Romantic Irony in The Short Stories of Fatih Abdul-Salam

Abstract

The research has specialized in working on an important and vital form of irony, which is the romantic irony, which in turn belongs to a larger and more comprehensive type, which is the paradox of
the situation, as (D. C. Mueck) puts it, or what is known as the paradox of context, which includes, in addition to the romantic irony, other types: dramatic irony. The Socratic paradox, the event paradox, and the paradox of simple dissonance. The research relied on a distribution mechanism consisting of two parts: The first was devoted to the theoretical approach to clarify the concept of the romantic paradox through a theoretical presentation that began from the philosophical foundation from which this paradox arose by presenting a number of opinions of philosophers and thinkers regarding the references for this type of paradox, and proceeding to renew its essence, nature, and how to manifest it. Within the literary text, which can be summarized in an equation consisting of two parties: the writer, the maker of the paradox, and the reader, the recipient of the paradox, and the imaginary structure that falls between them is broken in the end. The theoretical approach also included monitoring the specificity of the narrative genre, especially the story and the novel, in their adoption of this form of paradox. Romantic irony is the most appropriate and ideal form for it to appear. As for the second part, it worked on procedural samples for analysis and treatment and adopted a selective mechanism from a large group of Fateh Abdel Salam’s stories that ensured a
clear and dominant presence of this type of paradox, including: the story of the genie, the Assyrian story, the gray frog, and the shortdistance marathon.