The form, content and style in P. Leseyane's Letlhaku le legologolo

Abstract

Much memory, or memory of many things, is called experience. Again, imagination being only for those things which have been formerly perceived by sense, either all at once or by parts at several times; the former, which is the imagining the whole object as it was presented to the sense, is simple imagination, as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is compounded; as when, from the sight of a man at one time and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person with the image of the actions of another man ... , it is a compound imagination, and properly but a fiction of the mind (Thomas Hobbes in Hollander et al 1973: 1001 ) This study sets out to expose the literariness of Leseyane's Letlhaku le legologolo as an essay . The point of departure here is that in the Setswana language, there seems to be a lack of the essay as an art-form. Guided by this we first define the term essay according to different scholars, in an attempt to set ground rules for our discussion. The structure of the essay in its classical form, as well as the relationship between the essay and the essayist, and between the essay and other literary forms, are discussed. The second chapter reveals the theoretical background as relied on in chapters three and four. Chapter three focusses on the content of the essay, discusses the various themes, and is the beginning of the discussion proper of our text, Letlhaku le legologolo. The relationship between the essayist and the reader is hinted at in this chapter since the content of any given essay usually belongs to the world view of the society that produces the author thereof. Chapter four is the product of the first and third parts of the title: The form, content and style in Leseyane's Letlhaku le legologolo, namely form and style. These are discussed together because of similarities in their approach. We also discuss space and text in this chapter to reveal the relationship between literature and the society that produces it.