African Literature & European Literature: A Summary
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This summary is purely my intellectual property and is credible for it helped me ace my quizzes and tests in this subject. This document summarized the definition and uniqueness of the African Literature. On how the African Literature represents its culture and rich history on every story. This doc...
difference between african literature and european literature
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Submitted by: Bernadette A. Velasquez
African Literature & European Literature
1. What makes African Literature different from other?
African Literature is unique from other literatures, due to the fact that its themes
focus on social, political, and economic crises that the African continent is facing.
Their oral literature such as storytelling, proverbs, and poems told the beauty of
Africans’ virtues, values, arts, tradition, culture, and their daily living. Poetry was also
included in this phase wherein it looked like rituals since it is accompanied by songs
or music and dances, unlike the common poetry. Their praise songs focused on love,
work, and children. Call and Response was also included in this phase. This is used on
religious songs and even political movements, since it had an effective way to engage
audience. Pan-Africanism was also evident in the African Literature. It was a
movement for Africans to move from their horrific past and towards their freedom
and beauty. However, the themes of literatures in this phase still focused on corrupt
and unstable politics and gender issues that was about the oppression of black
women in Africa wherein they experience inequality and harassment. It was about
racial imbalance as well. These capturing themes of the stories in African Literature
increases our social consciousness and raises awareness of the crisis that the African
people are facing. And that is what makes African literature unique.
2. What are the characteristics of European Literature?
European Literatures focus on politics and Christianity as their themes in the
Renaissance period. In the Enlightenment period, the literatures focused on logic and
intellectualism, wherein writers would express their desire on improving the
condition of the humanity through tolerance, freedom, and equality. In Romanticism,
its themes were all about emotions and imagination wherein symbolism was a
superior element. In Realism, it focus on the dark side of life; hypocrisy, brutality, and
dullness of the life in middle class. In the Victorian period, it focuses on the sober view
on idealism, the middle class, reality, work, and nation as a whole with religion,
science, and morality. In Modernism, it focused on the middle class and morality but
was only concerned for aesthetic and beauty. And in Post-modernism, it questioned
the distinction between the low and high culture through pastiche.
3. What is the difference between European and African Literature?
Aside from the languages used in European literature and African literature, the
difference between the two are their purposes, characteristics, and themes. Because
in European Literature, its purpose is to make a change on the society by showing the
reality with the themes of politics, Christianity, and morality. However, in African
Literature, their purpose is to fight for the rights of the oppressed black people,
especially for the black women. Their themes focus on slavery, protests against
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