Asst. Prof. Mushtaq A B D U L H A L E E M Mohammed Fattah

Two of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Salah Abd Al-Sabur and T. S. Eliot, write poems depicting their alienation experiences in various historical and cultural situations. This paper compares and contrasts the idea of alienation in selected poems by the two poets who relate their personal, societal, and political circumstances to their sentiments of alienation, fragmentation, and isolation. It looks at how the two poets express their alienation through the use of different poetic tropes such as symbolism, intertextuality, and imagery. The poems that exemplify the work of both poets are: Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”; Abd Al-Sabur’s “The Tragedy of Being Alone,” “The Lost Ones,” and “The Night Train.” The study makes the case that although alienation is a common subject across both poets, their approaches to expressing, understanding, and resolving it differ. Abd Al-Sabur's alienation is a result of his post-colonial Arab world theological crisis, cultural dislocation, and political disillusionment. By recovering his heritage, reaffirming who he is, and reviving his faith, he aims to overcome his estrangement. Eliot's moral degradation, cultural degeneration in the contemporary West, and spiritual emptiness all contribute to his alienation. He rejects his identity, runs away from reality, and embraces his tradition to overcome his estrangement.

Alcoholism, as a social disease that creeps into society in general and into the family in particular, causes addiction, depression, and ultimately death. Affecting a vast array of people, alcoholism is indiscriminate regardless of race, gender, identity, education, class, or intelligence. Alcoholism results in societal problems that are depicted heavily on the American stage after wars to reach solutions. A qualitative research method is going to be followed and applied by employing a mixture of Scholarship and Textual Analysis Methods are used to investigate the body of scholarship written about the two playwrights, their literary works, and historical periods. By comparing two American plays: Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, this paper identifies alcoholism as a social disease, traces back its causes, and analyzes the problematic portrayals of its stereotypes. By following the Block Method, this paper makes a comparison to deal with particular and important features of the two plays for the argument presented, supported by textual evidence taken from both texts. This study raises questions such as: Why is alcoholism projected publicly? How do people feel and react toward alcoholic addicts? Are alcoholic addicts, the main characters in the selected plays, reliable, tragic, sympathetic, or empathetic? Does the playwrights' history of alcohol play a role in shaping such characters?

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most prodigious Native American writers of the 1970s. She is distinguished for her engagement with folklore traditions, religious inspirations, and quest narratives. In her novel Ceremony (1977), Silko introduces a man on a journey that is full of hardships and frustrations. Accordingly, the present paper explores Tayo's journey, through which he quests to heal his psychological distress and physical illness caused by the atrocities of World War II. The paper also investigates the different kinds of journeys the protagonist, as a war veteran, takes up and the various motives behind them. Finally, the paper tries to answer questions such as "What is the significance of the people the protagonist meets during his healing quest? Is he healed physically and psychologically at the end of the novel? How? Why? How do all healing processes contribute to affirming his identity and restoring his humanity?"

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a prominent African American novelist and poet, is known for his poetry that tackles the black race in a close association with the natural world. The purpose of this paper is to examine Dunbar’s employment of dialect vs standard English in selected poems. It argues that Dunbar’s dialect poetry neither romanticizes nor pictures his black race through rose-tinted glasses. Instead of using black dialect to represent the stereotypical and simple rural life of black slaves, Dunbar transcends this limitation and challenges white and black public preference. Dunbar’s use of the standard English becomes his method to reveal his black race’s sorrow, pain, and segregation whether within a hostile or friendly rural or cultural or social environment. The paper endeavors to discuss the following questions: Why did Dunbar find literary English or the standard English a better tool instead of the black vernacular as an alternate tool to speak of his black race? How does he connect his use of language with the natural world that the blacks inhabited? Does his use of black dialect and standard English in connection to a racialized nature make his poems part of the plantation tradition? Fanon’s postcolonial concepts such as “cultural identity” and “language and communication,” mentioned in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ sociological concept, “double consciousness” mentioned in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), are applied to the selected poems.

