Exploring the Ideological Use of Grammatical Structures in a Written Text: Applications for Students of Literature

Abstract

By the fall of Colonialism in the mid-20th century, a plethora of writers and critics mostly from the excolonies started to write back to the Empire. Being categorized as Postcolonial, this group has used for the most part the language of the colonizers for their writing. Thus the latter has imposed its own criteria on the used language. This research has chosen Chinua Achebe's magnum opus, Things Fall Apart, as its language is English: the language imposed on Nigeria and many other colonized nations. He wrote this novel supposedly as a reaction against European novels that depicted Africans as uncivilized people who needed to be civilized by Europeans. Adopting Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the text for the ideological use of certain grammatical structures, the present paper argues that Achebe, despite his nationality, is virtually writing as a western literary figure who has set his fictions in Nigeria. This goes contrary to what the novelist has embarked on; it still perpetuates the same African stereotypes.

Keywords

• achebe
• critical discourse analysis
• postcolonialism
• things fall apart
• grammar