Fatemeh Solgi, Kobra Roshanfekr, Faramarz Mirzaie,
Volume 5, Issue 4 (6-2024)
Abstract
As an artistic technique, narration represents reality and depicts the story of societies and individuals. In contemporary Iraqi fiction, narration is utilized to portray and visualize the pain and suffering of Iraq and its citizens in a very tangible manner by drawing on reality and human emotions. In this context, language plays a pivotal role in showcasing the realities in contemporary Iraq. Stylistics, as a critical approach, pinpoints different and multifaceted linguistic features of a literary text. The Iraqi novel constitutes an important part of the contemporary Arabic narrative and holds a special place in Arabic literature. Recently, the social novel has achieved a considerable foothold in Iraqi fiction. This study examines the portrayal of Iraqi people’s pain and suffering in Maysalun Hadi’s A Light Pink Dream (2009) from a stylistic point of view. Also, this study addressed the distinguishing characteristics of the author’s style as observable in the novel. The main objective of this study is to pinpoint the characteristics of the Iraqi novel after 2003 and analyze the linguistic stylistics of the case study novel, focusing on the pain and suffering of the Iraqi people. It adopts a descriptive-analytical approach to examine the novel at the levels of composition, rhetoric, and implication. It finds that the author draws on a variety of stylistic devices to share her personal and social experiences in the realm of narration. The novel makes an idiosyncratic use of language in that it utilizes compositional, rhetorical, and implicative components to showcase the pain and suffering of Iraqi people under the shadow of war, occupation, and political and social crises.
