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CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF OLA ROTIMI”S OUR HUSBAND HAS GONE MAD AGAIN

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

”Discourse” refers to expressing oneself using words Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is concerned with studying and analyzing written texts and spoken words to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias and how this sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced and transformed within specific social, economic, political and historical contexts. CDA along with other related disciplines attempts to reveal hidden meanings i.e. the ideological loads of the language and the exercise of power. CDA is a contemporary approach to the study of language and discourses in social institutions. It focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in communities, schools and classrooms.

CDA aims to make its users aware of and able to describe and deconstruct vectors and effects in texts and semiotic materials generally which might otherwise remain to wield power uncritiqued. In there respects, CDA may be a kind of wake up cal, or consciousness, rising about the coercive or anti-demo criticizing effects of the discourses we live by. Critical discourse analysts take explicit position and thus want to understand, expose and ultimately resist social inequality. In other words, CDA may be seen as a reaction against the dominant formal (social or uncritical most times) paradigms of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

This project focuses on an attempt to carry out a Critical Discourse Analysis of Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband has Gone Mad Again. This chapter therefore focuses on the purpose of study, scope of the study, justification, methodology, data description and author’s background.

1.1    PURPOSE OF STUDY

The purpose of this project is to critically analyze Our Husband has Gone Mad Again by Ola Rotimi using Critical Discourse Analysis. Being that the analysis of a play is rarely done, the researcher is not aware of any previous attempt to do CDA of the text Our Husband has Gone Mad Again.

1.2    Scope of the study

This project will analyze Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again using Critical Discourse Analysis. It will analyze selected conversations and utterances in the text. There are a lot of CDA elements but only some of them will be selected for the analysis of the text. The analysis will entail how power relations are decoded from the text that links to the society. Findings and conclusions will bring a temporary end to this research work.

1.3    JUSTIFICATION

In the best knowledge of the researcher as a theoretical construct has not been used in analyzing Our Husband has Gone Mad Again by Ola Rotimi. Thus, the study is justifiable as it seeks to investigate the sociopolitical and cultural issues that are inherent in the text. It is also believed that this study will be an additional work in the scholarship of the study of CDA, especially at the undergraduate level.

1.4    METHODOLOGY

This project is basically a Critical Discourse Analysis or Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again. Some selected conversations and utterances will be selected from the text for analysis.

Norman Fairclough’s theory of CDA has been chosen for the analysis of this research work, some elements have been selected from the theory including the political and sociocultural issues which occur in the text and leads to the society. The textual analysis sociocultural analysis and the political issues of this text will be analyzed.

1.5    DATA DESCRIPTION

The play, Our Husband has Gone Mad Again, is a political satire. It shows the follies and fables of the entire political system in Africa and Nigeria in particular, in a bid to correct some of its anomalies. It lampoons the protagonist Major Rahman Teslim Lejoka-Brown a former military officer who takes to politics with the motif that looks more of vanity patriotism. Ola Rotimi takes a comic swipe at the ideological misfits and opportunist who strut the ever accommodating political landscape of the continent Africa.

1.6    AUTHOR’S BACKGROUND

Olawale Gladstone Emmanuel Rotimi, best known as Ola Rotimi was born in Sapele, former Bendel state of Nigeria on 13thApril, 1938, to an Ijaw mother and Yoruba father, so cultural diversity was a recurring theme in his work. He was a playwright, stage director, producer, actor, critic, scholar and a teacher. In his early age, he was exposed to a traditional Nigeria heritage of arts. He was educated at Methodist Boys High School in Lagos from 1952 to 1957. He went to Boston University for a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts where he studied play writing and directing. He later went to Yale University where he had masters in the arts after three years and retired to Nigeria in 1966. While in America, he got married to a French Canadian lady, Hazel a renowned artist, actress, singer and pianist. In Nigeria, Ola Rotimi took a job at the University of Ife, where he was a research fellow from 1966 to 1969 at the institute of African studies. He later became the head of creative arts and director at the University of Port Harcourt.

The dramatic works of Ola Rotimi are known throughout Africa and have made him one of the most significant playwrights on that continent. While he was at Yale University on a Rockefeller fellowship, his socio-political comedy Our Husband has Gone Mad Again was chosen as Yale’s student play of the year in 1966. Ola Rotimi examines Nigerian’s history and ethnic traditions in his works. Some of his published works are: Introduction to Nigerian Literature, The Gods Are not to Blame(London: Oxford University Press 1971), Kurunmi (Ibadan: University press Limited 1971), Our Husband has Mad Again (London: Oxford University press 1977), Ovourumwen Nogbaisi (Benin: London: Ethiopian and Oxford University press 1974), If : A Tragedy of the Ruled (Ibadan: Heinemann 1983). He was in Nigeria until his Nigeria until his death in 2001.