Literary Texts Research Articles

Study of Pragmatic Analysis of Literature on the Development of ELT Students’ Receptive and Productive Skills: A Case of North Cyprus

Language serves as a mirror reflecting our understanding of the world and mirrors the world of literature. Pragmatics extends beyond mere literal interpretation, delving into comprehending subtle implications, varying expressions and lexical ambiguities. This deepens our exploration and appreciation of the world of literature. It is worth investigating whether pragmatic instruction can improve students’ language awareness and competence. To this end, a quasi-experimental study involving the students of two English language teaching (ELT) classes was conducted to determine whether pragmatic treatment could enhance students’ comprehension skills and to identify how effectively the pragmatic understanding of literature through Shakespeare’s language could aid the development of receptive and productive skills in ELT students. Participants took two pre-tests: multiple-choice discourse completion task (MCDCT) and discourse completion task (DCT) based on Othello. After the treatment, the same tests were administered as post-tests. Results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in comprehension skills. Cohen’s D effect size calculation confirmed the practical usefulness of the treatment and the significant difference between the two groups. The study concludes that pragmatic training using literary texts contributes to developing ELT students’ pragmatic competence.

The Effect of Semantic Mapping Strategy on EFL Preparatory School Students' Higher Thinking Skills

Literary text usually begins with a writer’s need to convey his or her personal vision to reader. Even when a writer uses factual material, historical documents newspaper stories, personal experience his or her primary purpose is not just to convey information but to give a unique view of experience, one that has significance beyond the moment. Literature is the news that stays news. To convey his or her view of experience, invents characters, and creates dialogue. In order to solve this problem, the teacher should have creative activity, and semantic mapping strategy can be an alternative way as a learning and make students enjoy and easy to write. The present study aims at; 1) finding out whether there is any significant difference between students' achievement at the recognition level on one hand, and their achievement at the production level, on the other hand. 2) Finding out EFL preparatory school students' ability to identify figurative language, recognize and be aware of other cultures, and higher thinking skills. A sample of (60) students has been randomly selected from Iraqi EFL fourth year preparatory school students who study ‘Literature Focus’ at Al-Manahil school for boys in the city of Tikrit during the academic year 2023/2024. The sample represents (25.60%) percent of its original population and is divided into two equal groups, i.e. the experimental and control groups. Both groups have been equalized in their age, the parents’ educational attainments, and their scores in English language subjects in the previous year of the academic year (2022-2023). An achievement test of six question is constructed, validated, its reliability is obtained, it is items have been analysed and then applied to the two involved groups of the study. The results show that SMS is more effective than using the conventional method for organizing, clarifying, or simplifying complex information.

User Experience of ChatGPT: Insights from Undergraduate English Language and Literature Students in Bangladesh

ChatGPT, a large language model, has become increasingly popular, and students have begun to use it for the purpose of learning. The purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of undergraduate English language and literature students from Bangladesh who are using ChatGPT. Qualitative research methods were utilized for this study and the data were collected using semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis technique was employed to analyze the data. The study reveals both positive and negative experiences associated with the use of ChatGPT by students from the English Language and Literature department. ChatGPT helps students to practice their reading and writing skills. It aids them to provide literary explanations of their texts and helps students to understand complex literary texts in lucid language. However, it sometimes provides confusing or wrong answers and provides wrong explanations regarding literary texts. As students possess some negative experiences along with many positive experiences, they are inclined to continue using it with heightened awareness of their use. However, users in this study believe that its use should be limited, and it should be used as a complement rather than a primary tool. The findings of this research may provide educators and policymakers with valuable insights that might help them integrate new aspects of artificial intelligence in education.

