Linguistic Choices and Gender Roles in New Nigerian Literature: An Examination of Alpha Emeka’s The Carnival and Razinat Mohammed’s A Love Like a Woman’s and Other Stories

Abstract

This paper is premised on the Systemic Functional approach to text analysis, which considers a work of art as a consequence of the social milieu (Senkoro, 2005). Specifically, it takes Hasan’s (1985) view that without linguistics, the study of literature remains a series of personal preferences. It examines how power is invested along gender lines through language choice in two works of fiction, both by new Nigerian writers: Emeka’s novel The Carnival and Mohammed’s short story collection A Love Like a Woman’s and Other Stories. It seeks to achieve two objectives. The first is to evaluate whether, and to what extent new Nigerian writing is holding onto, or shifting from established ideologies regarding the portrayal of women in fiction, especially by male writers. The second is to compare the two works, The Carnival, by a male writer, with A Love Like a Woman’s written by a female, to see whether and to what extent the two differ in their portrayal of characters of the two sexes. The final part of the paper draws conclusions on
the basis of the evidence from the two books that would help in validating the notion of gender positioning in Nigerian fiction, or re-assessing same. The paper argues that such an examination of broader contextual properties oftexts affect their description and interpretation, and concludes that by thus determining positions available within texts, we can make a proper evaluation of how gender is grounded in new Nigerian writing.

Keywords: gender, feminism, transitivity, verbs, reductive, critical discourse