and power, as we view through a young girl’s eyes both the pathos and the degradation of men and women whose lives have fallen into a potentially deadening cycle of promise and decay.
Anne Carson
Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Ontario. She received her B.A. and her Ph.D. in classics from the University of Toronto. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has taught classics at McGill University and the University of Michigan, among other schools. Along with poetry, she has published books of criticism on classical literature; translations from Greek; and a novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red (1998).
In her poetry, Carson braids together the ruminative texture of the essay, the narrative propulsion of the novel, the self-analysis of autobiography, and the lapidary compression of lyric. In “The Glass Essay,” a long poem that reflects on the dislocations of identity through time, love, and madness, she vividly narrates the end of a love affair, a visit with a difficult mother, and the degeneration of a father with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Into this semi-autobiographical tale, she weaves commentary on the writings of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, whose works function as oblique and remote points of comparison for the poet’s experience.
Both personal and impersonal, the poetry of Carson bridges the gap between private narrative and philosophical speculation, between self-excavation and literary-critical analysis. Tightly wound with crisp diction, studded with striking metaphors, etched with epigrams and ironies, her poems are lucid in feeling and intense in thought. They are as intellectually crystalline as they are emotionally volcanic.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Kamau Brathwaite has been the most prominent West Indian spokesman for “the literature of reconnection”: he has sought to recover and revalue the African inheritance in the Caribbean. In History of the Voice, Brathwaite argues that Afro-Caribbeans, their ancestors uprooted by slavery, were further cut off from their specific history and their local environment by Standard English models of language and literature. He proposes “nation language,” creolized English saturated with African words, rhythms, and even grammar, as a crucial tool for writers to recuperate Afro-Caribbean history and experience. His own poetry draws on West Indian syncopations, orality, and musical traditions, but also adapts imported models, such as the modernist dislocations of persona, rhythm, and tone in T. S. Eliot’s verse.
He was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the eastern edge of the West Indies. His undergraduate studies in history were at Cambridge University; his graduate studies, at the University of Sussex. He worked as an education officer for the Ministry of Education in Ghana and taught history at the University of the West Indies, before taking a position in comparative literature at New York University in 1991. His many books of poetry include a work of epic scope and scale, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), which gathers Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969).
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia, in the British West Indies, where he had a Methodist upbringing in a largely Roman Catholic society. He was educated at St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
He then moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a book reviewer, art critic, playwright, and artistic director of a theatre workshop. He also taught at several American colleges and universities, especially Boston University; in 1992 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Black poet writing from within both the English literary tradition and the history of a colonized people, Walcott has self-mockingly referred to his split allegiances to his Afro-Caribbean and his European inheritances as those of a “schizophrenic,” a “mongrel,” a “mulatto of style.” His background is indeed racially and culturally mixed: his grandmothers were of African descent; his grandfathers were white, a Dutchman and an Englishman.
Over the course of his prolific career, Walcott has adapted various European literary archetypes and forms. He has ascribed his rigorous concern with craft to his youthful Protestantism. At once disciplined and flamboyant as a poet, he insists on the specifically Caribbean opulence of his art. Although much of his poetry is written in Standard English, he occasionally incorporates the rhythms of a lightly creolized English in “The Schooner Flight,” and he braids together West Indian English, Standard English, and French patois in Omeros. He has a great passion for metaphor, by which he deftly weaves imaginative connections across cultural and racial boundaries. His plays, written in accurate and energetic language, are similarly infused with the spirit of syncretism, vividly conjoining Caribbean and European motifs, images, and idioms.
Analysis of “The Schooner Flight”
In Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight,” there are many interesting things, but I will focus on Walcott’s character Shabine and how the influence of Shabine in the passage resonates with Walcott’s theme. Shabine is a loving, passionate, yet unhappy man who loves the sea and his wife and kids. However, his growing disappointment and unhappiness with society’s corruption and negative change force him to leave his wife, children, and mistress in Trinidad and voyage out on the “Schooner Flight.”
