ABSTRACT
Modernism has had a great influence in East African prose fiction particularly among pioneer East African literary writers who took up Frantz Fanon’s clarion call that African literature ought to contribute the African liberation struggle. Given the background of slavery and colonialism, the African literary writer has to express political themes to bolster the self-esteem of African audiences. Pioneer writers therefore focused on grand narratives, and literary criticism aptly took a modernist inclination that adopted canons such as Marxism, psychoanalysis and formalism for literary readings. This study breaks away from the monotony of modernist canons to carry out a postmodernist reading of selected works of East African prose fiction and drama. In this chapter, I distinguish modernism from postmodernism and briefly explain the tenets of the leading voices to be adopted in the study. I briefly expound on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida and then conduct a literature review to find the gap of the study. I state the problem statement and objectives of the study and describe the theoretical framework and research methodology. I conclude the chapter with a description of the content of the chapters of the study and the theoretical concepts to be adopted in the analyses.
