Landscapes Within, Landscapes Without: The Forest and Other Places in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
The purpose of this paper is to bring face to face the spaces of the mind or ‘landscapes within’ and the open spaces or ‘landscapes without’ in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, in order to question the supposed duality between the physical world and the imaginary or mythic one, which is reflected in th...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2014-11-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1974 |
| Summary: | The purpose of this paper is to bring face to face the spaces of the mind or ‘landscapes within’ and the open spaces or ‘landscapes without’ in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, in order to question the supposed duality between the physical world and the imaginary or mythic one, which is reflected in the oscillation in Okri’s novel between the Western literary tradition of realism and the West African attachment to mythology and the supernatural. The multidimensionality of the forest will be examined firstly as the dwelling place of spirits and a space that is submitted to the ecological catastrophe of deforestation. The analysis will then move on to the open spaces the spirit-child Azaro feels inside him, landscapes that are both inscapes and means of escape. Through the poetic opening of these new ontological spaces, the narrator celebrates the power of limitless imagination, redefines the concepts of landscape, inner and outer space, and expands the dimensions of the real world. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |