Style and dramatic achievement in John Ruganda’s drama.

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of style and dramatic achievement in John Ruganda’s Drama focusing on his six published plays: The Burdens (1972), Black Mamba (1973), Covenant with Death (1973), The Floods (1980), Echoes of Silence (1986), and Shreds of Tenderness(2001). The study focuses on Ruganda’s choice of style and how he uses his style to communicate his concerns. It makes a detailed examination of his use of figurative language, role-play, folkloric transpositions and satire. It also examines how Ruganda develops his themes using the features of style, and how he manages to hold his audience’s interest. It also seeks to collate his six plays and study the style and thematic development across the six works. The method of study is close text analysis. The work categorizes data according to the period of publication and identifies the overarching themes and the relationship between style and thematic development. His use of imagery, allusion, characterization, folklore and satire is compared across both the earlier and the latter plays. The first chapter, the introduction and background to the study, focuses on the historical context in which the plays were set, together with what other critics have written about John Ruganda’s works. The second chapter examines Ruganda’s style in the earlier plays that is; The Burdens, Black Mamba, and Covenant with Death. The general argument is that by using a variety of stylistic features, Ruganda appeals to the readers to find solutions to the problems he identifies. Chapter three deals with style and thematic development in the latter plays that is : The Burdens, Echoes of Silence, and Shreds of Tenderness. It examines the way Ruganda develops his thematic concerns from one play to the next, and also examines the various stylistic choices that he makes in order to achieve this. It particularly focuses on the way figurative language has been used to communicate the social and political evils in society, and the use of role-play, folklore and satire. Chapter four is a recap of the previous chapters.