Famous African authors

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is one of Nigeria's greatest novelists. His novels are written mainly for an African audience, but having been translated into more than forty languages, they have found worldwide readership.

Early life

Chinua Achebe was born on November 15, 1930, in Ogidi in Eastern Nigeria. His family belonged to the Igbo tribe, and he was the fifth of six children. Representatives of the British government that controlled Nigeria convinced his parents, Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Ileogbunam, to abandon their traditional religion and follow Christianity. Achebe was brought up as a Christian, but he remained curious about the more traditional Nigerian faiths. He was educated at a government college in Umuahia, Nigeria, and graduated from the University College at Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1954.

Successful first effort

Achebe was unhappy with books about Africa written by British authors such as Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and John Buchan (1875–1940), because he felt the descriptions of African people were inaccurate and insulting. While working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation he composed his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1959), the story of a traditional warrior hero who is unable to adapt to changing conditions in the early days of British rule. The book won immediate international recognition and also became the basis for a play by Biyi Bandele. Years later, in 1997, the Performance Studio Workshop of Nigeria put on a production of the play, which was then presented in the United States as part of the Kennedy Center's African Odyssey series in 1999. Achebe's next two novels, No Longer At Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), were set in the past as well.

By the mid-1960s the newness of independence had died out in Nigeria, as the country faced the political problems common to many of the other states in modern Africa. The Igbo, who had played a leading role in Nigerian politics, now began to feel that the Muslim Hausa people of Northern Nigeria considered the Igbos second-class citizens. Achebe wrote A Man of the People (1966), a story about a crooked Nigerian politician. The book was published at the very moment a military takeover removed the old political leadership. This made some Northern military officers suspect that Achebe had played a role in the takeover, but there was never any evidence supporting the theory.

Political crusader

During the years when Biafra attempted to break itself off as a separate state from Nigeria (1967–70), however, Achebe served as an ambassador (representative) to Biafra. He traveled to different countries discussing the problems of his people, especially the starving and slaughtering of Igbo children. He wrote articles for newspapers and magazines about the Biafran struggle and founded the Citadel Press with Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. Writing a novel at this time was out of the question, he said during a 1969 interview: "I can't write a novel now; I wouldn't want to. And even if I wanted to, I couldn't. I can write poetry—something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood." Three volumes of poetry emerged during this time, as well as a collection of short stories and children's stories.

After the fall of the Republic of Biafra, Achebe continued to work at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and devoted time to the Heinemann Educational Books' Writers Series (which was designed to promote the careers of young African writers). In 1972 Achebe came to the United States to become an English professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (he taught there again in 1987). In 1975 he joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut. He returned to the University of Nigeria in 1976. His novel Anthills of the Savanna (1987) tells the story of three boyhood friends in a West African nation and the deadly effects of the desire for power and wanting to be elected "president for life." After its release Achebe returned to the United States and teaching positions at Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and other universities.

Later years

Back in Nigeria in 1990 to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, Achebe was involved in a car accident on one of the country's dangerous roads. The accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors recommended he go back to the United States for good to receive better medical care, so he accepted a teaching position at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In 1999, after a nine-year absence, Achebe visited his homeland, where his native village of Ogidi honored him for his dedication to the myths and legends of his ancestors. In 2000 Achebe's nonfiction book Home and Exile, consisting of three essays, was published by Oxford University Press. 

wole soyinka

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months until 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed 1960, publ.1963), Kongi's Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka's serious philosophic plays are (apart from "The Swamp Dwellers") The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The Road ( 1965) and Death and the King's Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka's latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce's and Faulkner's, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer's thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Eurydice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the parents' warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

Soyinka's poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988).

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1986, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1987

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya, in 1938 into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Leeds, Britain. He is recipient of seven Honorary Doctorates viz D Litt (Albright); PhD (Roskilde); D Litt (Leeds); D Litt &Ph D (Walter Sisulu University); PhD (Carlstate); D Litt (Dillard) and D Litt (Auckland University). He is also Honorary Member of American Academy of Letters. A many-sided intellectual, he is novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic and social activist.

