A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO’S SOCIO-POLITICAL POETRY (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
ABSTRACT
Style is the manifestation of one’s personality. Every writer has a natural, linguistic and idiosyncratic way of expressing ideas that leads to the identification of style with man and his thought. The manipulation of words by a writer creates a distinct style through which he/she reaches out to the audience. This research work focused on a stylistic analysis of selected socio-political poems of Christopher Okigbo. This aims at identifying Okigbo’s unique use of language. Stylometrics was used as a theoretical framework for the study. The findings in this are that Okigbo’s poems begin with some words in capitalisation which are foregrounded to the theme of the poems. He makes use of elements like repetition, alliteration, rhyme, parallelism and so on which add musical colour and rhythm to his poems. It is also evident his poems are sometimes prophetic, ritualistic and often address socio-political issues from a universal perspective. The work found out that each of the linguistic choices has an identifiable function that is performed in the poem. The study concludes that Christopher Okigbo’s poems are musical in nature and highly figurative in language use.
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0 INTRODUCTION
This chapter serves as general introduction and includes background to the study, the statement of the problem, as well as the scope and delimitation of the study. Also, included in chapter one are the aim and objectives of the study, significance of the study, limitations of the study as well as the research design and a definition of terms.
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Language use by individuals differs from one person to the other. This is because of the differences in language ability. Stylistics is a borderline discipline between language and literature. It focuses on language use in both literary and non-literary texts. Stylistics is also concerned with the study of the language of literature or the study of the language habits of particular authors and their writing patterns. Therefore, it can be said to be the study of style. Style on its own has been defined differently be scholars. According to Leech and Short (15), style is the cover of our feelings and it is the tool of the writer to transfer the message to readers. Leech further says “style proclaims the man” (11), that is, there is an intimate relationship between the choice of language and the author’s personality. Haynes defines it as “the study of style is the study of differences” (3). This further drives home the point that our choice of diction differentiates us from others.
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A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO’S SOCIO-POLITICAL POETRY (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
