Farhad Rajabi, Milad Tajrobehkar,
Volume 6, Issue 4 (4-2025)
Abstract
Social agents play an important role in shaping a text or discourse. They are central to its meaning and purpose. However, little attention has been paid to how they are represented in literary texts. Van Leeuwen argues that agents are represented in two main ways: exclusion and inclusion. Each has its own subcategories. Understanding these representations helps to reveal underlying discourses in a text. This article studies The Baghdad Clock novel by the Iraqi author Shahad Al-Rawi as a research project to examine the representation of social agents in it. It will also identify and introduce the main functions of these social agents that passes through the underlying layer of the story. This research aims to understand different discourses in the novel. It also examines the socio-semantic functions that these agents signify through their representation. The results show that the author uses various methods of representation. However, the focus is more on inclusion than exclusion to describe the tragedies of Iraqi people. Among the inclusion strategies, partial identification is emphasized the most. It highlights movement and dynamism in the story, despite themes of war, destruction, and occupation. This research follows a descriptive-analytical approach.
فاطمه Akbarizadeh,
Volume 19, Issue 2 (8-2025)
Abstract
The study of places and environmental sites in human societies is not limited to topographical studies or geographical studies only, but we can study the place from a cultural and intellectual perspective from the standpoint of literary studies from literary criticism. The novel, as a socio-literary work, narrates events and, perhaps following the perspectives of Paul Ricœur and Hayden White, engages in emplotment or the structuring of scattered facts into a coherent narrative. This involves weaving together places and their related events, vividly depicting their features as their voice rises alongside the characters to represent life in all its diversity as a means of strengthening and enriching identity and as a non-historical document. The novel "The Baghdad Clock" by Shahad al-Rawi, one of the most famous contemporary Iraqi novels, recounts the conditions of Iraqi society amidst the atmosphere of war and focuses on Baghdad and its various places as the epicenter of events to form the novel's plot. Through this, it portrays the intellectual, civilizational, and cultural image as the identity of the nation's people. This article aims to study the semantic features of place in the novel "The Baghdad Clock" using the descriptive-analytical method. It concludes that the novel attempts to emplot history by linking reality and imagination to delineate the identity of Iraqi society, particularly in Baghdad, across time from the past to the future. It narrates the civilizational, intellectual, and cultural landmarks of the place according to lived experience, where the identity of the place is inseparable from the identity of the individual. The novel presents Baghdad as an imaginative realm pulsating with life, where places transform into significant symbols of collective memory and belonging, contributing to the construction of characters and the formation of collective consciousness. The research shows that the novel blends the real and the imagined to offer a resistant literary image that narrates Baghdad and its places, and formulates its narrative identity from the depths of pain, nostalgia, and hope. Place in the novel, from the neighborhood to the Ma'mun Tower, from the grandmother's house to Al-Zawraa Park and the Baghdad Clock, is reshaped through the narrator's personal memory, becoming a vessel for cultural, historical, and emotional connotations that reflect the depth of the collective experience of its inhabitants.