I think that Walcott, in his poem, is using his own life experiences to connect or sympathize with his character Shabine. Whether negative or positive, Walcott used the character of Shabine to express himself.
For example, we can see it when he says in the poem: “I look in the rearview and see a man exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island.” By stating this, Walcott is identifying himself with the emotions, feelings, and disillusionment that Shabine possesses.
In conclusion, I believe that this poem is essentially an autobiography. Due to the fact that there is a sense of narration on Walcott’s end, the thesis can be stated that Shabine’s voyage away from the corruption and unhappiness to the unknown is equivalent to Walcott’s own journey in life thus far into what is yet to be determined, or better known as the future.
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe is the most celebrated African novelist, whose Things Fall Apart permanently transformed the landscape of African fiction, both on his own continent and in the Western imagination. His novel, while steadfastly refusing to sentimentalize its Nigerian subjects, effectively challenged many of the West’s entrenched impressions of African life and culture, replacing simplistic stereotypes with portrayals of a complex society still suffering from the legacy of Western colonial oppression.
He was born in Ogidi, an Igbo-speaking town in eastern Nigeria. He is a writer, famous for his novels describing the effects of Western customs and values on traditional African society. Achebe’s satire and his keen ear for spoken language made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English.
He was educated at church schools and University College, where he taught before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos. He was director of external broadcasting and then launched a publishing company with Christopher Okigbo. He also taught in the United States before returning for a time to the University of Nigeria. Since 1990, Achebe has been Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
Achebe has been professor emeritus and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A volume of Achebe’s poems was a joint winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. He also has written short stories and essays, but he is best known for his novels.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart is a response to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, a novel famous in its day for its depiction of Nigerian tribal society. Things Fall Apart, written with an insider’s understanding of the African world and its history, depicts the destruction of an individual, a family, and a culture at the moment of colonial incursion.
Things Fall Apart is at once Okonkwo’s tragedy and that of a complex tribal society, whose members speak a resonantly proverbial language that operates in the book as an image of all the beautiful and traditional structures transformed irrevocably by colonialism.
Margaret Atwood
Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, noted for her feminism and mythological themes. Margaret Atwood’s work has been regarded as a barometer of feminist thought. Her protagonists are often a kind of “everywoman” character, or weaker members of society. Several of Atwood’s novels can be classified as science fiction, although her writing is above the normal formulae of the genre.
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa. Atwood spent part of her early years in the bush of northern Quebec, where her father undertook research.
Atwood is celebrated for the blunt feminism of her books. Atwood explores women’s historical roles in other works. Both reimagine the lives of famous pioneer women in Canadian history.
Part of nature is the irrational elements. Photographs for her are very important, seeing continuously photos as icons. A very important symbol is the snake, a man’s sexual tool, a symbol that appears many times. The female body is very important for her because she considered women as victims. At the same time, the female body also demonstrates the unbreakable connection between the Earth and women, proof of a woman’s vulnerability and mortality. A famous poem by Margaret is “This is a Photograph of Me.” In the poem, she sets us in the frame of the action, describing completely a landscape, but she goes on to describe, leaving left and right and describing background and foreground. She gives us calm, stillness, etc.
This poem can provide different meanings to people. She treated to explain how death is. She tries to explain the difficulty of being alive; however, she has drowned, she tells us as she’s alive. Time is representative in the poem because it doesn’t matter how time passes because we still have our senses. Sadness is present, but she doesn’t give any remorse. We have two interpretations:
- No matter the time, she still has her identity.
- Feminism difficulty between women and society. Men have dominated our world, but women are still there, are present in society; however, they aren’t as important as male people.
In the poem, she refers to herself as a survival in a man’s world.
Plot: The narrator goes back to the village in the mountains in Northern Quebec and then to the island where she lived as a child to look for her missing father.
r her missing father.