| dc.description.abstract | This study investigates the rhetorical strategies utilized by Chinua Achebe in creating his five
novels:
Things fall Apart, No longer at Ease, Arrow of God, A M
an of the People
and,
Anthills
of
the Savannah. Focusing
on stylistic elements
in the novels, the study acknowledges that
Achebe
adopts a deliberate method of telling the story so as to achieve
particular effects.
The critical
approach
accounts for
the author‟s awareness of his craft and
audience. Utilizing
theories of
rhetoric, there is an effort
to reconcile the uniqueness of strategies adopted
and their intended
political, emotional, linguistic,
and intellectual
effects
on
the reader. The integration of theory
and reflections on style leads us to
recognize
that Achebe did not just write for writing sake; he
had a deliberate persuasive intention.
In the process of accounting for this relationship between
the style and the reader,
this
study strives
to identify the textual elements that establish the
patterns in the discourse sequences
in which
each of the novels of Achebe
is organized
by
examining
the rules of the text's generative systems; the
particular conventions on how the
Achebe texts generate
sense/meaning.
The word strategy
in this study has military connotations
implying the direction of movements or operations in a literary campaign;
both artistic and
ideolological. Each of the Achebe
novels
is seen as a literary maneuver
that has a name and a
justification for the
categorization
in rhetorical terms. The
compositional ingredients that
characterize the
novels
are sought
out
and,
at the same time, their relation to typical usages and
their singular uniqueness
and purpose for use
stressed.
In the end the study attempts to trace and
account for the developmental patterns
and shifts of emphasis in the storytelling strategies
in the
novels of Chinua Achebe
in an endeavor
to
evaluate whether the
style the author adopts is
integral to his worldview and
instructive
to the reader | en_US |
