Bronwyn Averett

  • Time in Two Parts

    “I’ve recently started to finish learning Bach’s Two-Part Inventions.” This awkward sentence nudged itself into some of my written correspondence this morning, and I gagged a little when I reread it before sending. My first impulse was to emphatically land my finger on the delete key, and to retype something a bit more polished sounding. I’m revisiting Read more

  • The Millennium Trilogy and Relearning to Read the “Readerly” Text

    There was not – if I’m being honest – much thought behind my decision to suddenly drop everything nothing and finally read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Not that I insist on putting too much thought into one’s choice of reading material. In fact, I would call myself a proponent of the spin-around-in-bookshop-and-point strategy of literary selection. Read more

  • Isidore Okpewho’s Myth in Africa (1983)

    Some more Okpewho for you today…no introduction needed… Myth in Africa Isidore Okpewho London: Cambridge, 1983 Preface: Here, Okpewho takes the opportunity to drive in the point that he concentrated on in the previous work The Epic in Africa (1979), which is that the practices of oral literature are not solely related to religious ritual. Read more

  • Isidore Okpewho’s The Epic in Africa (1979)

    After a fair bit of study during my undergrad and MA (the latter with Harold Scheub who has recently retired), I had almost entirely forgotten the fascinating body of work dedicated to African oral literature. Oral? Literature? Did I hear you right? Yes. Yes you did. Because despite not being written down, this rich body of tales, Read more

  • self-imposed leisure reading

    Okay, I did it. I wrote a dissertation prospectus and passed the defense, which means that in order to be crowned DOCTOR, I have but one tiny, little, no-big-deal hoop to jump through called ‘writing a dissertation’… I also survived the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New York City. (ACLANYC2014) These Read more

  • this week in books: histoire du Sénégal

    This week was largely devoted to brushing up on my Senegalese history. I’m revising an article – crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s (as well as changing most of my which’s to that’s…good lord did I not go to middle school?) and I realized that while the literary premises were sound, the paper was really Read more