Romantic Ecologism: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the False Eco-criticism Tributes (Published)
Colonial and postcolonial environmental criticisms of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA) have attributed to the novel eco-critical consciousness of significance, apparently ignoring the concern for environmental sustainability that is the foundation of current arts and humanities endeavour into the environmental discourses. On the strength of representations of human and non-human nature in the novel, critics have adjudged the novel to be a quintessence of the ecocritical ideal. Against some of the conceptual underpinnings of foremost ecocriticism postulations, ecological consciousness attributed to TFA are contested in this present study as false and misleading. The utilitarian values of ecocriticism and the remediating goal of literature in environmental studies, which are absent in the primary text and many of its secondary readings, are recommended as the basis for attributing ecocritical consciousness to texts. Natural entities and practices in the novel are contested as contextualization devices, employed by the author, for situating characters and events in their organic, pre-colonial African setting, and are described in this paper as the lost ecological values of Africa that are decried by contemporary critics of the global impacts of the science and technological cultures on the environment. This study employs ecocriticism as its theoretical basis.
Keywords: African literature, Chinua Achebe, Ecocriticism, Environment, Literature, postcolonial literature
Language Use and Style, as a Depiction of African Literature: An Example of Niyi Osundare’s The State Visit (Published)
The continued domination of English language in the African world especially in literary field has caused various doubts on what could be termed the African Literature. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine, how African writers have used language and style of writing to depict their continental identity in works of art. Researchers have established that the some parts of Africa had their literatures (either oral and or written) long before some parts of Europe. Therefore, the advent of English language is not the genesis of literature in Africa. The research, having examined this paramount discourse from Niyi Osundare’s The State Visit has concluded that language use and style are very significant beacons of African Literature.
Keywords: African literature, Depiction, Language, Niyi Osundare’s The State Visit
Deviant Collocation As A Writing Technique In African Literature: A Stylistic Study of Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. (Published)
This paper appraises the use of deviant collocations in Habila’s Measuring Time. Ordinarily, collocations are words or expressions that naturally co-occur. But some literary artists have as a matter of fact made some incongruous blending for stylistic stand point and to unravel the ills in their environments. This inquiry adopts the systemic functional Grammar because it highlights the functions of language, the descriptive methods of data analysis, the primary and secondary data collection methods. It was discovered that language use depicts the afflictions of the people like the twins La Mamo and Mamo in the novel. Thus, elements of language as used in the Measuring Time stand for Habila’s ideological orientation. He therefore, uses deviant collocations such as personification, paradox, oxymoron, grotesque scheme, hybridity and so on to unearth the sense of fragmentation, despair and perplexity, which define his fictional Keti community, which is a paradigm for Nigeria and indeed Africa.
Keywords: African literature, Deviation and Collocation, Language, Style