A Sociological Cognitive Analysis of the Discourse of Jerir and Akhtal’s Parodies Based on van Dijk’s Model

The discourse of literary texts can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and all the dimensions of their various levels can be evaluated. Discourse analysis provides an opportunity for a deep understanding of the text. It helps highlight the author’s discourse and linguistic interactions with ideological structures. The parodies of Jerir and Akhtal are among the texts of Arabic literature based on foregrounding and backgrounsing. These two poets use specific discursive tools in most of their parodies, seeking to foreground their own identity and to background the identity of their rival. This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analysis, such as the explicit socio-political stance of discourse analysts, and focuses on the dominance of the elite and institutions as they are enacted, legitimated, or reproduced by text and speech. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. This article argues that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the “cognitive interface” of models, knowledge, attitudes, ideologies and other social representations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. This argument is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs. The article attempts to refer to the “ideological square” of van Dijk in order to check out the discursive levels of two parodies by Akhtal and Jerir. The results demonstrate that highlighting negative aspects of the other is of a very high frequency in both texts (66 percent in Jerir’s and 71 percent in Akhtal’s). The difference is that Jerir has been more successful in the use of discursive levels of meaning, formal structures, and grammar.