Literature, Psychic Re-Engineering And National Transformation: A Study of Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love

Abstract

The late Robin Williams, who played the role of John Keating, an English teacher in the film, Dead Poets Society, had told his students in one of his teaching sessions that no matter what anybody told them, words and ideas changed the world. If indeed words and ideas change the world, how does it happen? Is it possible to re-engineer human psyche? How can the whole body of a people’s culture be changed in a bid to transform them? What is culture? Since a text is made up of words and ideas, is it possible that it become an agent of transformation? These are pertinent questions this paper seeks to answer using Ben Okri’s Dangerous Love as a primary text. Qualitative method will be used in the process of doing the paper to prove that indeed it is possible to re-engineer and transform human psyche in the process of nation building, especially in Nigeria; and that once a cultured man or woman emerges, a healthy nation automatically evolves with his or her emergence!