A RELEVANCE-THEORETIC ASSESSMENT OF ARABIC TRANSLATION QUALITY OF SELECTED SHAKESPEAR'S HAMLET'S RIDDLES

Translating riddles may be regarded as a problem that encounters a translator, especially in a literary text; then, the quality of the translation may hinder the reader’s comprehension of the target text. The problem arises when the target text lacks a humorous effect on readers, hence it is less relevant to the target language. Therefore, this descriptive qualitative study aimed to assess the translation quality of riddles from English into Arabic from a relevance-theoretic perspective. According to relevance theory, translation quality is determined by searching for and achieving the optimal relevance between the target and the source text. Thus, the translation of riddles is considered a process for reaching optimal relevance of humour in the riddles between the source text and the target audience. To this end, five sample riddles were selected from Shakespeare's Hamlet and two versions of Arabic translations of this play, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Khalil Mutran. The findings showed Jabra’s translation achieves a more powerful communicative effect with less cognitive effort than Mutran's, meaning that it is more effective in maintaining explicit and implicit content. Mutran’s translation, though creative, is less effective in understanding the meaning of the target text as the reader exerts more cognitive effort with less communicative effect. This means that trying to fit one's target language conventions to the source language conventions would decrease the relevance of the source text to the target one and would not maintain the explicit and implicit content of the source text.

Assessing the Translation of Direct Speech in “Wuthering Heights” into Arabic

The present study tackles the translation of direct speech forms in Bronte’s novel "Wuthering Heights" into Arabic. The significance of this study stems from the fact that English direct speech forms in literary texts might pose substantial challenges when translated into Arabic due to their semantic connotations and structural peculiarities. The study aims at assessing the translation of English direct speech forms in "Wuthering Heights" novel into Arabic. It also aims at investigating the problems that may arise during the translation of direct speech forms in this novel into Arabic. Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte’s unique novel. It is a story of love and revenge, this exciting and vivid novel depicts a deep and devastating love between its two main characters, the stubborn, charming Catherine and the handsome, dark-skinned, impulsive Heathcliff, both of whom are as wild as the Yorkshire moors where the novel takes place The study hypothesizes that translating direct speech in literary texts poses serious difficulties for the translators. To test the validity of the hypothesis, the study includes a practical chapter which tackles the translation of (25) excerpts that have been chosen from Wuthering Heights novel along with four Arabic translation versions. The Arabic renderings are those of the Arabic Cultural Centre (2016), Rifaat Naseem (1975), Helmi Murad (2003) and Hanna Saeed (2021). The analysis is implemented according to the model proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) which tackles the different kinds of translation approaches and strategies available for the translator when handling the task of translating various kinds of texts. The study concludes that novice and unskilled translators might encounter serious difficulties and challenges in translating direct speech expressions due to the multiple meanings and connotations inherent in such expressions. It also concludes that context plays a vital role in defining the most appropriate rendering for the SL text.

Difficulties in Translating Hyperboles from Arabic Poems into English Texts

The study focuses on exploring the difficulties faced the translators during the translation of hyperboles in Arabic literary text caused by the ambiguity in the source text. The study aims to look for the strategies mostly used by M.A graduates in translating hyperboles from Arabic literary text into English, as well as surveying the samples being given to the M.A graduates to look for the reason of ambiguity in translating them. To fulfill the aims of this research, the study hypothesizes that the use of communicative or literal translation will convey the meaning from into TLT accurately and clearly, or using the Vinay and Darbelenet translation strategies will produce the same effect of SLT on TLT and whether the hyperbole in Arabic literary text is translatable despite the social, stylistic or structural differences in literary text. To prove the hypotheses, the procedures start with the researcher collecting 10 samples and giving them to 10 M.A graduates for the 2022-2023 academic year, followed by analyzing the samples according to the Vinay and Darbelenet translation model, the samples were chosen from the poem collection of Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab “Rain Song””انشودة المطر”, specifically from the two poems “قافلة الضياع” and “غريب على الخليج”, and given to be translated into English by the M.A graduates, then discussing the results of the collected data. The study concludes that the translation of hyperboles from Arabic literary texts into English text can be challenging due to the different ways they are used, additionally hyperboles can have multiple interpretations which is the result of the context they are used in, as well as that hyperboles in Arabic literary text are also affected by the difference in culture and social background and other factors.

