Reviews for Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria

The average rating for Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-21 00:00:00 Jezebel M. As an introduction to Nigeria via synopses and descriptions of fiction - Griswold read every one of the almost 500 Nigerian novels in English that she could find - supplemented by some information about its publishing, political, and social history, this book tells a very interesting and sad story. But, as a case study in the sociology of literature, it's weak. She makes a doubtless strategic choice not to second guess her interlocutors or impose broad frameworks on her "empirical" data, but in what sense can a study of fiction, including a few interviews but mostly based on reading novels, be called "empirical"? It seems polite of her, but it's not very illuminating. I miss critique. What is the point of talking about the "reading class" without a broader account of class? What is the point of invoking ideas from the ideology of Western letters (the autonomy of the author, e.g.) without giving a substantive, critical account of them, and of how they arrive in Nigeria and what function they fill there? It's deliberately, studiously simple-minded. But I certainly learned something about the novel in Nigeria.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-20 00:00:00 Yann Roye This book synthesizes a remarkable corpus of research that details almost the entire history of Nigerian novels from the perspective of their writers, readers, and publishers. THEN, as if this weren't enough, the book turns to the novels themselves in order to analyze and catalog their contents. That Nigeria, itself, has a relatively confined number of authors and books that might be directly attributed to its nation does not undercut the importance of this contribution, which not only is massively comprehensive, but also suggests what role novels play outside a Western context.