Language and gender portraiture in Obafemi's Wheels
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Date
2010
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Publisher
US-China Foreign Language
Abstract
This paper examines language and gender portraiture in Obafemi's novel-Wheels. The author's interest is to show how Obafemi combines his professional leaning as English language teacher with his literary worldview as a radical feminist to portray women. The paper has 4 sections. Section 1 introduces the key concepts in the paper and justifies how literature could be used as a tool for language teaching/learning. Section 2 reviews and appraises earlier works on the subject matter. Section 3 analyzes the use of language and other linguistic elements for gender portraiture in the novel. Section 4 is the concluding remark on the findings of this paper. The author's conclusion is that Obafemi's use of language has been very helpful in the way he positively portrays his women characters, unlike many other male creative writers. It is, therefore, imperative for the creative writers to give special attention to positive portraiture of women and also focus attention on writing in indigenous languages to re-construct African cultural values for the global peace agenda. The conceptual orientation for this study is stylistics. Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics that has a special bias for both descriptive and analytical approaches to the factors of language use.
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Keywords
Language, Gender, Stylistics