Author(s)

Henri Oripeloye^*, Folasade Hunsu

Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria.

This essay responds to the shaping influence of Yorùbá oríkì on personal citation, a written text that constructs individual identity in contemporary time. It reads personal citation as a cultural production that is realised through performance. Through a close reading of two purposively selected citation texts, the essay examines the various angles of interpolations between this written literature and the rhetorical practice of Yoruba oríkì. Specifically, it explores the use of oral features such as animated speech, histrionics, and narrative aesthetics, and direct discourse in its delivery and proposes that the construction of social eminence in personal citation depends largely on praise chants. It concludes that there is a noticeable appropriation of the linguistic and textual context of panegyric to which shows personal citation as a hybrid text that contests cultural homogeneity and textual boundaries as it operates within the logic of complementarity in its poetic reflections and linguistic manipulations.

Personal Citation, Oríkì, Inter-Textuality, Rhetorical Nuances, Literature

Oripeloye, H. and Hunsu, F. (2021) Personal Citation, Rhetorical Practice and the Reinvention of Oríkì Tradition. Advances in Literary Study, 9, 159-172. doi: 10.4236/als.2021.94018.