Tasting With Words in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Vanessa Guignery (1)

1 IHRIM - Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités

This chapter interrogates Michel Serres’s claim that language is unable to convey what senses provoke in our bodies and examines the literary techniques employed by Ben Okri in The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Half of a Yellow Sun to give an apprehensible form to the sense of taste through words. While acknowledging the force of Serres’s position, the chapter draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque body to show how the two Nigerian novelists deploy such literary means as metaphor, accumulation, hyperbole, diction, or the use of sonorities to reproduce and comment on the bodily experience of taste or evoke its absence in times of war and deprivation. The chapter ultimately argues that the reader may approach what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘quasi-sensation’ of taste through the consumption of words.

Domaines: Littératures

Vanessa Guignery. Tasting With Words in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Annette Kern-Stähler; Elizabeth Robertson. Literature and the Senses, 1, Oxford University Press, pp.320-338, 2023, 978–0–19–284377–7. ⟨10.1093/oso/9780192843777.003.0018⟩. ⟨hal-04224066⟩