Abstract:
The research presents a cognitive stylistics study of two Namibian novels: Francis Sifiso Nyathi’s The Other Presence and Salom Shilongo’s The Hopeless Hopes. The novels have been selected because they presented Namibian societal problems from two different Namibian perspectives. The study also argues that only few such Namibian novels have been investigated conceptualising applied linguistic theories such as cognitivism, functionalism and structuralism. To guide the entire stream of the research, the researcher raised three fundamental questions: How does cognitive metaphor help explicate psychological hitches as captured creatively in the two novels? What is the mind’s contribution to conceptualise and comprehend contextual meanings in the two novels? How does content schema contribute to the understanding of the two novels? It is therefore against these three questions that the two novels have been purposefully selected and studied in order to address the gap. Conceptualising and implementing cognitive metaphor, the study also analyses the root causes of societal problems such as unemployment, unfair treatment of people, HIV/AIDS and witchcrafts in the Namibian social fabric. In The Other Presence, it is HIV/AIDS what is referred as the other presence of the other. Shilongo’s The Hopeless Hopes also reveals how Robert and the other fellow ex-combatants gathered at a Big House in Windhoek to hand over their petition to Honourable Zopa. This clearly indicates that the State House is being contextualised to a Big House, while The Founding Father and former President of the country, Honourable Sam Nuyoma referred to as Honourable Zopa. The contextual meaning of the selected novels can thus only understood if the readers of the concerned novel have general background of the Namibian society. Following cognitivism as a broader theoretical framework, the study has also followed a schema theory specifically to explain mental problems and contextual meanings. The study revealed and demonstrated how cognitive stylistics approach to Namibian novels can advance the literary understanding of multiplicities of themes such as culture, taboo, superstition, unemployment, colonialism and corruption.
