Abstract

The salubrious/deleterious implications of literary interventions in societal mechanism and its continual lubrications have agitated critical minds from time immemorial. Plato in his Republic inaugurated in script the vexing problem that has been man’s burden since earlier epochs about the contentious relevancy of the writer and his literary productions to the connubial bliss of the social organism. Plato pillories the writer as a parasitic tick on the body politic because his/her contributions to the commonwealth, unlike those of teachers, doctors, farmers, lawyers etc are more cerebral than palpable, more numinous than visual or tactile. Plato, therefore, legislates that unless and until the writer is able to prove the ineffable positivism of his art to the common weal, he/she stands banished from his ideal republic where all constituent parts must advance the over-all well-being of society in concrete terms. His main concern is that imitation, which is the forte of art, could lead to the erection of terrible models for youths, thereby lowering the moral tone of the society. While Plato’s rather sweeping consignation of art and artists to the margins of national life has been challenged by Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, and a host of other luminaries in the literary firmament, Plato’s misgiving about the effects of works of art on the ethical fabric of society is as valid today as it was in Classical times. Given the prevalent moral turpitude in the Nigerian society today where crime and criminality, corruption and general debasement of values are becoming the norm rather than the exception, the urgency of a moral approach to the evaluation of literary works cannot be over-emphasised. This paper, therefore, undertakes a neo-humanist reading of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do not Come to You by Chance in the bid to assess the ethical implications of the work on Nigerian youths and the society at large

Keywords

NigeriaLiteratureMoralNeo-HumanismNwaubani

Published in: Nsibidi:AE-FUNAI Journal of Humanities ( Volume: 2 , Issue: 1 , October 2023)

Page(s): 179 - 178

Date of Publication: October 2023

ISSN Information: 1596-5428