An Analysis of The Sorrowful Land of the Orange Based on Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis

Among the famous figures of Palestinian literature is Ghassan Kanfani, who has dedicated his life and pen to defending the oppressed nation of Palestine and its ideals. His account of "The Sorrowful Land of the Orange" is a picture of the displacement of the oppressed people of Palestine and the problems of their lives. This article is an attempt to discover the discoursal and semantic layers of the novel using the descriptive-analytical method and relying on Fairclough critical discourse analysis. The language of the text is realistic and far from complicated. The formal parallels of the text indicate that its discourse is societal and political. The author expresses his ideological view of the issues in the society by creating collocation, synonymy, and semantic contradiction as well as using metaphorical words and historical symbols. There is a good relation between the text and its situational and intertextual contexts so that one of the participants of the story is he himself who plays an active role. Kanfani's goal is to question the social structures such as power relations by using background knowledge.