The Kenya of his birth and youth was a British settler colony (1895-1963). As an adolescent, he lived through the Mau Mau War of Independence (1952-1962), the central historical episode in the making of modern Kenya and a major theme in his early works.

Ngugi burst onto the literary scene in East Africa with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, as part of the celebration of Uganda’s Independence. “Ngugi Speaks for the Continent,” headlined The Makererian, the Student newspaper, in a review of the performance by Trevor Whittock, one of the professors. In a highly productive literary period, Ngugi wrote additionally eight short stories, two one act plays, two novels, and a regular column for the Sunday Nation under the title, As I See It. One of the novels, Weep Not Child, was published to critical acclaim in 1964; followed by the second novel, The River Between (1965). His third, A Grain of Wheat (1967), was a turning point in the formal and ideological direction of his works. Multi-narrative lines and multi-viewpoints unfolding at different times and spaces replace the linear temporal unfolding of the plot from a single viewpoint. The collective replaces the individual as the center of history.

In 1967, Ngugi became lecturer in English Literature at the University of Nairobi. He taught there until 1977 while, in-between, also serving as Fellow in Creative writing at Makerere (1969-1970), and as Visiting Associate Professor of English and African Studies at Northwestern University (1970-1971). During his tenure at Nairobi, Ngugi was at the center of the politics of English departments in Africa, championing the change of name from English to simply Literature to reflect world literature with African and third world literatures at the center. He, with Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba, authored the polemical declaration, On the Abolition of the English Department, setting in motion a continental and global debate and practices that later became the heart of postcolonial theories. "If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African? Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?" they asked. The text is carried in his first volume of literary essays, Homecoming, which appeared in print in 1969. These were to be followed, in later years, by other volumes including Writers in Politics (1981 and 1997); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Center (1994); and Penpoints Gunpoints and Dreams (1998).

The year 1977 forced dramatic turns in Ngugi’s life and career. His first novel in ten years, Petals of Blood, was published in July of that year. The novel painted a harsh and unsparing picture of life in neo-colonial Kenya. It was received with even more emphatic critical acclaim in Kenya and abroad. The Kenya Weekly Review described as “this bomb shell” and the Sunday Times of London as capturing every form and shape that power can take. The same year Ngugi’s controversial play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), written with Ngugi wa Mirii, was performed at Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Center, Limuru, in an open air theatre, with actors from the workers and peasants of the village. Sharply critical of the inequalities and injustices of Kenyan society, publicly identified with unequivocally championing the cause of ordinary Kenyans, and committed to communicating with them in the languages of their daily lives, Ngugi was arrested and imprisoned without charge at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison at the end of the year, December 31, 1977. An account of those experiences is to be found in his memoir, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1982). It was at Kamiti Maximum Prison that Ngugi made the decision to abandon English as his primary language of creative writing and committed himself to writing in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. In prison, and following that decision, he wrote, on toilet paper, the novel, Caitani Mutharabaini (1981) translated into English as Devil on the Cross, (1982).

After Amnesty International named him a Prisoner of Conscience, an international campaign secured his release a year later, December 1978. However, the Moi Dictatorship barred him from jobs at colleges and university in the country. He resumed his writing and his activities in the theater and in so doing, continued to be an uncomfortable voice for the Moi dictatorship. While Ngugi was in Britain for the launch and promotion of Devil on the Cross, he learned about the Moi regime’s plot to eliminate him on his return, or as coded, give a red carpet welcome on arrival at Jomo Kenyatta Airport. This forced him into exile, first in Britain (1982 –1989), and then the U.S. after (1989-2002), during which time, the Moi dictatorship hounded him trying, unsuccessfully, to get him expelled from London and from other countries he visited. In 1986, at a conference in Harare, an assassination squad outside his hotel in Harare was thwarted by the Zimbwean security. His next Gikuyu novel, Matigari, was published in 1986. Thinking that the novel’s main character was a real living person, Dictator Moi issued an arrest warrant for his arrest but on learning that the character was fictional, he had the novel “arrested;” instead. Undercover police went to all the bookshops in the country and the Publishers warehouse and took the novel away. So, between 1986 and 1996, Matigari could not be sold in Kenyan bookshops. The dictatorship also had all Ngugi’s books removed from all educational institutions.

