Faculty: Ankomah, Edmund Hammah

Lecturer

Teaching Statement

Andy Rodney argues that “most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.” These words amply demonstrate my love for the teaching profession. I believe that there is no profession quite as fulfilling as the teaching profession. I believe that the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other profession.

Thus, my teaching philosophy is given impetus and driven, in large part, by a desire to make a difference in the lives of students; to awaken the kind of curiosity that drives change, the kind which only a teacher can provoke.  As a teacher, my goal is to strive, each day, to make what I teach relevant to my students’ experiences and interests.  

Research Statement

American Literature, Literary Theory, Studies on Literary Influence & Intertextuality, Postcolonial theory

Research Summary

• Examining Suicide in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Soyinka’s Death & the King’s Horseman (not published)
• Ngugi’s “Matigari”: A Project in Heroic Protagonism (not published)
• Reggae Activism: The Postcolonial Ethos in selected Reggae songs (not published)
• (MPhil thesis, 2014: Echoes of Emerson in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”)
  The study explores fundamental relationships existing in the works of two great American Scholars of the 19^th century: Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It argues that, “Song of Myself”, the poetry collection in Whitman’s major literary work Leaves of Grass, echoes or re-emphasizes some of Emerson’s significant ideological and philosophical beliefs. . Ralph Waldo Emerson, recognized as the founder of America’s transcendentalist movement, was a key figure in America’s intellectual and literary revolution in the 19^th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s publication of “Nature” in 1836 began a process of creating a new condition of American thinking, severed from European cultural and intellectual influences. Employing T.S Eliot’s theory of influence in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) as a framework to interpret the echoes, the study challenges traditional notions of influence that privilege the precursor influence as a “standard” to evaluate the later artist’s work and concludes that although Emerson is echoed in Whitman’s text, the relationship of influence between these two writers (per a critical literary interpretation of texts) is not one in which the precursor is seen in the simplistic light of “flowing into”, or sending forth “power or virtue” to the later artist. Rather, the relationship of influence is a sort of symbiosis in which the precursor and the later texts mutually transform and reinforce each other.