Reading Calibrations

In Calibrations, Ato Quayson provides us with a highly stimulating and thoughtprovoking method by which literary aesthetic domain read in order to shed light on larger processes (xv).' Although there some fluidity in direction of this movement of thought, motivating factor, indeed primary interest in aesthetic, to put it to use for an understanding of social, which, for Quayson, should be de-linked from more specific term society. Calibrations involves a situated procedure of attempting to wrest something from aesthetic domain for analysis and better understanding of social (xv). In putting forth this method, which he terms very thesis of his book (xi), Quayson highlights certain terms that become crucial to an explication of method. I begin my re-reading by pursuing a quick engagement with a few of these terms as defined by him before proceeding to closely track method he calls calibrations. In explicating the social as different from society, Quayson at pains to stress that it from a calibration of literary that comes into view (xxviii). Although he spends less time spelling it out, it clear that idea of literary or aesthetic rather one of text (any text) that calibrator identifies and closes off as such. In this manner, stories about market women or anecdotes can fulfill this role of text as starting point. What less clear way in which such texts, when wrested from outside what strictly speaking literary, are aestheticized in this account. This point will become pertinent to application of literary tropes in a narrative from real life that then aestheticized for a reading of social. We see some of this difficulty reflected in way shift occurs in presentation of what to come on Ken Saro-Wiwa's untimely death: Elements of tragedy as a process rather than merely as a literary genre are outlined to show degree to which African post-colony, exemplified in this case by contradictions that have shaped Nigerian history, produces a tragedy unerringly mimetic of tragedies we encounter in literary (xxxix). While Quayson correctly indicates that any contextualizing or historicizing of literary text involves a notion of society which is saturated with interests and perspectives of analyst (xxix), he seems less concerned with a) choice of literary texts for generation of particular aspects (or vectors) of and b) choice of particular bracketings of that are aestheticized into functioning on par with literary text in method of calibrations that elaborated. He goes further to then suggest that

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