Analysing Linguistic Stylistic Devices in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and So Long a Letter: A Comparative Appraisal

This research work focuses on linguistic stylistic analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. It aims to identify the various translation procedures used in each novel in order to establish a comparison between the different translation procedures and style of each translator of modern and old English. A sampling method has been used to carry out this research work. Thus, one extract has been selected with its corresponding translation from the French and English versions of each novel. The results show that, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the translator has used predominantly adaptation for his translation representing 32.32% in both selected extracts whereas in So Long a Letter, the translator has adopted predominantly literal translation representing a proportion of 28.48% in order to preserve the sustained register of the source text. However, both translators have also used other translation procedures in lower proportions depending on the context orientation. It has been noted that translation methods such as calque has been used only once whereas borrowing is nonexistent in the selected extracts from both literary works.

A Marxist Reading of Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter

This work examines Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter from a Marxist perspective. It explores the radical and feminist tendencies on the stereotype of African women with the awareness that women are equal with men without prejudice to the interpretation of the theory of creation. Based on Marxist theoretical framework, our analysis shows that the oppression and exploitation of women is a process involving women themselves. The woman, in effect, continually reproduces the conditions of her subservience as Marx will add, through alienation, competition, rivalry and docility. Through alienation, women forfeit their rights to be the initiators and controllers of their historical processes. The study concludes that Marxist Feminist must practically engage in struggle against inequality and all manifestations of oppression and exploitation of women.

The Expression of Love in Long Distance Life (1989) by Marita Golden

In Long Distance Life (1989), Marita Golden, one of the most outstanding African American female writers, follows up her first novel,A Woman’s Place (1986) with an impressionistic sort of saga about a black American family living in Washington, D.C., from the 1920’s to the present. In Marita Golden’s Long Distance Life as in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (1979), most of the couples’s love lives come to an abrupt end by means of death, divorce or a presence of an intruder that is to say another lover between the two spouses. The question of love occupies a central role in the novel in so far as all most all the relationships of the characters are motivated by the issue of love. Women’s predicament in the novel is the outcome of the different aspects of love dealt with by Gloria Naylor.