Publication Date: 2021/06/03
Abstract: Critical use of language in literary texts can manifest the expression of political consciousness through the styles deployed by individual literary authors. Previous studies have phenomenologically looked at these from angles of pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics but have not significantly examined the manifestation of political consciousness in Nigerian literary texts within the framings of Critical Stylistics. Thus, this study investigates a critical stylistic analysis of political consciousness in Osofisan’s Morountodun to know the stylistic dictations of meaning in the text. With the deployment of Lesley Jeffries’s Critical Stylistic Theory (CS) as the theoretical framework, 14 excerpts from the text were put to analysis. While excerpts 1,2,3,4 and 5 were analysed with the CS tool of 'Naming and Describing’ through labelling, 6,7,8,9,10 and 11 underwent ‘Representing Actions/Events/States' with its principles of transitivity processes and 12, 13 and 14 deployed the tool of 'Speech and Thought Representation' using direct speech essentially. The study reveales the use of these CS tools for the expression of rebellion, labelling and direct condemnation of political corruption and imposition, all of which are ideologically loaded. The study, thus, concludes that in the expression of political consciousness in Morountodun, Osofisan manifests more of ‘Naming and Describing’ and ‘Representing’ tool than the ‘Speech and Thought Representation to strategically express and label socio-political situations of rebellion against the government, direct attack by the masses against corrupt leadership and condemnation of political imposition. Tools of Critical Stylistics aid representation and labelling of words and thoughts by the author to exert ideologies to construct meaning(s) within socio-political consciousness.
Keywords: Political Consciousness, Critical Stylistics, Morountodun, Literary Discourse.
DOI: No DOI Available
PDF: https://ijirst.demo4.arinfotech.co/assets/upload/files/IJISRT21MAY676.pdf
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