The Context of Culture-Oriented Literary Aesthetics in Collegiate English Studies

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.