How to do a Neo Critical Analysis: Using Mum Money and I by Odunayo Àjàní.

How to do a Neo Critical Analysis: Using Mum Money and I by Odunayo Àjàní.

Picking up a children's book, one often just randomly discards it as a bedtime storybook or just simply, kids' book that is not worthy to be read and examined. 

For instance, one neglects the "how" and the "what" of how a texts is structured. 

Reviewing children's literature, as such, is seen as something mediocre and mundane to the study of contemporary literature. Why is this so? Literary critics tend to focus on analysing literary texts based on how important they relate to everyday issues plaguing adulthood. 

Thus one can ask the question, "are children literatures worthy of critical analysis or review?" One can answer yes; this answer is based on what the text is about and how important it is to scholarly study. Therefore, the text to be examined, which is a children's literature genre, focuses on financial intelligence education for children. With its subject matter, one will find it noteworthy to explicate and examine how the writer explores the motif of financial intelligence and is able to teach the young ones what the text is meant for. 

The literature Mum Money and I, to be considered will be treated as a text - The term ‘text’ refers to any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language (cf. Halliday and Hasan, 1976: Chapter 1). Hence, one will explicate how the text is communicable and able to express its focal subject matter. 

The text revolves around a child which inquisitiveness leads to the subject matter of financial intelligence or money matters. The writer writes from a third person eye and often dived into the omniscient and first person point of view. 

The uncomplicated, but not simple of the text's nature is able to present a complex subject matter that adults still study today to children expressively and concisely. In examining the text, Mum Money and I by Odunayo Ajani, the employ  of the literary theory, New Criticism will be employed as  a tool to investigate the text. 

One can ask the question, "Why using New Criticism as the literary theory for analysis?" one can simply answer that the features of New Criticism actually plays a vital role in selecting it as our major tool.

 One will question that the theory of New Criticism is used often to ground poetry due to the uniqueness and sine qua non of its form or structure, nonetheless, one needs to point to the fact that to write a masterpiece for children, which is done by Odunayo, that the form must be subtle and unique to a child's way of seeing or identifying the world. 

Although  the  book  is in  a narrative form laced with the cloak of dialogue, nonetheless, the form plays a crucial role in developing the plot and achieving its motif. 

Then, what is New Criticism? 

Lois Tyson maintains that "For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object.

 Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence on the page, for it is constructed of words placed in a specific relationship to one another—specific words placed in a specific order—and this one-of-a-kind relationship creates a complex of meaning that cannot be reproduced by any other combination of words.

 Using New Criticism will call one to focus on such aspects of the text;

 these aspects are:

 the Organic unity of the text - how the parts of the text come together to make a whole, the form and the content and their role in relating to the subject matter (financial intelligence) of the text, and so on.

 All these will be the focalé of this paper.

Examining the form first, one will assert that the form is simply written in simple but not mediocre English sentence structure, which suggests the Nigerian English in its pure sense.

 The text, Mum Money and I presents itself in English simple sentence structure of Subject + Predicate.

 Often it is laced with compound sentence that are carefully recruited but with conscious effort not to muddle up the meaning so as to have the children audience in mind.

 Moving beyond the linguistic ensemble of the text, one will come across the pages with pictures that has semiotic underpinnings for the kids.

If one look beyond the domain of form, one will find some interesting features embedded in Mum Money and I. First of all, one will be reading it as a bildungsroman if it comes in the form of an adult novel, due to the fact that it talks about the coming of age of a girl, Esosa, who comes to the consciousness of what financial intelligence is and that  finance can be managed.

 The text, talks about some universal literary themes of self consciousness.

 This latter motif can be identified in the first chapter, which reveals Esosa inquisitive nature towards what money is and how it can be handled.

 Further, chapter two revolves around the conceptual frame of "work with your hands" in earning a living, while chapter three enumerates the import of saving and spending.

 One can further list the other chapters into various points they dwell on. The chapters are:

Chapter Four: talks about family and their relationship to money. It also points out to the importance of "man-woman" relationship and why it is important to finance.

 If the text had been written as a short play, one would have envisaged that this is a theme which often is discussed by short story writers.

 The concept of Family here can be related to the Nigerian sociocultural context, but this will be out of our jurisdiction in performing a new criticism analysis.

Chapter Five: dwells around learning and the need for scholarship and why it is necessary on financial intelligence.

Chapter six: mentions the power of dream and determination in achieving financial freedom.

Chapter Seven: posits the concept of Mother-child relationship and why it is crucial to financial knowledge.

 One can maintain that, here, Odunayo, focuses on why mothers have an essential role in teaching their kids about money.

Chapter Eight: mentions the concept of investing by using the connotative title, "scattering the seed".

 This shows the importance of investments when it comes to the subject matter at hand.

Chapter Nine: this dwells on servitude and stewardship towards maintaining a discipline of achieving financial freedom.

Chapter Ten: teaches the ingenuity of the mother in teaching financial literacy.

Chapter Eleven: posits changing one's bad habits and maintaining good ones when it comes to money matter.

 

Chapter Twelve wraps it all up by revealing the reward of teaching a child financial literacy.

Examining the chapters shows how the parts of the text are able to form a whole body.

 

This shows the organic unity of the paper.

 Another concept is that of irony which is embedded in the chapter 12 title, "Esosa saves the day".

 In reality one will find out that Esosa is meant to be portrayed as dependent on her parents, but due to her financial capability was able to save her parents. In summing it all up, one can assert that the text, Mum Money and I, has been able to express the concept of financial literacy to the kids audience clearly and concisely.