Stylistic Analysis
2 articles filed under this keyword.
Stylistic Analysis of Dorothy Parker’s Poem “A Dream Lies Dead”
Maysa A. Mahmood, Valan A. Hassan A. Hassan
This paper investigates the types of figurative and phonological features used by Dorothy Parker in her poem “A Dream Lies Dead.” Based on Geophry Leech and Mick Short’s (2007) framework of literary analysis, the poem employs various figurative and phonological schemes, including imagery, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and anaphora, as well as rhyme, repetition, assonance, and consonance. The paper addresses three main questions related to the types of grammatical and lexical schemes used in the poem, the most frequent one(s) applied, and the poetess’s purpose behind using them. To accomplish the study, the heuristic checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories, presented by Leech and Short (2007), was applied. The checklist included basic levels of analysis which included lexical categories, grammatical categories, figures of speech, context, cohesion, and semantic features. The semantic features in the framework are separated, as they could be accessed through other categories and conveyed through basic language structures. Results of the analysis showed frequent usage of various figurative and phonological devices reflecting the poetess’s feelings and spiritual state that prevail through the poem. Among several linguistic features, personification, imagery and metaphor were mostly used to express all types of meanings conveyed in the poem and, at the same time, enhance the humanitarian phase with all the emotions and struggles people experience.
Volume 11 · Issue 5 · October 2024Linguistic Features and Foregrounding Aspects in Dylan Thomas’ “We Lying by Seasand”
Rawand Sabah ahmad, Esmael Mohamad fahmy
The main difficulty in understanding Thomas’ poetry is his diction and style, which the reader usually relies on to comprehend his poems. It would be difficult to go through character, activity, situation, or anything else unless the reader is able to grasp their sense. Thomas wrote many great poems. The selected poem is among these difficult and great poems. An obvious way to remove these obstacles is to depend on the use of linguistic features and the foregrounding theory of stylistics to explicate his poem. For this purpose, the present study is also supplemented by the checklist of Leech and Short (2007) to identify, describe, and evaluate the linguistic categories of the poem while making use of literary interpretations. As a result, the study is based on a qualitative descriptive analysis, which is used first to investigate the specific types of parallelism and deviations in the poem, then through describing and evaluating them the study shows how these prominent features help understanding and highlighting the themes and meaning behind the words. The study finds out that being able to identify and relate the prominent linguistic aspects supports the reader’s explications of this poem.