A CRITICAL STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF AFRICAN FEMINISM IN CHIKA UNIGWE’S NIGHT DANCER

Abstract

This study aims at analysing how language helps to establish the ideology of African Feminism in the text, Night Dancer. The study adopts Lesley Jeffries Critical Stylistic (CS) Analytical model as theoretical framework. Selected extracts from the text formed the data for the study. The extracts were subjected to Jeffries selected CS tools while simple descriptive analysis was adopted for data analysis. The findings reveal that while naming and describing had the highest instance in the text with 58%, presenting others’ speech and thought had the lowest, that is, 1% respectively. Thus, the study found out that although Critical Stylistic tools such as naming and describing, representing actions/states and events, equating and contrasting, enumerating and exemplifying, assuming and implying and presenting others’ speech and thought were deployed in the text at varying degrees, they all synergised in no small measures to establish the coherence (meaning) of the extracts and the overall linguistic construction of the ideology of African Feminism in the selected text.