Laws of Aesthetic Response In Wole Soyinka's Death And The King's Horseman

This paper studies Laws of Aesthetic Response in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman as a great shift from the tradition of oral literature to sophisticated Western documentation which halted pursuits of sustaining orality (folktale) in contemporary African societies. This study aims to bring to the fore how over the years, different researchers have attempted to analyze the literary piece of Death and the King’s Horseman as a mythical play by cultivating the use of cultural and traditional settings. This has led to the problem of paucity of scholarship on the narratives of the African oral traditions with Western parallels. Prompted by the aforementioned problematic situation, the researcher examines the elements of folklore in the play and the influence of the folkist laws of aesthetics which govern folkism as a form of oral narrative as applied in the play under study. The theoretical approach of this study is Folkism. Folkism as propounded by a renowned playwright; Sam Ukala, advocates for the use of African indigenous mythical forms as structuring agents in contemporary African drama which hinges on the performance-audience relationship derived from the traditional African folktale aesthetics and with the inclusion of various forms of oral narratives such as folktale, folklore, myths, proverbs etcetera to create art works which are relevant to the indigenous African. The study recommends the need to awaken consciousness available with a view to rescuing society from oral narrative decadence in contemporary times.