Importance Of Creativity In Literature

The author advocates the essence and relevance of literature, creativity towards the development of the society. He foregrounds the discourse by appraising some artistic writers and their contribution to their immediate society. He claims that like, and sometimes more than other subjects, literature has continuously played a decisive role in moulding and shaping the general and specific consciousness of the Nigerian society towards national development. In conclusion, he submits that literature has lived above the assumption that it is a tool used to express the whims and caprices of individual writers rather literature shapes the society. The chronology of a superfluity of Nigeria in the past and in the present in the different genres of literature

To be creative means having the ability or the power to create. Human beings are creative animals. In the field of literature, creative writing is taught as a course, in which students are encouraged to be original and imaginative. Creativity is, thus, associated with ‘originality’ and ‘expressiveness’ and with ‘imaginativeness’. A controversy once raged over the issue of whether creative writing is teachable. Many critics believe that writers are born and not made; that is to say, talent is everything. Others believe that talented writers become better and more accomplished if they receive instructions in creative writing. The number of creative writing programmes instituted in European and American universities today easily tells us which side has won the argument. Even in Nigeria, many universities, Lagos being one example, now teach courses in creative writing. Creativity or creativeness is defined as “a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts” (Wikipedia, online dictionary). The following factors are variously seen as determining and controlling creativity: divine intervention, cognitive processes, social environment, personality traits and chance or ‘accident’. Creativity is a characteristic identified in geniuses and has also been associated with mental illness. In the past, people

However, for the purpose of this confernece, ‘literature’ refers to works of art, of imagination and includes written texts as well as oral ones including such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, forms of oral poetry and folktale. In Africa, for instance, oral literature is highly regarded and seen as the precursor of the written form which borrows heavily from the resources of oral tradition. Consequently, we cannot discuss written African literature without reference to the oral forms and the way writers have incorporated them in the exploration of their people’s past and contemporary experiences. Critics of African literature have long realized that “writing is only a symbolic way of representing speech and as such is secondary to it” (Chika Nwankwo, 315). The gap between the two has long been bridged and both scholars and writers can conveniently draw from the former to enrich and embellish the latter, thus creating a literature that is dynamic and aesthetically