Identity Crisis in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Origin: A Pragma-Stylistic Study

Abstract

Identity crisis is a dominant literary theme, especially in most Arab women writers’ works. However, it has not been given enough attention from a linguistic point of view. By so doing, the current study intends to fill this gap by analyzing the identity crisis from a pragma-stylistic perspective by examining the writer's style in three purposely selected extracts from Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Origin (2007). The study aims to examine the identity crisis by using pragmatic and stylistic tools and to explore the effects of Abu-Jaber’s stylistic choices on the readers of her work. To conduct this study, an eclectic model comprising Searle’s speech acts (1979), Brown and Levinson's politeness theory (1987), Leech's model of figures of speech (2008), and Simpson's stylistic levels (2004) will be used. The study reveals how Abu-Jaber utilizes masterfully different pragmatic and stylistic tools to reveal Lena’s, the main character, identity crisis. Pragmatically, the findings show that the representative speech act is the dominant speech act, and the bald-on-record is the dominant politeness strategy. For the stylistic tools, verbs are the dominant word choice at the lexical level, the simple present tense at the grammatical level, and hyphens at the graphological level. Imagery is the dominant stylistic device in respect to the stylistic devices. To reduce the effect of identity crises, foster families are recommended to provide love as well as truth about their adopted children’s past. Otherwise, they will lead them to have crises in their future life.