Untitled

Dieng, Omar

doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.49.2.12

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2023

2024

Publication Types

Select...

Article1

Other1

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent2

Authors

Journals

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Re-visioning Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Using Wmatrix

Bonsu,

Nkansah

2024

Íkala

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The numerous literary explorations of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels reveal his aesthetic creativity and relevance in addressing African and diasporic issues that have contemporary relevance. Guided by two objectives, this corpus study set out to analyse the narration and thematisation of Armah’s Fragments (1970) through part-of-speech and semantic domain tags using Wmatrix. We compared Fragments as a target corpus with two other novels by Armah. Results of the analysis suggest that Armah alternates between homodiegetic narrative in character dialogues and monologues, which dominate the main heterodiegetic discourse narration. He also provides a critical perspective on the immediacy of a historic and instantaneous present by giving a specific past account that projects a possible continuity of events in Ghana and Africa. Additionally, Armah discusses the geographic mobility of characters as a metaphor for a quest for a place of being and identity. These findings illustrate the value of applying computational tools like Wmatrix to examine African literary texts and provide a base for further studies.

show abstract