A CRITICAL STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF DIASPORA IN SELECTED ENGLISH NOVELS
حسين حميد معيوف, عمر أسامة نشأت عزت
كلية التربية للعلوم الإنسانية-جامعة بابل · العراق
Diaspora communities include various groups of individualslike expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnicminorities. In the studies of diaspora, yet, there is a tendency to focus on the cultural and social aspects of diaspora, while overlooking the role of language in shaping identity, belonging, and community formation.To bridge this gap, the current study analyzes diasporic conceptfrom a Critical Stylisticperspective to understand how stylistic choices in literature reflect and shape the experiences and identities of diasporic communities. Jeffries model (2010)examines the language and stylisticdevices used by diasporic authors to explore ideologies of displacement, identity, and cultural hybridity. Thus, the study aims to identifythe CS tools utilised in these two diasporic novels and the most and least frequently employed.Explore an ideology or ideologies behind the two diasporic novels. Recognisediaspora types utilised in these two novels.Identify the functions of diaspora sought by the authors.In consensus with aims, it is hypothesisedthat: Diaspora demands various critical stylistictools. Consequently, fivetools employed (i.e., naming and describing, equating andcontrasting, prioritising, negating, and hypothesising) are used with different percentages. Oppression and Nostalgia are the most dominant ideologies in 'Salt Houses'. Regarding 'We Need Names', deprivation and oppression are the dominant ideologies. In 'Salt Houses'and 'We Need Names', the authors employ the political and tradediasporasto reflect the Palestinian and African diasporic cases. Diaspora is used to achieve specific functions in the novels selected, namely political and social effects. To verify these hypotheses, the researcher adoptsJeffries’ (2010) critical stylistic framework using only five tools that are more relevant to the data selected. The researcher adopts the following procedures: Surveying the related literature on critical stylistics, critical discourse analysis and diaspora.Analysing two English novels following Jeffriesmodel (2010) to answer the questions and verify 8hypotheses. Calculating the analysis results in statistical tables representing the frequency of occurrences and percentages, i.e. the analyses are presented with qualitative and quantitative results.Discussing the findings of the analysis of the selected novels.Presenting conclusions, recommendations and suggestions for further studies. The study is limited to the critical stylistic analysis of two novels. These two novels are Bulawayo's 'We Need New Names, published in 2013, and Hala Alyan's 'Salt House' published in 2017. The researcher adopts Jeffries's (2010) Critical Stylistics framework to conduct the analysis. The analysis conducted has drawn many conclusions. One significant conclusion reports that all the five essential critical stylistic tools are employed to reflect diaspora. Regarding ideology, nostalgia is the dominant ideology in the "Salt Houses" novel indicating that the Palestinians feel nostalgic for their homeland more than other ideologies. Moreover, the dominant ideology in the second novel, "We Need New Names", is deprivation which causes the African people to flee their homeland and search for another.Concerning types of diasporas, political and trade diaspora, the diaspora of Palestinians forced to escape their nation and move to another in quest of peace, has been noted as the most prevalent type of diaspora