In exile, Ngugi worked with the London based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya, (1982-1998), which championed the cause of democratic and human rights in Kenya. In between, he was Visiting Professor at Byreuth University (1984); and Writer in Residence, for the Borough of Islington, London (1985) and took time to study film, at Dramatiska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. (1986). After 1988, Ngugi became Visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale (1989-1992) in between holding The Five Colleges (Amherst, Mount Holyoke, New Hampshire, Smith, East Massachusetts) Visiting Distinguished Professor of English and African Literature (Fall 1991). He then became Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University (1992 –2002) where he also held the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of languages, from where he moved to his present position at the University of California Irvine. He remained in exile for the duration of the Moi Dictatorship 1982-2002. When he and his wife, Njeeri, returned to Kenya in 2004 after twenty-two years in exile, they were attacked by four hired gunmen and narrowly escaped with their lives.

Ngugi has continued to write prolifically, publishing, in 2006, what some have described as his crowning achievement, Wizard of the Crow, an English translation of the Gikuyu language novel, Murogi wa Kagogo. Ngugi’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages and they continue to be the subject of books, critical monographs, and dissertations.

Paralleling his academic and literary life has been his role in the production of literature, providing, as an editor, a platform for other people’s voices. He has edited the following literary journals: Penpoint (1963-64); Zuka (1965 -1970); Ghala (guest editor for one issue, 1964?); and Mutiiri (1992-).

He has also continued to speak around the world at numerous universities and as a distinguished speaker. These appearances include: the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University in New Zealand; the1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University; the 1999 Ashby Lecture at Cambridge; and the 2006 MacMillan Stewart Lectures at Harvard.
He is recipient of many honors including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature and seven honorary doctorates.

Elechi Amadi

Personal Information

Born on May 12, 1934, in Aluu, Nigeria; son of Daniel Wonuchuku and Enwere (Weke) Amadi; married Dorah Nwonne Ohale (a midwife), 1957; children: seven daughters, one son
Education: University College of Ibadan, BSc, 1959.
Religion: Protestant.
Military/Wartime Service: Nigerian Federal Army, 1963-66, captain, rejoined 1968, served with Marine Commandos during the Civil War.

Career

Government assistant, Calabar, Nigeria, 1953-55; surveyor in Enugu, Nigeria, 1959-60; science teacher in Oba and Ahoada, 1960-63; Asa Grammar School, headmaster, 1966-67; author, 1966-85; administrative officer, Port Harcourt, government divisional officer, Ahoada, 1968-69, various other offices held from 1969-90, including commissioner of lands and housing, 1989-90; Rivers State College of Education, various positions, 1984-87, head, department of literature, 1991-.

Life's Work

Nigerian writer Elechi Amadi achieved international literary acclaim during the 1960s and 1970s for his novels depicting rural village life in West Africa and its subsequent disintegration due to post-colonial political strife. His debut work, written in English, was The Concubine, and its 1966 publication brought him critical plaudits. An essay by Emmanuel Obiechina in the Dictionary of Literary Biography noted, "In his novels African villagers come alive in the immense variety of their individual and group activities, which are deeply informed by a shared sense of religion, ethics, social etiquette, and culture."

