This paper is a comparative ecocritical investigation considering the relationship between man and nature in cross-cultural contexts as reflected in the poetry of two great admirers of nature in England and Malaysia: William Wordsworth and Ghulam Sarwar Yousuf. Both poets have composed poetry that strengthens man's bonds with nature and inspires environmental consciousness. Their nature poetry has been previously studied from different individual perspectives, but none has approached it comparatively from an ecocritical stylistic viewpoint. This study aims at analyzing selected nature poetry to identify the unique philosophy of nature both poets adopted, highlighting the artistic and aesthetic values their poetry are teeming with. The study demonstrates the cognitive development of the poets' environmental consciousness through three phases of attitudes towards nature; the physical, the intellectual and the mystical. Using major ecocritical concepts like ecocentrism, symbiotic interrelationship and ecological consciousness, the study adopts a comparative stylistic approach to scrutinize linguistic and literary representation of nature in the selected poems. It identifies the similarities and differences between both poets concluding that despite differences in their times, places, cultures, language and style, there is an affinity between both poets in their treatment towards nature. The present study responds to the enormous need for literary-linguistic investigation of leitmotifs of nature across geographical, cultural, and linguistic contexts as a means of facilitating environmental sensitivity and sensibility.
This study is a descriptive-analytical investigation of the current approaches of teaching English poetry as a vital component of the English Department curriculum for English as a foreign language (EFL) female students at Faculty of Languages and Translation (FLT), King Khalid University (KKU). It aims at identifying teaching methodologies adopted to teach poetry and demonstrates learners' responses towards these practices. The study was conducted at the English Department of the female campus during the academic year 2018-2019 (1439-1440 H). Forty students who studied poetry (Eng-430) in first and second semester participated in the study. The study adopts a qualitative methodology with the questionnaire as the primary tool to collect data and descriptive analysis as a method to interpret data. The study finds out that most of the teaching methodologies practiced in teaching poetry are traditional teacher-centered. It view poetry subject as a type of "knowledge" where teachers are mediators to impart information about poets and poems, and the students are passive recipients for information without interactive, critical, creative and evaluative abilities. Resultantly, students' involvement in the class, interest in the subject, and comprehension of the genre are affected. The study finds the effectiveness of an interactive multimodal pedagogical model of interacting reader-centered educational tools and literary theories to promote language and literary competence, critical thinking, knowledge-cum-creativity in poetry classroom. The suggested methodology would help to provide a motivating medium for English language and literature learning as per the requirements of quality modern education.
Abstract. This paper is a comparative descriptive investigation of the mystical representation of death in the poetry of the English poet John Donne and the Arabic poet AbulAlaa Al-Ma’arri. Highlighting their life circumstances and the religious, intellectual, economic and psychological factors that shaped their specific perceptions of Death, the study reflects upon the mystic elements in both poets’ approach towards Death and delves deeper into the language they adopted to express their insights. The death poetry of both poets has been previously studied from different individual perspectives, but none has approached it comparatively from a mystical stylistic viewpoint. Using the major echelons of mysticism implemented by both poets in the treatment of death in the selected death poems such as contemplation, escapism, compulsion, conscience, tranquility, submission and reunion, the study implements a comparative content and stylistic analysis methodology to analyze linguistic and literary representation of death in the selected poems. It identifies the similarities and differences between both poets and concludes that despite the cultural and religious, time and place differences, both poets share psychological and intellectual factors that lead them towards the identical mystical perception of Death as an agent for unity with the Ultimate Divinity. This perception has been gradually developing and masterfully represented with the use of linguistic techniques like imagery, apostrophe, metaphors, personification, symbolism, allusion. and logical construction. The study hopes to fill a vital gap in the body of knowledge related to the mystical perceptions of death and the language that capture the identity of the two poets in their timeless literary masterpieces. Keywords: Mysticism; Death; Donne; Al-Ma’arri; Comparative.
This study is a comparative cognitive analysis of the identical symbols of Divine Love in the poetry of the oriental Pakistani poet Omer Tarin and the occidental English poet William Blake. It adopts the Mental Spaces theory in Cognitive Poetics and the theory of Perennialism in Comparative Mysticism as the main theoretical frameworks. The study aims at demonstrating the mental operation of meaning construction of these symbols and help deliver meaningful mystical perceptions of the human soul’s ineffable experience in its union with the Divine. Exploring mystical symbols via these theories will offer an accurate interpretation of the meaning of the abstract concepts based on the concrete ones and stipulate deeper insight into the commonality of the ambiguous feelings of the soul in Divine Love. Answering the question of the existence of identical symbols with mystical connotations, the study focusses on the symbols of Pipe, Woman, and Bird and reveals that despite the religious and cultural disparities between Omer Tarin and William Blake, there is a keen affinity between them as related to their unitary poetic-mystical consciousness of the soul’s experience in its search for the Divine, for which both poets have ingeniously utilized identical symbolism not only as a tool for artistic ornamentation but as a tool for cognitive orientation. The study endorses further research on mystical language and poetry from comparative and cognitive perspectives to corroborate the tenets of cognitive theories in comparative literary studies through cross-cultural research.
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