Character Formation and Terrorism in Elnathan John’s Born on A Tuesday And Obinna Udenwe’s Satans and Shaitans
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Date
2019-09
Authors
Onyango, Dedan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Kenyatta University
Abstract
This study explores how character formation has been deployed in Elnathan John’s
Born on a Tuesday and Obinna Udenwe’s Satans and Shaitans in the advancement of their
discourse on the different propensities for terrorism in literary studies. The study is
premised on the knowledge that character formation is an essential literary element,
especially as far as delivering the ideas of a literary writer is concerned. The research is
grounded on three objectives namely; to investigate the deployment of character formation
as a literary technique used to present the different propensities for terrorism, secondly, to
explore how the characters have been presented in the texts to illuminate terrorism, and
lastly to interrogate how characterization has been used to reveal the sub-conscious
undertones of religious extremism in the two texts. The rationale for this study is based on
the wide gap of knowledge in regards to character formation and its relationship with
terrorism. The study is delimited to two Nigerian texts, Born on a Tuesday and Satans and
Shaitans, which are both rich in form and content and fall in the basket of Africa’s
contemporary writing on polemical issues. The study adopts the psychoanalytic literary
theory, which gives insights into the basic approaches to character formation and
revelation of the sub-conscious undertones of religious extremism in literary texts. The
study has also employed the New Historicism literary theory as propounded by Stephen
Jay Greenblatt, which helps us gain insight on the relationship between the different power
structures that shape the various characters under study and the historical epochs of the
two texts were crafted in. The study adopted a qualitative research approach. It also
utilized library research, which involved textual analysis of the primary texts and the use
of secondary data. Purposive sampling was also done to select characters seen to be rich in
the aspects named above for the analysis. The study observes that there are several
propensities for terrorism that result in acts of terrorism being witnessed in the two texts.
Among them, included the notion of religious extremism, the ramifications of
globalization, occultism, among others. It was also discovered that the presentation of
characters was achieved through contrastive technique. The characters were presented as
either belonging to the moderate wing as well as the extremist side of the two antagonistic
groups in the texts. Through the contrastive presentation of characters, the aspects of
religious extremism were exposed. Furthermore, this study also found out that, through
characterization, the sub-conscious undertones of religious extremism, such as undertones
of extreme thoughts, verbalizations, and actions, are the main contributors to the terrorism
acts witnessed in the two texts. This study concludes that character formation is an
essential component in any investigation that looks into the relationship between literature
and terrorism and that it functions to aesthetically question and ideologically attempt to
explain the interconnectedness between literature and terrorism extrications. The study
recommends that future studies may interrogate the narrative and structural choices
employed by the two authors. Moreover, other literary theories can be used to widen the
scope of criticism of the two texts.
Description
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of Master of Arts of Kenyatta University, November 2019.
Keywords
Terrorism, Elnathan John’s, Tuesday, Obinna Udenwe’s Satans, Shaitans