Mapping Rhetorical Appeals onto Discourse Tools: An Integrated Analysis of English and Arabic Popular Fictional Stories

Popular fiction is a mass-market genre with a commercial focus that focuses on re-contextualised relationships, love, pride, prejudice, and profound meanings to probe for human experiences reflected through characters and their small gestures. The current study investigates ten extracts taken from two collections of popular fictions; 'The Darcy Monologues' edited by Boyd and (اشياء صغيرة/ The Little Things) written by Samira Azzam. Using Aristotelian appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) and Gee’s (2017) discourse tools, the research explores emotional vulnerability and societal expectations portrayed in each text. Thus, the key questions of the study are: How do popular stories represent diverse cultural identities and ideologies? How can dramatic monologues and relatable human feelings and experiences, especially when viewed through the prism of cultural identities and ideologies, reflect and question power dynamics? How do the selected texts employ Aristotelian appeals to convey their messages? How do the primary tools of Paul Gee's discourse analysis model and Aristotelian appeals reveal the construction of personal narrative and social commentary in the selected stories? The study concludes that analyzing texts from different linguistic and cultural contents enriches the readers’ understanding of universal human experiences, particularly love, self-perception, and societal pressures. This study also demonstrates the value of integrating discourse analysis tools with rhetorical appeals in linguistic and literary studies.