STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF BENWILL’S COWRIES OF HOPE

STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF  BENWILL’S COWRIES OF HOPE

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

     1.1  BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Stylistics, which has variously been regarded as an eclectic and relatively new concept, in fact, has its origin in traditional rhetoric. Scholars such as Richard Bradford and Graham Hough have linked the 20th Century stylistics with the art of rhetoric as obtained in ancient Greece. In those ancient times, the Greeks recognized the informative, cohesive and persuasive qualities of a good speech in public speaking. The skills of this ‘oral forensic craft of rhetoric’, with the discovery of writing in the 5th Century B.C. began to be taught and learned as a practical discipline. The ancient forensic orators developed the techniques known as figures of speech, which included schemes and tropes. These were employed in the structuring and elaboration of an argument. They were also used to move the emotion. The Renaissance period in Europe (14th Century – 16th Century) when there was a great revival of learning in art and literature influenced by Greek and Latin, saw the study of these figures under the heading of Elocutio. Elocutio was technically one of the five divisions of rhetoric. What can be regarded as modern stylistics can be seen as a development from this main branch of rhetoric. Its interest lies in the relations between form and content, concentrating on the characteristic features of expression. One of the attempts to fuse modern linguistic insights with traditional rhetorical figures was by Geoffrey Leech (1969) in what he termed descriptive rhetoric. In the 19th Century, linguistics as a science invaded the field of style such that any discussion in the area of style was regarded as a discussion in linguistics. This is because any use of language in a literary work operates within the confines of the ‘scientific rules’ of the language. The credit for this development goes to Ferdinand de Saussure. At his demise, his student, Charles Bally – the expressive stylistics – became the acclaimed father of modern stylistics. The concept of linguistic stylistics has to do with a stylistic study that relies heavily on the ‘scientific rules’ of language in its analysis. Such rules will embrace the lexical, grammatical, figures of speech, context and cohesion categories. Literary stylistics differs from linguistic stylistics in that the latter abstracts and describes the elements of language used in conveying a certain subject matter whereas the former dwells heavily on external correlates (history, philosophy, source of inspiration, etc) to explain a text, with an occasional leap into the elements of language used. Literary stylistics and linguistic stylistics have different emphases and different methods of operation. The former operates on values and aesthetics while the latter presents a scientific analysis, working with such tools as grammatical, syntactic and phonological components of the language. With the application of linguistic standards to literary works, the literary critic felt ‘threatened’ and some like Bateson stoutly ‘fought’ to resist the ‘encroachment’. With this linguistic invasion of the field of literature, came a ‘war of words’ among scholars – those who identified with linguistic stylistics and those

who think that literary stylistics alone can do the job of explication of a literary text. When Winifred Nowottny, in the 1960s, advised that the prudent analysis of work (poetry for instance) is that which begins with ‘what’s there’, she was only lending credence to an academic debate staged by I.A. Richards in the 1920s. Wimsatt and Beardsley, who were extreme defendants of subjecting works of art to linguistic frames, developed I.A. Richards’ propositions. Richards’ treatise was criticized for its basic contradictions concerning affectism, while Beardsley and Wimsatt were flawed because of the classification of genetic materials. However, the point was already made: any objective examination of a literary work has to be by a thorough linguistic analysis devoid of the reader’s responses because such responses are variable, irresponsible, undiscoverable, and demonstrably erroneous. A literary giant such as Bateson, however, fumed at what seemed a linguistic invasion of their field. In some quarters, the literary critics regarded linguists as ‘a generation of vipers’, and Bateson himself swore never to have anything to do with a linguist in his family. People like Roger Fowler and Rene Wellek certainly see the importance of subjecting a work of art to appropriate linguistic frames, but they caution that exclusively linguistic stylistics or exclusively literary stylistics would be going to the extreme; each needs the support of the other in the common goal of explication of literary works. (See the introductory part of R. Fowler.)

 Linguists over the years have studied languages and have actually expanded the wings of language to various levels of Linguistic analysis or description such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and Discourse. The graphic representation of sounds (speech sounds) on paper is called writing. Writing is done in different ways for various purposes and by different people. It is because of this that the study of stylistics becomes necessary and an important area to both linguists and critics.

In spite of these initial conflicts, linguistic stylistics has come to stay. It is a term coined in 1968 by Donald Freeman, apparently to put to rest the verbal feud between literary critics and linguists (Freeman1990:120). Scholars have done 4 works aimed at guiding the linguistic stylistic student on the procedure of linguistic analysis. Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short have provided a checklist arranged in four categories – the lexical, grammatical, figures of speech, context, and cohesion. Crystal and Davy have also outlined the methodology of describing the linguistic features of a text. In a more recent study, M.N. Azuike gives a systematic guide on how to analyze a work of art both from the standpoint of the linguistic stylistician and that of the literary stylistician.

Binwell Sinyangwe’s fiction is, in this research is subjected to such linguistic frames as diction, phrasal, clausal and sentence patterns, paragraph structure, with a view to exposing the stylistic effects of these in conveying the message in the novel.

1.2  STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Firstly, there exist innumerable literary assessments by scholars, especially the literary critics, on the creative works by African writers. The volumes of African Literature Today (ALT) series and other critical works that are available at present attest to this. Renowned creative writers in Africa have received some level of attention by critics. Nevertheless, as if there is some conspiracy, a prolific creative writer like Binwell Sinyangwe, with books to his credit, has scarcely been given due attention. Little or none researchers all over Nigeria have been written on this writer. None of these has dwelt on a stylistic study of Binwell Sinyangwe’s works.

Secondly, students interested in research into the field of linguistic stylistics need a coherent and current work in the field to update their knowledge. Both problems coalesce to inform the desire to work on the title of this research : A Stylistic Analysis Binwell Sinyangwe’s cowries of hope