Article: "The Man of the Day to Follow": Dani Kouyaté's Keita! and the Living Epic

I am the man for the morrow [sinimogo]

I am the man of the day to follow [sini-kini-mogo].

- Epic of Son-Jara (Johnson 52)

The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin famously declared that the epic presents an "absolute past," that "an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality" (15). It is a time of the greatest achievements and the greatest heroes, a world of "firsts" and "bests"(14), a time that no longer exists, that does not "serve the future" (19). For this reason, the epic is no longer a living genre, having given way to the genre of the novel. Such an assessment may certainly be applied to many western epics such as the Iliad of Homer, the Nibelungenlied, or the ...

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