Arabic Literature

Abstract Harmonizing text and image to produce a meaningful and purposeful text is a discourse process and, thus, a social and cultural one. This social practice is of great importance and value in children stories—and generally children literature—as, for children, it does not merely operate at a socio-cultural level but at an intercultural one. This is the case because children’s speed of image processing and decoding is greater than their speed of processing linear texts. Al-Qandil Al-Saqir is one of the best short stories by Ghassan Kanfani, an author of Palestinian resistance literature, which employs a multi-faceted discourse to instill the concepts of ideology, value, and resistance in Palestinian children who need to be educated. Kanafani has fully understood that Palestinian children, as those who make the future of their homeland, have an important mission to accomplish, namely liberation from the domination of the Zionists. So, encoding the reality is the most prominent characteristic of his story. He is also aware of the ability of temporal, spatial and visual signs, as factors which are complementary to meaning, in consolidating the text, catching the child’s attention, and conveying the message of the text. The story brings a number of questions to mind: How can social semiotics, as a new tendency, be utilized to discover the underlying layers of meaning and discourse analysis in the text and illustrations of the story? What kind of linguistic processes are used by the author to express the bitter experiences of Palestinian children in a better way? What kind of textual coherence is used by the author in order to better define these experiences? This descriptive, analytical study employs a social semantic approach to analyze Kanafani’s short story. This analysis is expected to answer the above questions in order to provide a new reading of the story.

Abstract This paper is based on the descriptive analytical method and using the critique of dramatic sociology, we examine short stories: " Men Vara Al Hejab, Al Saghat  by Zenon Ayub, (from innovative people of contemporary Iraqi literature) based on Erving Goffman ideas (1922-1982), a Canadian researcher in the field of Sociology and Anthropology Studies, who examines how the social identity of scarlet letter characters can be patched in their interaction with healthy individuals and their executive capability. The findings of the research show that the disclosure of abnormalities in the story of Al Saghat  makes it possible to marginalize, disagree, and widen the gap between him and society, which leads to a person in the critical situations . But the scarlet letter person in Men Vara Al Hejab can conceal its secrets from others by controlling the behind-the-scenes and adhering to their social role, and not allowing their social identity to be discouraged.
In addition, the other findings of this study indicate that the scarlet letter for both stories is to be attracted to forbid love; the relationship of Sohan  with Ehsan without respecting the customary and social criteria in Men Vara Al Hejab as well as the illegitimate relationship of the prostitute woman with The refferrals in Al-Saghat. Therefore, it is necessary to explain these two approaches, the way in which the main characters of the two stories, the actions, the rules and how to get the scarlet letter  and  the ability in dealing with the people who are accepted by the community, and the reaction of their circle of people regarding disgrace, according to Gaffman's theory, it has been studied and analyzed.