A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Crisis Rhetoric in English and Arabic Populist Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/wjfh.Vol21.Iss3.966Keywords:
Keywords: Crisis rhetoric, Conceptual Blending Theory, Populist poetry, Cognitive Stylistics, Figurative Language.Abstract
This study examines the rhetorical construction of crisis in English and Arabic populist poetry through the lens of Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), as developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), within a cognitive stylistic framework. While previous research has extensively analyzed populist discourse in political speech and media (Moffitt, 2016), the study argues that there remains a significant gap in understanding how crisis rhetoric is cognitively and stylistically realized in poetic texts across different linguistic and cultural contexts. This study aims to address that gap by investigating how selected poets construct crisis narratives through conceptual blending, symbolic framing, and ideological positioning. Methodologically, the research applies CBT to purposively selected extracts from four poems, two in English by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Benjamin Zephaniah, and two in Arabic by Mudhaffar al-Nawwab and Muwaffaq Muhammad. The analysis focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that shape emergent meaning through conceptual integration, paying close attention to poetic form and sociopolitical context. Findings reveal that the English poems tend to employ irony, satire, and appeals to universality, whereas the Arabic poems emphasize historical trauma and symbols of collective resistance. Ultimately, the contrastive analysis of blending networks shows how crisis rhetoric in populist poetry reflects culturally embedded yet thematically parallel strategies for articulating mobilizing identity
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