TEXTUAL PATTERNS AND SIGNIFICANCE IN JOE USHIE’S POETRY: A SEMIOSTYLISTIC STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v4i1.191Keywords:
creative writing, poetry, semiostylistics, textual patterns, significanceAbstract
Ushie’s poetry has been much studied for its message on topical issues like social injustice, political malfeasance, the environment, among others, and perhaps much more for its use of language. Yet several aspects of the use of language in Ushie’s poetry are yet to receive attention, and a major one among these is what this study has attempted to demonstrate. Against the background of Daiches’ (1948) exposition on creative writing as an art, and the creative writer as an artist in words, this study analyses a few of Joe Ushie’s poems with thetool of semiostylistics, and shows how Ushie communicates his messages through patterns created with language units in the text of his poems. This study concludes that this is a technique Ushie has consciously wrought, being himself a stylistic critic of the works of great literary artists, and thus very conversant with the workings of creative writing as verbal art with a semiotic dimension, as every good work of art in general.
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