‘High’ regime, ‘popular’ protestant: negotiating the cultural departures in Nigerian literary consumption and criticism

Abstract

As an academic discipline, literature it would seem has created a consumption culture remote from its layman anticipation as an imaginative document for leisurely edification – evident in the now-obligatory engagement of creative writings more for intellectual discourse, and less for their aesthetic merit. From this bifurcation, Nigerian literary culture evinced a material taxonomy that drew the line between writings that constitute canon and achieve curricular recognition, and those alleged as predominantly bereft of content that make intersection with ideology possible. Through recent scholarship, however, it is becoming increasingly palpable that the statutory departures of ‘high’ and ‘popular’ literary cultures have appeared to have held sway, without even as much as a standard authoritative theoretic supplying their distinction. Also, academic boards are warming up to the growing influence of popular culture and the clout of proliferated technology on the traditional import of ‘literature’, and have begun to study these realities. However, in spite of new curricular curiosity in this direction, there has remained the insistence on holding the hierarchical premise of quality to canonical texts, and against popular ones, that are avidly consumed, but curiously deemed unworthy of academic credit. The objective of the study, therefore, is to come to terms with what supplies the ‘high versus popular’ departures in literary culture. The study argues that their divide is artificial and critically prejudiced; and entertains the dismounting of the hierarchical barriers between them in order to passably appreciate both in their consumption and criticism.