Constructing Power through Prose: An Integrated Stylistic Reading of Institutional Authority and Gender in Lola Akande's What It Takes

This study argues that in Lola Akande’s What It Takes, language does not simply describe institutional power and gendered vulnerability within the Nigerian university system but actively constructs, sustains, and at moments contests them. Existing commentary on the novel, including Coetzee’s reading of it as a self-help narrative of survival and journalistic reviews praising its urban setting and narrative craft, has engaged the novel’s themes without examining how its language performs those themes. This paper addresses that gap by integrating three frameworks: Stevenson’s concept of narrative web and texture, Ohmann’s account of prose style as ideological function, and Lutwack’s distinction between mixed and uniform prose, into a single analytic method rather than applying them as separate, sequential lenses. Close reading of the novel’s diction, syntax, dialogue, and shifting registers shows that Funto Oyewole’s doctoral ordeal is structured, in Stevenson’s terms, as a cyclical web of institutional delay, textured through embodied and psychological imagery, and voiced through a deliberately mixed style that moves between formal academic register, Yoruba-inflected colloquialism, satire, and introspective questioning. The study finds that this stylistic mixing is not incidental variation but the mechanism through which the novel enacts its central argument: that institutional authority sustains itself linguistically even as Funto’s own shifting register performs resistance and reclaimed agency. The paper concludes that Akande’s stylistic choices are constitutive of, rather than ornamental to, the novel’s critique of power.