A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE’S “PURPLE HIBISCUS” AND CHINUA ACHEBE’S “ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH”

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A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE’S “PURPLE HIBISCUS” AND CHINUA ACHEBE’S “ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH” (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)

Abstract

Language and style never moves beyond a concentration on the supremacy of words. Literary piece (such as novels) somehow contain meaning of style with language; effectively manipulated in ways that signal it as different from “ordinary” language. A stylistic analysis of Chimamanda Adichie’s “Purple Hibiscus” (2003) and Chinua Achebe’s “Anthills of the Savannah” (1987) is carried out to educate, explicate and expose everybody that come across this paper, in guiding them on how to analyse and understand these prose texts. It also examines the uniqueness of stylistics as it concerns both the combination of linguistics and literary study of the texts being reviewed. The data used to illustrate and substantiates our claims are systematically sourced from the selected Nigerian prose texts earlier mentioned. The lexico-semantic patterns and choices, the phonological, morphological, syntactic and graphological devices are the main stylistic elements coupled with rigorous in-depth analysis of the figurative language employed in selected prose texts which are used to prove our claims. Finally, we find that each of the elements however, has identifiable functions which contribute to the effective meaning of the texts. Therefore, it can be concluded that these elements trigger and play important roles in passing the intention of the writers/authors across their audience. Comparatively, this research discovers that Adichie borrows a lot from Achebe’s manner of writing in simple free-flow linguistic and stylistic presentations, there is, nevertheless, a wide disparity in their sexist beliefs and ideological orientations. This implies that; while Achebe tends towards phallocentric predilection, Adichie subtly differs by pitching a camp with her gender lot – Feminism. This creates a wide valley between the two mountains.

Keywords:
 Stylistics, language, figurative language, syntax, graphology, lexico-semantics…

INTRODUCTION

Stylistics has always had a hard time of it. As an academic discipline it has always been seen, pretty much throughout the twentieth century, as neither one thing nor the other, or, much worse, as all things to all men and women, as sitting uncomfortably on the fence between the linguistic and the literary, and as a bit uneasy within either domain, building bridges that never quite stretch far enough across dividing waters and always, as here, resorting to retreat, repair and reconciliation metaphors of bridges, unfilled gaps and spaces, crossing contested territories, unhappy marriages and paths not taken. In the 1960s and 1970s this was in part to be expected for an essentially inchoate interdisciplinary endeavour. Linguists felt stylistics was too soft to be taken too seriously and tended to introduce irrelevant notions such as performance data and interpretation; literature specialists felt that stylistics was too hard, too mechanistic and too reductive, saying nothing significant about historical context or aesthetic theory, eschewing evaluation for the most part in the interests of a naïve scientism and claiming too much for interpretations that were at best merely text-immanent. And many linguists and literary critics continue to this day to give stylistics a hard time. But, for better or for worse, statisticians have stayed together. Although, there have been few divorces or major disagreements within the family (G. Watson and S, Zyngier, 2007: R. Carter, 2007).

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A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF CHIMAMANDA ADICHIE’S “PURPLE HIBISCUS” AND CHINUA ACHEBE’S “ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH” (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)

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