By probing the language of a literary text one can have a profound understanding of that text and thus a real appreciation of the writer's artistic achievement. Accordingly, this paper tackles the relationship between linguistic structures and socially constructed meaning in two American poems: "The New Colossus" (1883) by Emma Lazarus and "America" (1968) by Robert Creeley. They were known for glorifying and condemning America's liberty and greatness respectively. Employing Halliday's transitivity which is rooted in Sys-temic Functional Linguistics, the paper attempts to reveal the poets' aims by employing specific verbs. This paper also scrutinizes Halliday's transitivity, which includes processes such as material, mental, verbal, existential, relational, and behavioral, to show its functions in the overall meanings of the two poems.

Children's stories have a significant role in American literature. Such a role is regarded as both instructive and entertaining. A child narration, to Harper Lee (1926–2016), the American novelist, reveals some hidden messages about how a child can develop and can succeed to conform to society. A narrator, to her, could or could not be a character in the events. If a child narrates the events of a novel, he/she will definitely simplify the topics he/she narrates. Hence, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird portrays a world that is exotic to the reader. The present paper aims to explore how the novel introduces the struggles and the disadvantages of Western society through a child’s narration, which includes the point of view and language. It also tackles how the capacity of childhood innocence shows people’ behavior clearly. This study tries to find some answers to the following questions: Why did Lee use child narration? What is the aim of using first-person narration? Was the narrator ...

As one of the literary figures in post-war American literature, Norman Mailer tackles psychological and sociopolitical issues in The Naked and the Dead (1948) that bewildered both critics and readers. He combined them in a complementary way that explained their cause and effect development. The present paper sheds light on the definition of power in comparison with megalomania, its different causes, and its devastating effects on both the victimizers and the victimized. It also aims at revealing the inner thought of the contemporary individual as suffering from the spiritual decadence as a rebellion against the political life that hovers almost every aspect of the American society. These points are rendered through Mailer's major and powerful characters like General Cummings and Lieutenant Croft who represent the victimizers as a part of their megalomaniac attitudes. An emphasis has always been directed to two other powerless characters—Lieutenant Hearn and Troop Red Valsen—whom...

It is one of the distinctive features of Langston Hughes's (1902-1967) poetry to wield the many types of transitivity for many poetic demands. This paper examines the functions of different processes of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics theory in creating the poetic voice in Langston Hughes's three early poems: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), "Mother to Son" (1922), and "I, Too" (1926). The present paper is also an endeavour to analyse and interpret these three poems for they deal with the essential themes of the negritude, showing the poet's awareness of the stylistic features of simplicity, spontaneity and flexibility of poetic diction. Transitivity reflected in Hughes' poetry will be stylistically parsed as a communication utility on one hand, and as for their implicatures on the other. Through examining Hughes' selected poems, it has been concluded that he employs some materialistic and mental processing to prove the very noteworthy clues supporting the reader's comprehension of the five W's of who/what does what/ whom then when relative to the individuals of the poems.

Adultery is regarded as one of the greatest sins in all religions which saw it as a vicious and forbidden act. Generally, sociologists argued that adultery, whether committed by women or men, is a social threat for both the individual and society. This paper presents the concept of adultery as it was reflected in Nathaniel Hawthorne"s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Francis Scott Fitzgerald"s The Great Gatsby (1925) during the seventeenth and twentieth centuries respectively. The aim of this paper is to give attention to the definition of adultery as a dangerous act that affects the people"s behavior towards adulterer or adulteress. It also shows adultery, a major theme in the history of American literature, as an outlet from an oppressive marriage. In addition, it scrutinizes the causes and effects of such a scandalous act. ‬

This book is a continuation of the primary school books taught in Iraqi regular schools.  It is, however, written for the first-year students in the preparatory schools of the Sunni Endowment schools. It follows mainly the communicative approach.  The book, moreover, aims to promote human rights principles and ideas through some prophetic traditions.  The students' horizons will be broadened through encouraging them to read in English. This will emphasize the importance of the English Language role in solving some problems among the countries for the purpose of improving the relations among the various countries.