1,720,955 research outputs found
The Hero as Villain in Armed Resistance: A Comparative Study of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s "The Trial of Dedan Kimathi" and Ahmed Yerimah’s "Hard Ground"
No full textAn armed situation like a liberation movement is a trying time for the people. It is a time when events are unsettled and lives are at risk. In such situations, there emerges central figures who become the rallying points for oppressed people searching for change. Such a central figure is seen as hero by one side and as villain on the other. Such are the situations graphically dramatized in Ngugi’s “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi” and Yerima’s “Hard Ground”. Against this background, this paper examines the character of the heroes of the two plays against the backdrop of the Mau Mau and the Niger Delta insurgencies in Kenya and in Nigeria, respectively. It seeks to investigate the heroes’ actions and motives in carrying out their revolts. In what dramatic tropes have the playwrights represented them in the plays? In what ways do they achieve heroic stature? Working within the Marxist literary theory, we apply such concepts as oppression, ideological underpinning and exploitation to the actions and events of the plays. A close reading of the texts and a rigorous critical interpretation of the character of the heroes reveal that “one man’s freedom fighter is, indeed another’s terrorist.” The paper concludes that, rather than uncritically accepting ‘establishment’ or ‘official’ categorisation of leaders of insurgency/ armed struggles as devilish, brutal and bloody ogres, a nuanced understanding of their social and political conditions that necessitated their actions must be considered. Thus, Dedan and Baba (protagonists in these plays) are innately gentle, committed and caring leaders that are driven by the quest to liberate their people
Ritual Language: Soyinka’s Contributions to the Debate on Language Use in "Death and the King’s Horseman"
No full textThere is an agelong debate on the issue of language in African literature. Many African countries were colonised by the West and they enforced their languages on the colonised. African writers are, however, divided over which language that best conveys their thoughts, culture and tradition. While Ngugi wa Thiong’o advocates the use of indigenous languages, in this case, Gikuyu and Swahili, Chinua Achebe promotes the use of the language of the colonialists in so far as it is used creatively to express the African worldview. This paper examines Wole Soyinka’s use of ritual language in Death and the King’s Horseman as a unique contribution to the controversy about the ideal language for African literary expression especially in drama. The paper is a theoretical analysis of the language debate in which Soyinka’s text is considered as an exemplification of Achebe’s position. Nonetheless, references will be made to instances of ritual language such as the use of chants, rites, incantations, drumming and dancing. Analysis of the play reveals that Soyinka’s usage is ritualistic yet dramatic but also couched in African imagery and anecdotes even as it is accessible to the world. The paper concludes that although Soyinka has been accused of difficulty, complexity and inaccessibility in his use of words (Jeyifo xviii) in many of his creative works, his use of language in Death and the King’s Horseman encapsulates creativity, an index of ritual language of African identity and culture
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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