‘Text-To-Text’ Metaphor As An Aspect Of Meaning Making In Osundare’s Poetry: A Stylistic Examination

Abstract

This paper analyses pre-existing texts as rhetorical signifiers of meaning in Osundare’s poetic oeuvre. These texts are recreated and appropriated as a metaphorical representation of meaning within the cultural context of use in Osundare’s poetry. I engage this as an aspect of Osundare’s literary idiolect because, in -spite of the body of scholarship in Osundare studies, the deployment of these pre-existing texts as metaphorical tropes of meaning in Osundare has yet to be analytically examined. For analytical convenience, the topology of Osundare’s metaphor design can largely be conceived as a matrix of two creative formats: ‘text-to-text’ and ‘word-to-word’ frames, and the former, being under-examined, forms the focus of this paper. Metaphoric abstractions from existing prime and second-order texts are what we described as ‘text-to-text’ metaphors. This is when pre-existing texts or phenomena like proverbs and oral tales (second-order texts), and actual events (prime-order texts) existing in the culture are manipulated and textualized for meaning in the process of poetic composition.