Changing Patterns in the Shona Novel from Zimbabwe – A Linguistic Literary Analysis.
The interdisciplinary research project aims at establishing a model for joining literary and linguistic scholarship in the analysis of African-language literatures. The corpus of investigation consists of three Shona novels from Zimbabwe, which are representative of different stages in the development of the genre: P. Chakaipa’s Pfumo reropa (1961), C. Mungoshi’s Ndiko kupindana kwamazuva (1975) and I. Mabasa’s Mapenzi (1999). The project breaches new ground in applying “Toolbox”, a linguistic computer program, to a literary corpus. Native Shona speakers trained in linguistics and literature will assist in the evaluation of the electronically generated data. Theoretical concepts situated at the interface of literary and linguistic sciences (stylistics, discourse analysis, narratology) will be employed to use linguistic findings for an overall literary analysis of the corpus.