The academic field of Qurʾānic Studies employs a wide range of approaches, each one of which helps to open up a new perspective on the Qurʾānic text. The Holy Book was revealed to guide people; it is thus of relevance to all aspects of people’s lives. This article focuses on the way social actors are represented in one Meccan sūra, entitled “Ya-Sin”, and employs a case-study approach to do so. The analysis carried out includes the socio-semantic processes that the sūra uses in order to represent social actors either by behavior (action) or meaning (reflection), and it also analyzes the actors as they are represented in processes such as activation and passivation. The methodology adopted is eclectic and analytic. It is a hybrid of Swales’ move analysis, El-Awa’s identification of shift-markers, and Halliday’s and Van Leeuwen’s theories of social actor representation. This study shows how such an analysis can contribute to understanding the apparently fragmented and non-linear nature of “Ya-Sin”.
The present paper gives a detailed analysis and interpretation of 16 poems in Jorie Graham's collection, Swarm (2000), which bear "UNDERNEATH" as their main titles. The poems are marked with different types of repetition such as graphological repetition, word, phrase, and sentential repetition, semantic repetition, and syntactic repetition. The study draws on Lakoff and Johnson's theories on metaphor and Brehm and Brehm’s reactance theory. It is argued "underneath" is a conceptual (orientational) metaphor which signifies a state of being limited, lack of control and freedom, and loss of power. The paper investigates the speaker's reactant behavior in "Underneath" poems, seeking a way to restore her lost freedom. Reactance behaviors can be skepticism, inertia, aggression, and resistance. It is concluded despite her thematic inertia, representing her submission to the oppressed state, her stylistic reactance reflected in repetitions, innovations, and disruptive diction stands for her attempts to regain her lost control.
This paper applies the politics-based theory of Discourse Space to a literary text in order to investigate its flexibility and possible contribution to literary interpretation. As a case study, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A very old man with enormous wings” has been selected; this story most obviously evolves out of dichotomies on both inter- and intra-character levels. The theory’s proximization model is the main core of the analysis based on which the role of the deictic centre in positioning the story’s entities is accentuated. The analysis shows that despite its advantages, the proximization model needs to be expanded in order to accommodate the variety of deictic centres which any literary text, unlike political discourse, has. A comparison between Discourse Space Theory and narratology shows the inadequate attention the latter assigns to the axiological and evaluative role of the deictic centre in the story.
Spatial positioning strategies and social actors representation have been introduced and discussed in visual and political texts. This paper offers an analysis of these strategies in a literary text, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. The main objectives of this study are (a) to disclose the way(s) the narrator-autobiographer positions himself and others in his life story as social actors, (b) to investigate whether these strategies can explain the involved social actors’ motivations in their interactions, and (c) to pinpoint the pros and cons of this perspective for literary analysis. The paper uses social actors representation and spatial positioning theories provided by Langacker, Hart, van Leeuwen, and Chilton along with Jahn’s notions of focalization. The analysis of Barnes’s fictional autobiography pinpoints the precision spatial positioning strategies confer on literary focalization. Simultaneously, both social actors representation and spatial positioning strategies fail to attend to the gaps the narrative has due to its symbolic overtones or ambiguous repetitions.
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