Chidinma Dike: A Stylistic Analysis of Selected Stories in Achebe’s ‘Girls At War And Other Stories’ [PDF]

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Literature – Africa, , language: English, abstract: This study aims at carrying out a stylistic analysis of selected short stories from Achebe’s Girls at War and other stories. Stylistics, a combination of style and literature is a discipline which has been approached in different ways by different scholars both in linguistic studies and literary studies; it is a borderline discipline between linguistics and literature thus its definition varies based on the theory adopted. For better understanding, there is the need to explain what style is before defining the term stylistics.

Style is got from the Latin word “Stilus” which means “a pointed instrument for writing on waxed tablets and has, in modern times, been associated with a way or manner of writing or speaking” (Otagburuagu et al 35). Style has also been defined as the description and analysis of the variability forms of linguistic items in actual language use. It is the manner or mode of expressing one’s thought in language. A creative artist expresses his feeling, thought, ideas and vision through language and his unique way of using language to convey his feelings is what is called style (E.J. Otagburuagu et al 2014:35). Leech and Michael in E.J. Otagburuagu et al 2014 define style as “the linguistic characteristics of a particular text”. According to Otagburuagu et al, Katie in her book, A Dictionary of Stylistics (1989) classifies style into the following: style as personal idiosyncrasy, style as a technique of expression and style as the highest achievement of literature.

Stylistics has been defined as a study of the different styles that are present in either a given utterance or a written text or document. Stylistics is derived from the word style and it concerns itself with the study of the techniques and manner in which people express their thought both in speech and writing. Stylistics deals with a wide range of language varieties and styles that that are possible in creating different texts, whether spoken or written, monologue or dialogue, formal or informal, scientific or religious etc. Stylistics unlike pragmatics that focuses on the “what” of a text, concerns itself with the “how” and “why” of a text. Leech, in line with this, defined stylistics as “a linguistic approach to literature; explaining the relation between language and artistic functions with motivating questions such as why and how more than what.”