Born on May 12, 1934, Amadi grew up in a village in the southeastern Nigerian rainforest. He married a midwife, Dorah Nwonne Ohale, in 1957, while still studying physics and mathematics at the University College of Ibadan, located in Nigeria's second-largest city. After earning his degree in 1959, he worked as a surveyor for a year, and then became a science teacher. From 1963 to 1966 he served in the Nigerian Army, and upon his discharge took a job as headmaster of the Asa Grammar School. The Concubine was published at about this time, and the book solidified his reputation as a writer, both in his country and abroad. He was hailed as the successor to fellow University of Ibadan alumnus Chinua Achebe, whose 1958 novel Things Fall Apart broke new ground for African writers. Research in African Literatures critic Clara A. B. Joseph wrote: "Although not to the same extent as with Achebe's works, Amadi's works are peppered with witty translations of proverbs and numerous references to age-old customs. His narratives highlight the importance of tradition (more than language) in the creation of a political community."

The Concubine is the tale of a young woman, Ihuoma, who belongs to Nigeria's Igbo ethnic group. Her plight involves her past life, when she was said to be the wife of the mythical Sea King deity. This gives her great status in the present, but portends doom for any mortal man who seeks to marry her. As the novel progresses, Ihuoma is wed and widowed three times, as a result of the wrath of the Sea King toward those who would usurp his bride. Though it seems a traditional cautionary tale on the surface, Obiechina asserted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that "the strength of The Concubine rests on the fact that it is not folklore but realistic-style fiction, in spite of its strong penetration by the super-natural."

Amadi's writing career was disrupted by civil war in Nigeria in 1967. That year, an armed uprising and establishment of secessionist state by Nigeria's Igbo group resulted in the breakaway nation of Biafra. Amadi was stranded there and had to escape, rejoining the Nigerian Army in 1968 and serving with a Marine commandos unit. The war raged on for three years until Biafra's surrender in 1970, and it was a disastrous episode in modern Nigerian history. Biafra was unable to feed its people, and a million inhabitants within its dwindling borders were estimated to have perished from starvation and malnutrition during the war.

Amadi's next work seemed to be a metaphor for the conflict. The Great Ponds is set in the years before World War I, but its plot centers around a long struggle for control of a part of the Niger River delta. Two villages battle one another over communal fishing rights at the Wagaba pond. The main figures are the warrior Olumba from the Chiolu village, and Wago, a famed leopard-killer from neighboring Aliakoro. "In the tradition of heroic contests," wrote Obiechina, "the possession of the pond becomes a challenge and a channel through which the warriors on each side celebrate their bravery, martial sagacity, and magical prowess."

Amadi spent the next several years of his life as a provincial government official in Port Harcourt, the city in Nigeria's Rivers State province that was once a part of Biafra. He turned to playwriting in his spare time, producing Isiburu, a drama about a wrestler which enjoyed a run at the National Arts Theatre in the Nigerian capital of Lagos in 1973. Peppersoup delved into the topic of interracial marriage, while another play from 1977, The Road to Ibadan, took place during the civil strife in Biafra. A 1978 work for the stage, Dancer of Johannesburg, was an espionage thriller set in South Africa and ended, presciently, with the dismantling of that country's apartheid system.

Amadi also wrote a diary of his civil-war experiences, Sunset in Biafra, published in 1973 by Heinemann, the esteemed London publishing house. He wrote no new novels until 1979, when The Slave appeared. Its story, again set in a rural West African village, concerns the fate of Olumati, who is the last in his family line. His parents were ostracized long ago and had to flee their home village, and have since been forced to serve as slaves to a god at a cult shrine in another village. Olumati is expected to take over this duty. He tries to restore his family's standing, but forces conspire against this plan. "Whatever social obstacles lie in the way of Olumati's efforts to restore his family's place and reputation are not as formidable as the state of deep unease and insufficiency within himself," wrote Obiechina in the Dictionary of Literary Biography profile. "In the end his failure becomes inevitable because he has suffered psychological damage from which he cannot recover."