Urban Lifewor(l)ds

This article focuses on narrative encounters between people, cities, and stories, and the narrative, material, and futuristic urban plotting. It explores how people engage with narrative heritage, its objects – not just neoliberal wet dreams and dystopias, but also speculative street theatre, participatory utopian fiction, orature, or lyrics – and the practices of co-writing, reading, and listening to ask, beyond Henri Lefebvre, not simply ‘who has the right to the city’, but who can narrate its shared pasts and futures, and how. In the paper, I treat stories and urban architecture as interwoven and co-constitutive modalities of heritage preservation, destruction, repair and futurescaping, drawing attention, after Don Mitchell and Sara Zawde, to the narrative affordances of built landscapes as ‘metaphors to live by’ and to the design-making force of narratives and words. The narrative heritages I center on are, therefore, not simply literary texts but diverse narrative acts, including narrators, different media, spaces, and situated rehearsals of public and collective sci-fi storytelling, writing, and listening for togetherness and less violent futures. The article meanders across several urban narrative situations: ‘Society of the Future’ showcases designed by students after dystopian novels and urbanscapes in Boston; speculative heritage live action role-play (LARP) in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, US; ‘wave writing’ experiments in Trondheim/Tråante, Norway; and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening sessions in the footprints of Sámi Elsa Laula Renberg across Scandinavia. It concludes with a reflection on the archives of narrative ‘repair’ and urban otherworldliness as pedagogies of non-necrotic futuring.

Alteridade e exclusão: o olhar para o outro no poema e na narrativa

This article aims to present two text analytical exercises from the artistic-literary sphere that address increasingly necessary and urgent themes to discuss in the classroom: refugees and black women, minorities that are still absent from many curricula. The analytical exercises of the poem “Army (chusma) of black roses” (2017), written by Cristiane Sobral, and the narrative Two boys of Kakuma (2018), written by Marie Ange Bordas, serve as a proposal for reading activities with students in the final years of elementary education, as they deal with relationships of otherness. These exercises are based on the perspective of Dialogical Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2008), originating from the extensive work on Mikhail Bakhtin and the Circle, in which the other is constitutive of the self. The theoretical foundation is based on the self-other relationship posited by Bakhtin, ([1920/24] 2020) and the concept of otherness (Amorim, 2004). As a result, in our analyses, we point out the centers of values present in literary texts based on the relationship between self and other and, through linguistic-discursive analysis, we lead readers to reflect on themselves and their other.

The Figurative Style in Contemporary Arabic Poetry (Henda Muhammad as a Model)

This study aims to highlight the figurative style in contemporary Arabic poetry by selecting the poetry of Henda Muhammad as a model. The significance of the study lies in analyzing how the poet employs figurative techniques such as simile, metaphor, and synecdoche to create expressive and rich poetic imagery. The study seeks to uncover Henda Muhammad's innovations in using these rhetorical tools to link the texts to the themes addressed in the poems, with the goal of answering the research question: What are the prominent poetic images at the figurative level and their manifestations of similarity, Metaphor, and synecdoche in Henda Muhammad's poems? The study utilized a descriptive methodology that focuses on describing the phenomenon by highlighting rhetorical purposes and examples and analyzing literary texts from a figurative stylistic perspective to determine their meanings. The study yielded several results, most notably that the poet succeeded in adding depth and aesthetics to her poems through her rhetorical strength, which contributed to enriching the poetic texts both linguistically and aesthetically, with manifestations of emotional impact and deep human experience reflecting a range of Emotions including sorrow, hope, longing, alienation, and patriotism.

