The Context of Culture-Oriented Literary Aesthetics in Collegiate English Studies
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Date
2014
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Publisher
Dept. of Languages and Literary Studies Babcock University
Abstract
Abstract
The immense significance of English in the world today has informed the study of the
language at the collegiate level as an area of interest. The essence of studying the language
at the university level is to enhance the proficiency of speakers of this international
language. The contents of English courses in most of the nonnative universities in Africa,
however, tend to hamper the realisation of the core objective of the language programme.
Emphasis has often been placed on structural elements such as parts of speech,
morphological processes, phrases, clauses, or types of sentence. This practice has its
limitations, which is the training of speakers who are only able to define linguistic
structural items. Such speakers however, would err in actual language use in culture oriented social situations. Such emphasises the extension of structural grammar to the
aesthetic context, which signifies that language efficiency, the domain of aesthetics, needs
be underscored in English studies at the collegiate level. A disregard for the aesthetic
naturally eventuates in a wide gulf in training the users of the English language at
the global level, and this bars international intelligibility. The gap created can be
filled only by extending structural discourses to the aesthetic context or functional
literariness. This is in line with the phenomenon of socio-cultural realities
characteristically influencing language use. Moreover, this informs an aesthetic
modification in the course contents for English studies at the collegiate in nonnative
universities.
Key words: English, Aesthetics, Structure, Literariness, Culture