A Formalist Criticism of Souad al-Sabah’s Poem Who Killed Kuwait? Based on the Model of Jeffrey Leach: A Review to Discover the Literary Text

Formalism is one of the critical schools of the 20th century, in which, critics concentrate on the structure and form of a literary text without taking into account any extra-textual factors like political, social, psychological etc, The school was founded based on the model of, Jeffery Leach, a linguist who emphasizes on presenting the familiar forms to unfamiliar ones, arguing that de-familiarization of language would lead to astonishment and amazement of the audience. Resorting to a descriptive-analytical method while reviewing the principles of the formalism school, the present research tries to investigate the poetry "who killed Kuwait" by contemporary Kuwaiti poet, Souad al-Sabah at two general and specific levels based on the linguistic model of Jeffrey Leach. The findings reveal that the poet has repeated some consonants and vowels in the composition of the poem to intensify the rhythm and express her latent grief and complaint to unfortunate circumstances of her country, Kuwait; as if she is aware of the effect of consonant and vowel on speech form and its coherence. Furthermore, the poet has applied de-familiarization to avoid automation of the poetry and it has been much influential on poetic aspect of the text and on completion of its meaning.