ЖАЗУШЫ А. КЕМЕЛБАЕВА ӘҢГІМЕЛЕРІНДЕГІ ТҰЛҒА КОНЦЕПЦИЯСЫ

The article discusses the concept of personality in the stories of the writer A. Kemelbaeva. The concept of personality in the work is the result of the author's worldview, position. Personality is the carrier of the author's point of view. The main goal of the scientific work is to consider the entire close unity between the author and the person on the basis of the writer's stories, analyze the features of the creation of images and the cognitive-ideological nature, the individuality of the approach. Although the images in the author's stories are simple working people of various fields, they are educated people of today's time, savvy in the phenomena of the world. Feeling the mystical power of creation and understanding it, he relies on the beliefs of the people. He believes in the truth of the creator, in his power. It is noted that freedom of belief, morality, and its significance in human life are one of the main characteristics of the writer's heroes. The main direction in his works is rooted in the best examples of World Literature; his stories are distinguished by an unexpected plot development, a rich artistic solution and content, National color. The scientific and practical significance of the work is that it contributes to literary studies in the study of the process of development of modern Kazakh prose, artistic searches and the continuation of traditions. After all, A. Kemelbaeva is a writer who does not repeat others, always brings innovations to Kazakh literature with his fresh searches and stylistic individuality. Especially in his stories, the mythical-mystical character, the detective line, ethnographic scenes, the revived use of traditional examples of oral literature express the author's stylistic individuality, the specifics of the artistic worldview. In the philological analysis of literary texts, biographical, historical-social, structural-descriptive, psychoanalytic methods were used. The results of the research work can be used in special courses of Philology of higher educational institutions, lectures on modern Kazakh literature. The theoretical and practical significance of the results of the work is characterized by the identification of the main place, historical nature and other features of the concept of personality in literary studies in the analysis of a work of art.

А. АЛТАЙДЫҢ «ТУАЖАТ» РОМАНЫНДАҒЫ НЕОМИФОЛОГИЯЛЫҚ МОТИВТЕРДІҢ АРХЕТИПТІК НЫШАНДАРЫ

The article deals with the archetypal symbols reflected in the ancient Kazakh myths of neo-mythological motives of A. Altai's novel «Tuazhat». In world and domestic literature, interest and the search for myth did not decrease, but increased. The prose of our national literature, which is a component of Kazakh culture, did not stand aside. No matter how much modern human society faces economic difficulties, modern domestic literature is experiencing a spiritual and cultural revival. Today's domestic literature is inspired by the ancient Kazakh archetype, and works are written that meet the requirements of the time. Our writers freely indulge in mystical, utopian and phobic creative forms, reflected in world culture with the help of myths, and describe their thoughts with symbolic metaphors. Mythology acquires its own poetic thinking in the works of Askar Altai. Such mental thinking demonstrates the author's complete creative possession of the nature of the process of mythification of realistic and postmodernist trends. The author draws attention to myths and folklore in the depiction of various negative phenomena that are alien to modern society. He also enriched previously stable and traditional mythological patterns by subjecting them to various changes. The proximity of artistic prose to philosophy and psychology is a proven fact of modern literary criticism. Therefore, the era of the emergence of new absurd, pictorial and mystical works, gradually moving away from the dominance of today's realism, is connected with the author's myth. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, Kazakh prose writers, who wrote in various genres, began to freely learn world and ancient Kazakh mythological materials. In the work of Askar Altai, various cultural trends and literary reminiscences are combined in one place in the space of a literary text. Instead of traditionalism, the author created new myths told by a modern "storyteller" who has his own characteristics, a different style of speech, a different understanding of life.

The Vitalistic Ecology of Death: An Autoethnographic Journey Through Bereavement and Loss

With this autoethnography, it is my intention to explore experiences of bereavement and loss through the diffractive lenses of cultural intra-actions with literary texts, narratives, and sensory affordances. Bringing my own biographic experience of grief into these pages allows me, as a researcher, to make sense of death and its rituals, fundamental for healing purposes. I wonder: What does the affective materiality of bereaving do? My lived experience helps me to connect empathically and compassionately to events by looking at how society went through the impossibility of delivering care to the dead and their families during COVID-19 lockdowns and by questioning the “crisis of care.” To conclude, I reflect on how autoethnography can be a sensemaking process, leading to healing, opening to reflexivity, and reaching out to socially relevant questions about practices and ethics of care.

