CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0     INTRODUCTION
”Discourse” refers to expressing oneself using words Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)is concerned with studying and analyzing written texts and spoken words to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias and how this sources are initiated, maintained, reproduced and transformed within specific social, economic, political and historical contexts. CDA along with other related disciplines attempts to reveal hidden meanings i.e. the ideological loads of the language and the exercise of power. CDA is a contemporary approach to the study of language and discourses in social institutions. It focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in communities, schools and classrooms.
CDA aims to make its users aware of and able to describe and deconstruct vectors and effects in texts and semiotic materials generally which might otherwise remain to wield power uncritiqued. In there respects, CDA may be a kind of wake up cal, or consciousness, rising about the coercive or anti-demo criticizing effects of the discourses we live by. Critical discourse analysts take explicit position and thus want to understand, expose and ultimately resist social inequality. In other words, CDA may be seen as a reaction against the dominant formal (social or uncritical most times) paradigms of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
This project focuses on an attempt to carry out a Critical Discourse Analysis of Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband has Gone Mad Again. This chapter therefore focuses on the purpose of study, scope of the study, justification, methodology, data description and author’s background.
1.1    PURPOSE OF STUDY
The purpose of this project is to critically analyze Our Husband has Gone Mad Again by Ola Rotimi using Critical Discourse Analysis. Being that the analysis of a play is rarely done, the researcher is not aware of any previous attempt to do CDA of the text Our Husband has Gone Mad Again.
1.2    SCOPE OF THE STUDY
This project will analyze Ola Rotimi’s Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again using Critical Discourse Analysis. It will analyze selected conversations and utterances in the text. There are a lot of CDA elements but only some of them will be selected for the analysis of the text. The analysis will entail how power relations are decoded from the text that links to the society. Findings and conclusions will bring a temporary end to this research work.