Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This study examines the journey of the literary text from the local to the global, and argues that it attains a worldly status largely due to how mobile and tuned to the present moment it is. It is often assumed that a literary text becomes worldly when conveying grand and universal truths, but I put forth that its attainment of a universal status relates more to the text’s temporal orientation than its reach for thematic universality. Once finely tuned to the characters’ present moment, it simultaneously articulates local and global realities generating affective affiliations at the micro and macro level. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) & Mariama Bâ’s So Long A Letter (1979) are two pertinent illustrations of the idea that the text’s fine representation of its characters’ present moment favorably positions it locally and globally. The literary text attains this also because of its capacity to move across cultural and national borders. Without a breath expanding not only across space but also time a literary text may not become worldly, and the global presence of the folktale corroborates this statement. The research then links a literary text’s rise from the status of local to worldly text, and fluid motion between the local and the global to its capacity to capture its characters’ present moment and circulate across physical and temporal boundaries.