The Impact of Literary Discourse on the Evolution of English Lexicon

This study explores the significant role of literary discourse in the evolution of the English lexicon, analyzing how works by authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce contributed to the development of new words and meanings. By combining qualitative and corpus-based methods, the research highlights the creative and innovative use of language in literary texts, tracing how words originating in literature entered mainstream usage. The study examines the influence of different genres, particularly drama and prose, on lexical expansion and discusses how literary creativity extends beyond word invention to reshaping existing terms. Findings suggest that literary texts serve as crucial drivers of linguistic change, shaping the dynamic evolution of English vocabulary across centuries. Future research may explore the impact of digital literature and other modern forms of media on lexical growth.

A Comparative Study of Artificial Intelligence and Translation Software in Chinese-English Translation: A Focus on Literary and Technical Texts

A Comparative Study of Artificial Intelligence and Translation Software in Chinese-English Translation: A Focus on Literary and Technical Texts

THE IMAGE OF KAZAKH ZOO-PHRASEOLOGISMS IN TRANSLATION (on the basis of novel “The Nomads” by I. Esenberlin in Kazakh, Russian and English languages)

The article considers the translation problems of zoo-phraseologisms of Kazakh language. The translation problem is an actual and complex theme and translation of phraseological units is an interesting task which needs special creativity. The main objective of a translator is to find phraseologism in a sentence and distinguish its ethocultural peculiarities and translation of such a phraseological unit keeping their national features is a rather complicated problem. That is why the actuality and the importance of the given articlegroup with these problems. Phraseological units of ethnocultural character does not replicate in the second language, and cannot be found in dictionaries. Therefore the scientific novelty of the article is the identification and analysis of translation methods of phraseological units of ethnocultural character which describe the culture, lifestyle and worldview of definite people. The article aims to make definite conclusions according to the results of research work by analyzing the methods of translating phraseological units appropriate to the definite nation, defining the failures and successes of translation.The translation methods of Kazakh phraseologisms into Russian and English languages are compared and analysed on the basis of the trilogy “The Nomads” by I. Essenberlin. Using the phraseologisms with zoo-component as the main material, the ways of translation (comparative, descriptive methods) were analysed. The meaning of them can be different while translating into other language, and so translators should try to keep the meaning of the word combination correctly or find the right analogue to make the reader understand the translated phrasal combination. Thepractical significance of the research with scientific value can be used at the courses of Lexicology, Phraseology, The theory and practice of translation, and as the lexical material in subjects as Linguocultorology and Linguistic analysis of literary texts and to compile dictionaries in higher education institutes.

SOME COMPARATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE HISTORICAL CHRONICLES OF SHAKESPEARE

This article examines some comparative constructions in the historical Chronicles of William Shakespeare. The study of the works of the great English playwright William Shakespeare mainly studied his creative activity or considered his comedies and tragedies (Karpova). Thus, it can be stated that Chronicles have remained out of the attention of researchers, in particular, the consideration of the genre in linguistic and stylistic coverage has remained the least studied. In this study, we consider comparative constructions as a means of imagery in Shakespeare’s Chronicles in comparison with the modern literary language of the 21st century. The study of comparative constructions in Chronicles made it possible to consider and identify differences in the language of the New England period and modern English of the early 21st century in qualitative and quantitative terms. The analysis carried out in the study of comparative constructions with the functional words like, as and than in the historical chronicles of Shakespeare and their comparison with modern literary texts allow us to make some generalizations about the evolution of the syntax of these constructions of the New English period and the change in the status of these functional words. Keywords: Historical Chronicles; comparative constructions; figurativeness; Shakespeare, contextual analysis, parallelism, literary, poetry.

