JOURNAL OF MODERN CRITICAL ARABIC LITERATURE
Year:2019 | Volume:8 | Issue:15 (17) |Papers Count:7

Language is a social phenomenon that is influenced by the beliefs and ideologies in the society, and it plays a fundamental role in reflecting and, thus, reproducing those beliefs and ideologies. This study aims to investigate the linguistic aspects of the short story ‘ Alsharaf’ by Zenoon Ayoub, on the basis of the pattern devised by two prominent linguists, namely Boris Avspnsky and Roger Fowler. The text is studies with a focus on the author’ s perspective and the level of discourse in this story. This helps to understand the ideology encoded in the text explicitly and implicitly. The analysis of the narrative suggests a pattern at four levels, including spatial-temporal, interpretive, psychological and ideological levels. These levels are the main elements of a discourse. Using linguistic tools, the story teller depicts two contrastive thoughts. On the one hand, there are dominant patriarchic attitudes explicitly expressed by the story characters. On the other hand, there is the implicit ideology of the first-person story teller, as the representative of the intellectual generation, which shows his dissatisfaction about the cultural and social misconceptions institutionalized in the society.

Ali Ahmad Bakathir (1910?-1969) is a Yemeni belletrist and dramatist who has addressed the problems of his society in his literary prose and poetry. A lot of social and political themes can be seen in the drama ‘ Larva and Dragon’ which narrates Napoleon's invasion to Egypt and the role of French colonialism mysteriously. By selecting larva and dragon as the title of his play, Bakathir pointed to the colonization symbolically. In this paper, using data analysis and library and electronic resources, the authors tried to address and analyze some key concepts of his drama such as colonialism, freedom, tyranny, women, patriotism, hope for the future, and ignorance. In an overall assessment, it can be noted that Bakathir tried to show the chaotic situation of Egypt at that time. In this way, he wanted to inform Arab and Muslim readers and awaken Arabic and Islamic societies to rectify themselves.

Al-Hurr al-Riyahi is a prosaic play by Abdul Razzak Abdul Wahid. The play is one of the few works in the field of religious prose, in particular about Ashura. Reviews of religious literature and comparative literature in different languages in verse and prose demonstrate the limited number of such works in prose. Most artistic creations in this field are limited to the contemporary era. They have emerged as different genres such as novels and plays by some writers in the field. These conditions clarify the importance of introducing, reviewing, and examining the few prose texts on Ashura that exist in a number of languages. Therefore, the present article attempts to examine this literary genre in terms of content, structure, and techniques used to draw upon the innovative and creative features of this work as compared to other similar works. The author has used a historical event as the theme of his play to bestow it with artistic aspects, and interesting perspectives and to exert a positive impact on the audience. He has employed the elements of artistic creativity and fantasy to relate the reality to a beautiful language that can be considered as a free depiction of the story of Karbala.

De-familiarization is one of the most important style-makers in a literary text that defines the special expression of the author. Through his literary work, the author tries to draw the audience's attention with different techniques one of which is deviating from the usual forms of writing. In fact, deviation from writing norms is the change of the written form of a word or a text that leads to the change of the meaning of that word or text. The frequency of this phenomenon is very high in the poetry of SamihQassem. It is practiced on the purpose of attracting the audience's attention and adding new meanings to the text. This research aims to identify various forms of deviation in the poetry of Samih Qassem through a descriptive-analysis method and provide examples that confirm the deviation in his writings. Then, the paper examines the poet's purpose of employing such a style. The poet has used this style to convey certain feelings to the reader, get the poem visualized, and embody the concepts.

Irony is a picture of a thought that eclipses on the denial of the discrepancy between the situation that is deserved and the real situation. It is a kind of euphemism expressed indirectly for the correction of the society. Also, there is a secret relation between the author and the reader that is manifested at the time of suffocation and fear. Among the beautiful aspects of irony, one may refer to brevity and contradiction in meaning. In this study, a descriptive-analytical method was used to search the elements and kinds of irony with a focus on them as used in the bitter satire of Ahmad Matar. As the results show, most of Matar’ s works are like a play with an ironical satire and pungent criticism, fraught with ambiguities. The distinctive feature of these odes is the author’ s intentional simple-mindedness and neglect. The poet uses visual and verbal kinds of irony. The verbal Irony that is encoded in words, in most cases, like visual irony, leads to a contradictory composit image. The poet’ s goal of using ironical satire is to show the funny difference between the ideal situation and messy socio-political situations in Arab societies, awareness, social correction, and exaggeration.

Techniques of writing fictions in the West have had significant effects on the Arabic fiction today. Among them, the technique of "magical realism" is noteworthy. It refers to a type of narrative realism which, on one hand, resembles a realistic story and, on the other hand, is excluded from the realm of realism by the extraordinary events that occur. Therefore, magical realism is a realistic narrative which occurs in magic patterns. Rabie Jaber, a Lebanese contemporary novelist, is among the most famous writers in the Arabic literature who uses this technique widely in his stories. The novel Mehlis Report narrates Lebanon Civil War and its social, political and psychological roots. One of his most prominent works is in the field of magical realism. In this study, after the concept of magical realism is defined, an analytical method is used to analyze the novel Mehlis Report by Rabie Jaber based on fictional elements. Then, the effects of these elements on the form and content of the novel are specifie. The research results indicate that, in this novel, Jaber has used diverse procedures and techniques such as magical phenomena, magnification of reality, unjustifiability of some events, dead narrators, creation of alternative and irrational worlds, authorial reticence, and expressionist descriptions. These elements are used to reveal the bitter aspects of social life.

Postcolonial studies seek to explain how economic and political domination are employed to attribute otherness to African and Middle Eastern subjects and deny their sense of autonomous identity in order to consolidate Western and Imperialist cultural and ethical supremacy. Gender, as one of the major tenets of this theoretical framework, is of special interest in the East-West relationship in Arabic novels where the interactions between Eastern men and Western women are apparently determined by domination. Mohammad Al-‘ AaliAr’ aar, an Algerian writer, explores the role of gender in the relationships among his protagonist, his wife and a French woman in his postcolonial novel, Ma La Tazrouh al-Riyah. This paper aims to investigate the role of gender in creation of rapport between the Eastern man and the Eastern woman. It also examines the autonomy and active role of the Eastern man against the Western woman. It is contended that femininity and weakness are essentially conceptualized to be associated with women and the Orient. In a patriarchal society and culture, the Eastern woman is passive while the Eastern man presumes an active role. However, in his relationship with the Western woman, the Oriental man becomes passive and presumes a feminine role. Mohammad Al-‘ AaliAr’ aar attempts to, indeed, demystify this erroneous concept by showing that femininity is essential to neither women nor the Orient; rather, such an essentialist conceptualization is merely imposed on them by the West to further its ideological intentions.