Grotesque in Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis

This study investigates the conceptualization of grotesque in Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs (1961). It aims at reaching a better interpretation of the novel and revealing the author’s ideology. For this aim, Werth’s (1999) Text World Theory as a cognitive linguistic model of language processing and Simpson’s (2014) Narrative Urgency model are used. The novel has four main themes: Alienation, betrayal, anger, and revenge. The results reveal that several sub-worlds are shared in these negative themes specifically Attitudinal, Negation, Deictic, and other sub-worlds. These sub-worlds explain how the text is constructed and how grotesque is conceptualized; hence reaching a better interpretation of such a literary work. The sub-worlds also show that Mahfouz criticizes the socio-economic situation in Egypt after the 1952 revolution through the grotesque characters. Moreover, the Stylistic profile of the Narrative urgency model proves that the text is urgent; hence explaining why we sympathize with the hero although we know that he is a criminal.