Riwaya Teule za Karne ya Ishirini na Moja na Udurusu wa Nadharia za Fasihi

Literary theory represents a way of thinking and a body of writing that is dedicated to the analysis of literary texts. It is a means through which literary critics come to appreciate the nature of the literary texts they seek to analyze and the methodology that informs their practice. Analyzing three 21st Century Swahili novels, this paper examines a paradigm shift: literary theory becomes the sub¬ject under examination as opposed to its conventional role where it would ideally offer systematic views of what such texts would mean. Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Dunia Yao (2006) and Nyuso za Mwanamke (2010) on the one hand, and Kyallo Wadi Wamitila’s Musaleo! (2004), on the other, represent a new kind of writing that experiments on literary theory as a subject for criticism. In these texts, we read about the tenets and practice of a variety of literary theories including Russian formalism, Saussurean and Jakobsonian structuralism, Derrida’s deconstruction, Edward Said’s post-colonial theory, and Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalytical theory. While this experiment that the two novelists engage in may appear elitist for the average reader at first, the paper contends that this form of writing will in the long term assist in the domestication of literary theory. Further, the three texts could greatly assist in pedagogical issues if read alongside other mandatory course books on literary theory