ANCIENT AND MODERN: NEXUS BETWEEN TRADITIONAL ELEMENTS AND NEW CULTURE IN TWO NIGERIAN PLAYS

Abstract

Studies in literary and linguistic analysis of culture in Nigerian literary texts are numerous in existing literature. However, there is still the need to fill the gap in comparative literary and linguistic studies of culture in the ancient and modern periods. This study attempts an investigation of the nexus between traditional elements and new culture in Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods and Gab Osoba’s The Tortoise and the Money Lender that reflect a society in transition. The paper examines the two texts as literary works that explore the conflict of ideas, values, or traditions in contemporary Nigerian society. Thirty-two excerpts selected from the two texts were subjected to rigorous analysis using J. R. Searle’s pragmatics and J. Austine’s speech act theory. The analysis reveals that linguistic and discursive resources are deployed in the texts to present traditional cultural practices that are being interrogated in the light of modernity 
and new culture. The paper concludes that African cultural practices that are not in conflict with modernity should be preserved while those that appear bizarre and primitive should be discarded