Stylistic polyphony in the literary text

Stylistic polyphony in the literary text

Ultimate Fantasy. Subwersyjne strategie queerowania Sztucznej Inteligencji w projektach transliterackich

This article describes artistic examples of queering Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can be understood as a practice that challenges the (hetero)normative nature of neural networks by implementing a queer perspective. The evaluation of ways in which AI reflects societal norms is conducted by addressing biases that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. On this basis, the author highlights the need for inclusive practices that make it possible for queer experiences to be represented by technology while also discussing why AI cannot be neutral. The in-depth study of Ultimate Fantasy, a collection of literary texts generated by a Queer AI, reveals how artists use language models in novel, subversive, and possibly liberating ways. The author aims to frame this practice as an example of a queer utopian aesthetic project in accordance with José Muñoz’s understanding of queerness. The various motifs evident in the short story collection – such as queer modes of love or trauma – are analyzed as reflections of themes present in the corpus of queer texts used to train the language model.

›Less Voice, more Viewpoint‹ – Towards a Cognitive Reconceptualization of the Centres of Orientation in Poetry

Abstract Analysing the centres of orientation in a literary text, narratologists since Genette have always worked with the distinction between voice (who speaks?) and viewpoint (who sees?). In contrast, nearly all lyricologists have remained entirely focussed on the category of voice, trying to identify, apart from the speaking voice, at best further speech instances in the poems under discussion. The present article challenges this voice-restricted tradition. It criticizes the deficiencies of various traditional one-voice-models (such as the identification of the speaking voice with the poet, a persona or the ›lyric I‹) as well as those of more recent voice-oriented approaches (by Hempfer and by Culler). It also discusses the blind spots of the multi-voice models developed in the course of lyricology’s ›narrative turn‹ (by Hühn and by Burdorf) and rejects Zymner’s recent suggestion to replace the notion of ›voice‹ by the purely textual concept of an ›addresser‹ as a ›structure of signs‹. Subsequently, the framework of an alternative, viewpoint-oriented lyricology is sketched by adopting from Cognitive Linguistics such key-concepts as viewpoint-multiplicity, mental spaces and deictic markers as well as from Cognitive Grammar the notions of ›viewing arrangement‹ and ›split conceptualiser‹. Further instruments that can help to account for those poems in which the centre of perception seems to unite in itself the viewpoints of different ›voices‹ are such concepts as ›viewpoint-blends‹ and ›viewpoint-zooms‹. More akin to cognition, in which there are no strict boundaries, but only transitions, they can help to overcome long-lasting, hardly successful attempts to establish rigid divisions in the lyric (e. g. between personal and impersonal, monologic and dialogic, biographical and non-biographical or lyric and narrative poems). Instead, the viewpoint-framework does justice to the fact that such binaries constitute no polar oppositions but mere scales of difference. Moreover, a viewpoint-approach makes possible a much more fine-grained analysis of poetry – in a way better even than an earlier attempt by Petzold (2012) to extend lyricology’s voice-centred methodology by integrating into it a Genette-inspired distinction of three types of focalization. The last section of this article is devoted to the complex problem of viewpoint-taking by the readers, which is aggravated by the underdetermined deixis and situational generality of many poems. As is finally illustrated by drawing on a poem with a particularly complicated deictic set-up (Eichendorff’s »Lockung« [»Lure«]), readers will admittedly not always be able to process all viewpoints contained in a text. Nevertheless, it can be shown with the help of this example that viewpoint-perception is often an indispensable prerequisite for a full understanding of a poem’s meaning.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Women’s Representation in Maysaloon Hadi’s Novel The Black Eyes

This study applies a discourse analysis framework to explore the portrayal of women in Maysloon Hadi’s novel (The Black Eyes) (2011), using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Norman Fairclough’s tri-dimensional model (1989) as the analytical foundation. It investigates the roles and challenges women face in the novel. While there is growing interest in the portrayal of women in literature, Iraqi literature—especially from the perspective of Iraqi women writers remains underexplored. Hadi’s *The Black Eyes* provides a unique case to examine this intersection. Despite the novel’s rich narrative, which offers insight into Iraqi women’s lives, there is a lack of comprehensive CDA to understand how its language constructs and communicates the multifaceted roles, challenges, and images of women. The research fills this gap by analyzing specific passages from the novel using Fairclough’s model. The findings reveal a nuanced portrayal of women and underscore the value of CDA in analyzing such works. Further research is recommended to apply CDA to other Iraqi literary texts for broader insights.