African Novels in the Classroom.

African Novels in the Classroom, ed. Margaret Jean Hay. Boulder: Rienner, 2000. 314 pp. ISBN 1-55587-4.

Skillfully written, a study guide can deepen students' understanding of its subject and can also provide useful teaching tips for the teacher. One can, admittedly, read novels, for example, with no regard for their narrative strategies, context, or form. Nevertheless, the effect of a consummate novel, be it complex like Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965) or simple like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958), is intimately connected with its style and language of expression. Unless a study guide promotes a surer eye for form and alerts its users to the nature and function of style, unless a study guide on the novel, in particular, helps its users to come to grips with what endows a novel with its staying power, much of the meaning and impact, nay, the significance, of a novel will be lost. What is more, a novel written in and about a culture that is not the reader's own requires accurate background information to be properly appreciated. When ill-informed readers misinterpret the novel, they perpetuate an act of violence on literature, so to say, because they not only drain it of its energy, they also tarnish the image of the authors whose works they discuss and the whole tradition within which the writing itself is rooted.

The contributors to African Novels in the Classroom have written valuably on what the editor describes as the objectives of her book, which seeks to show how "twenty-four college teachers from different disciplines discuss how they use specific African novels in the classroom--why they choose a certain novel, what corollary readings they assign, what background information they present in lecture, what major themes emerge in discussion, and what written assignments then explore the students' engagement with that particular novel" (1). It is a pleasure to look over the work of these US-based teachers who include African material in their classes, and who are willing to lend their various expertises to the promotion of a literature that is foreign to many of them. African Novels in the Classroom meets one's ...