Anbar University Journal of Languages & Literature

The tragic mode of Edith Wharton's 1911 novella Ethan Frome has long been recognized and celebrated but its critical reception remains rather appreciative and focuses almost exclusively on the physical setting rather than on character as the ultimate source of the work's tragic coloring. The novella was frequently compared to Greek tragedy but the comparison never goes beyond a general appreciation of its tragic magnitude and originality. The technicalities of the Aristotelian model of Greek tragedy are never present in any such comparison. This study tries to approach the character of Wharton's tragic hero from the vantage point of Aristotle's textual paradigm of the tragic hero as outlined in his Poetics.

This paper aims at illustrating the foregrounding features used by Dickens in Great Expectations and elucidating how and why these features are integrated throughout the whole novel. Also, it aims at showing how foregrounding features function as a source of correspondence, integration and structural cohesion. The analysis of a text can reveal the ways in which Dickens manipulates language to achieve his desired effect and it also shows how he has utilized a variety of linguistic strategies to enrich the language of Great Expectations. These strategies demonstrate an inventiveness or creativity in his novel. This reveals the importance of studying how Dickens has been able to manipulate language to create stylistic effects to pass his message to the readers. The analysis of the four texts taken from the novel comes up with a number of conclusions.

This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and structure and systemic functional linguistics, analyzes political articles of western newspapers, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and Barack Obama’s speech on the Syrian issue of arming the rebel groups mainly from modality perspective. The paper uses modality frequencies and qualitative analyses to evaluate the data. The results show that the western countries’ support towards human rights in the Syrian war has often belied their actions. Instead of active engagement in Syria, the US and UK have taken spectator role, with very limited inclination to help.

Hyperbole and litotes are two opposing rhetorical terms that can be seen in political speeches. Hyperbole is a form of overstatement while litotes is a form of understatement. The present study is concerned with the analysis of the two opposing tropes in political speeches to find their frequency in terms of types, uses, and functions. It also aims at finding out which one of these tropes is more or less common in the selected English texts, showing whether or not these devices are characteristic of this register; and explicating the pragmatic purpose behind using these two devices.
The model adopted in this study is an eclectic one that is adapted from Spitzbardt (1965), Galperin (1977), Leech (1983), McCarthy and Carter (2004), Mora (2006), Sert (2008), Claridge (2011), and Muhammad (2013). The method of analysis is both qualitative and quantitative.
From the analysis of the selected data, it has been revealed that hyperbole is more frequent than litotes in political texts, that the frequency of hyperbolic forms and functions outnumber their litotic counterparts and that hyperbole devices are characteristic of political language. The reason is plausibly that politicians seek their own interests. That is why they use more hyperbole in their speeches to make images and matters bigger and more important on the part of the audience so as to convince and direct them to a particular aim, for example, to vote for their own benefit.

Death is used to be known as the tragic end of life for many people; it is the point when a person is forced to give up, admit defeat, and bow down to the inevitable. As depressing as this view of death may seem, Dickinson submitted death in a quite different vision by focusing on the immortality and the afterlife aspects of death. This paper will show the ecstasy of death in Dickinson's poem “Because I could not stop for death”. In this poem, Dickinson was optimistic and saw death in a friendly light rather than as a horrible end. Dickinson succeeded in showing her pleasant attitude towards death. In this poem death is portrayed as a gentleman who takes a woman on an enjoyable journey to the grave, and then to the beautiful everlasting life, the life after death. Dickinson wanted to explore a very strange but a rather pleasant image about death. Marrying death would in many ways take her away from everything she severed in life, enter her into a life of immortality.