INTERTEXTUALITY AND CONTEXT. A STUDY OF BIYI BANDELE’S THE MAN WHO CAME IN FROM THE BACK OF BEYOND AND BURMA BOY

ABSTRACT

This dissertation entitled, Intertextuality and Context: A Functional Linguistic Study of Biyi Bandele‟s The Man Who Came In From The Back Of Beyond and Burma Boy conceptualises the levels of intertextual influx of the two novels via multi-leveled layers of context. It buttresses the linguistic review rather than the literary and examines how at least one text depends upon the postures of the other text. The study examines the manner in which two texts of intra-authorial and intra-generic work exhibit certain levels of intertextuality. In order to achieve textual tightness, the work uses a blend of Halliday‟s (2004) Systemic Functional Grammar-SFG through scale and category theory and Halliday and Hasan‟s (1976) Cohesion as the theoretical frame of analysis. It also embodies Firbas (1992) analytical model to stimulate theme/rheme structuration and their possible prominence. Owing to the analytical approach, and using text-linguistics levels of context, the outcome show that both texts possess textual relations. The findings also demonstrate that, two texts written by an author under the realm of a distinct genre-class retain the inclination of text-context-author-language convergence and intertextual relevance. Thus, by text-craft and artful tradition, text is opened to encapsulate citations, presuppositions, rhetoric, discourse and stylistic loads of another text principally of the same artistic entity.