Estrangement was both the last of Amadi's novels and the first to be set in Port Harcourt. The 1985 work recounts the tale of a woman named Alekiri and the traumas she experiences during the Biafran civil war. Her marriage ends, she becomes romantically involved with an army officer, and struggles to regain her footing after the hostilities end. "Every one of the major characters bears the scar of the war. ... but the end of the war also finds them gathering together the pieces of their shattered lives," Obiechina wrote.

Over the years, Amadi held a number of government posts in the Rivers State government, including commissioner of education and commissioner of lands and housing. He has also had a long involvement with the Rivers State College of Education, and was named head of its department of literature in 1991. That same year, he discussed his literary career in a brief essay for Contemporary Novelists. "I like to think of myself as a painter or composer using words in the place of pictures and musical symbols," he reflected. "I consider commitment in fiction a prostitution of literature. The novelist should depict life as he sees it without consciously attempting to persuade the reader to take a particular viewpoint. Propaganda should be left to journalists."

Awards:

International Writers Program grant, Univ. Iowa, 1973; Rivers State Silver Jubilee Merit A ward, 1992; Ikwerre Ethnic Nationality Merit Award for Literature, 1995.

Works

Selected writings:

The Concubine (novel), Humanities, 1966.
The Great Ponds (novel), Humanities, 1969.
Okpukpe (prayerbook in Ikwerre), C.S.S. Printers, 1969.
(With Obiajunwo Wali and Greensille Enyinda) Okwukwo Eri (hymnbook in Ikwerre), C.S.S. Printers, 1969.
Isiburu (play; produced in Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Aiyetoro, and at the National Arts Theatre, Lagos), Heinemann, 1973.
Sunset in Biafra (Civil War diary), Heinemann, 1973.
Peppersoup [and] The Road to Ibadan (plays), Onibonoje, 1977.
Dancer of Johannesburg (play), Onibonoje, 1977.
The Slave (novel), Heinemann, 1979.
Ethics in Nigerian Culture (philosophy), Heinemann, 1982.
Estrangement (novel), Heinemann, 1985.

Why Study English Literature?

So maybe you like the idea of doing English at uni: reading great books and learning about language. You might still wonder what the point is of studying literature as an academic—what do English studies give to us, and what’s the goal of all that work? In this essay, Prof. Rylance talks about what the discipline of English studies means for him—and how you can decide what it means for you, too…

The usual narrative of the development of English as a discipline is big on grand designs. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold thought that the appreciation of literature should supplant religion in providing spiritual nourishment in industrial life. F.R. Leavis, from the 1930s, continued this argument. He claimed that utilitarian values had so throttled the life force of twentieth-century culture, that it was only in reading really great literature that our moral and spiritual bearings could be recovered. More recently, the more politicised side of ‘literary theory’ (though in itself a beast with many shapes) proposed cultural criticism as a way of resisting ideological incorporation into the same social norms.

All of these views have had their impact across the education system. Arnold was an inspector of schools. Many Leavisites took their crusade from the varsity to the secondary school, where they worked as influential teachers or teacher trainers. Lately literary theory has made a slightly shy entry into the ‘A’ level curriculum.

Grand designs make good historical copy, and, at a personal level, can turn a career into a vocation. However, as an account of the discipline, they are aspirational rather than descriptive. Bringing purpose, direction, energy and commitment, they established a rationale for ‘doing English’ that many have found motivating and persuasive. But, alongside these strong, crusading narratives, English has always included a good deal of more mundane activity, a functional pedagogy of communication for instance, towards which some cultural missionaries have paid scant regard. There is something un-heroic about this aspect of English, a petty business that might detain preparations for the crusade.

In this piece I want to try to get away from heroic tales because I don’t believe them. Not being religious, I don’t need a substitute. And I do not believe that cultural criticism, any more than Leavisite habits of ‘feeling life’, brings salvation. Being a pragmatist (in the philosophical as well as the practical sense) I do not believe that there are any theories exempt from ideology or the claims of context and contingency. But I do believe that English is important and I want to go on working in it. Why?

