Abstract

The study undertook a graphostylistic analysis of Remi Raji’s poems in the anthology entitled Web of Remembrance. The selected poems in the Anthology include “Bound to remember,” “Malediction for maximum ruler”, “An African voting games”, “st. clinton’s song” and “Light must break”. The poems were analysed from the perspective of the linguistic framework of graphostylistics following Halliday (1971) and Mukarovsky (1964), concepts of foregrounding and deviation. The study adopted graphological deviational approach to analyse the six texts across various graphological tactics of punctuation, capitalization, spacing, hyphenation and internal norms. It is discovered that the language employed in the Web of Remembrance is essentially centred on graphostylistics. The selected poems for the study manifested deviations at various graphological tactics (punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, spacing and internal norm). These graphological devices were used by the poet to capture the messages of the poems which are basically on condemnation and apprehension of the evils, atrocities, oppression and injustice perpetrated by the erstwhile African political leaders, both at home and abroad and advocates the need for revolutionary change. The study showed how graphostylistics has been effectively manipulated to communicate in Web of Remembrance as demonstrated in the six selected poems from the anthology. The study proved that graphostylistics is a reliable linguistic tool for the study of literary texts, particularly, the poetic genre. It equally demonstrated that graphological components or devices of language could illuminate, to a large extent, the communicative goals of a poetic genre as an instance of language use.

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