A Critical Discourse Review of Resistance Consciousness in The Language and Ideology of Social Change Project in Wole Soyinka’s Political Discourse

Abstract

This paper discusses resistance consciousness in the language and ideology of social change project in Wole Soyinka's political discourse. The discussion is aimed at examining Wole Soyinka's text production strategies in his non-fictional writings. These writings weave a web of resistance ideologies that are enacted to instantiate social change on the political sphere of postcolonial states. This means that Soyinka produces texts aimed at instigating resistance consciousness in text consumers. The paper identifies the text production process for engaging the mind of the text consumer as semioticisation. The objective of Wole Soyinka's non-fictional writings, therefore, is to arouse consciousness for social change through deliberate acts of resistance against the anti-democratic dispositions, especially among Nigerian politicians. In this paper, the critical discourse review of the resistance consciousness draws upon the theory and methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA) propounded by Teun van Dijk (2002) and Norman Fairclough (1992) These theoretical approaches were complemented by Jacob Mey's (2001) critical pragmatic theory and Michael A. K. Halliday's (1985) systemic functional theory. The blend of the theories and methodologies gives the study an interdisciplinary outlook that facilitates the understanding of Wole Soyinka's deployment of linguistic devices such as metaphor, lexicalisation, passivisation and intertextuality to produce political discourse (text) that arouses resistance consciousness for enacting social change.