CHALLENGES FACED BY TWENTY FIRST CENTURY WOMEN: A FEMINISTIC STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF CHETAN BHAGAT’S NOVEL ‘ONE INDIAN GIRL’by

Abstract

Stylistics is a systematic study of form and content which studies the writer’s style and his/her use of content beyond the traditional and instinctive interpretation because it combines perception and detailed linguistic analysis of the text. The following research aims to explore the linguistic devices used by the author for describing the enthusiastic and revived character of Asian women with the help of feminist stylistic approach. Feminist stylistics, according to Mills (2005), is the use of language within the text itself for describing particular gender in a society and cannot be prescribed from outside world. Mills (1995) describes feministic stylistics as an approach which describes and interprets the use of linguistic items in terms of gender specification, sexism and discourse. A woman is always intended to be weak, submissive, subjugated, acquiescent and subservient to man in Asian culture. The study justifies the above claim by using Leech’s (2007) model through grammatical features which were used in the text for females. The study concludes that the nouns, adjectives and other specific nominalizations for an Asian woman is targeted with sexist language and Asian women are objectified with different symbols.