I think this because I hold a cluster of beliefs about which I am prepared to argue – though not here in their entirety perhaps. I think, for instance, that great literary writing is important (though I don’t believe in a canon of ‘great works’ or authors), because aesthetic pleasure is an important resource in human culture and for human achievement. I think that the style of intensely dialectical, often unresolved exploration that characterises the intellectual achievement of major literary texts is a style of thinking appropriate to our times and human situation in which, as far as I can see, values are mainly provisional and consensual. I believe that the mode of knowledge with which we engage when we discuss literature – open, discursive, provisional, revisable, intersubjective – is emblematic of the way values should operate in societies like our own. I also believe in the importance of clear, successful communication and, in a rather Orwellian way, that it is a political and ethical imperative to spread this as widely as possible.

“I want people who enjoy reading in all of its shapes and sizes, and who take pleasure in appreciating or performing acts of language.”

In my humdrum, pedestrian map of the subject, English includes three central activities. It is, humbly, a three-legged stool if you like, and, in order to support any weight, all three legs are essential. In no hierarchical order, there is, first, the cultural aspect, in which students and teachers engage primarily with literary texts (though engagement with other sorts of text is possible and, I think, desirable) in order to enable discussion of issues and values. Second, there is the functional or instrumental aspect in which students and teachers acquire and understand modes of communication and how to operate them successfully. Finally, there is the creative aspect. This is of increasing importance and includes not only ‘creative writing’, but also the broad appreciation of intellectual and aesthetic creativity and originality. This third aspect is a relatively late development in the evolution of the subject, and is likely to be a growth area in the future. In its pedagogy it highlights the necessity of understanding through doing – but that, I think, is characteristic in different ways of all three aspects.

Clearly these three aspects overlap, intersect and are mutually dependent. Understanding text in the ways indicated in the first ‘cultural’ aspect, for example, clearly depends on being able to operate successfully in the second ‘functional’ area. The different aspects overall are also mutually inclusive, and in describing them I have deliberately tried to draw them with wide, accommodating boundaries. By ‘issues and values’, for example, I mean not just politics, ethics or matters of ‘personal development’, but questions of cultural and aesthetic quality and importance. By ‘functional or instrumental’, I don’t have in mind merely the ability to write and speak effectively, spell correctly and know where to put an apostrophe, but also the understanding and appreciation of the function of style, argument and persuasion, and the way in which ideas are managed in intersubjective discourse. In the third aspect, functioning creatively in writing and speech requires some developed awareness of how effective communication has occurred in the past, and of the ways in which creative traditions thrive, develop and are expanded.

To describe things generally always risks stating the obvious, and I don’t think there is anything especially fresh or invigorating about these generalisations. What I do think, however, is that much debate within and about English in recent years has too often got bogged down, on the one side, in partisan and sometimes messianic visions of the subject, and, on the other, in the minute detail of operational matters like the nature of the syllabus or the protocols of particular assessment regimes. It is of course essential to be painstaking here, and to think operations through with care to consequence and efficiency. But I’ve increasingly started to think that such matters have come to preoccupy and distract, to clog things up in routine and bureaucracy about mark schemes, the checks and balances of a curriculum, the requirements of modular learning, quality assurance, and so on. Fair, efficient administration is always essential, but it should not make dismal or pointy-headed what is gratifying, generous-spirited and creative.

From time to time I am asked what it is that higher education wants from students arriving to study English. The answer, for me, is simple. I want people with experience of how to read all sorts of things (not just novels) with the skill and care of which they are capable. I want people who can attempt to communicate effectively and with curiosity, and who are concerned to develop this. Finally, I want people who enjoy reading in all of its shapes and sizes, and who take pleasure in appreciating or performing acts of language. Of these three, it seems to me just now that it may be the last that is the most important. As we speculate on how English will evolve over the coming years, there needs to be a strong voice for the pleasure principle and the joy of words, and an account of English that has this among its primary aims.