Thi Qar Arts Journal

This study examines the reading act in Tashari by the Iraqi novelist Inaam Kachachi through the perspective of Reception Theory, considering reading as an interpretive act that produces meaning rather than a passive process of reception. The study is based on the assumption that the novel relies on an open narrative structure that assigns the reader a central role in completing meaning and constructing significance. The research adopts a descriptive-analytical approach, drawing on key concepts of Reception Theory as developed by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, particularly the notions of horizon of expectations, textual gaps, and the implied reader. The study demonstrates that Tashari employs non-linear narration and temporal fragmentation, disrupting the conventional chronological sequence of events and compelling the reader to reorganize and connect narrative segments. The multiplicity of narrative voices further expands the interpretive horizon and prevents a single authoritative perspective, transforming the text into an open dialogic space. The article also highlights the role of textual thresholds—especially the title—in guiding the reading process, as it signifies spatial and human fragmentation experienced by the characters. The study concludes that the novel’s condensed language and narrative economy create silent spaces within the text that can only be completed through an active reading act grounded in the reader’s cultural and historical awareness, particularly in relation to themes of exile, memory, and identity. Accordingly, the article affirms that the reading act in Tashari constitutes a fundamental structural element in meaning production and situates the novel within modern narrative texts that rely on an engaged and participatory reader.

The concept of "void" functions as a reception strategy that provokes the reader's frame of reference and their response to fill the gap in the creative text. This frame of reference takes on diverse and varied forms, contributing aesthetic, semantic, cognitive, and cultural dimensions. All that the external and internal forms can offer in terms of textual dynamism is subject to the overall compositional relationship, which constitutes a type of communication that develops the interaction between the text and the reader, thus reproducing the creative text. This can be observed in the poetry of Abdul Razzaq Al-Rubaie, who has adopted aesthetic, cultural, and semantic dimensions from "void" in his creative text, according to forms such as the "void of deletion" in all its structures (grammatical, morphological, and contextual), the dotted "void," and the blank "void." Furthermore, this research focuses on the concept of "void" and its strategies.

Although representation and Islamophobia have been widely examined in studies of American Muslim Young Adult (YA) fiction, the formal ethics of reversion and the use of Islamic concepts as analytic tools remain underexplored. This study seeks to investigate Nadine Jolie Courtney’s All-American Muslim Girl (2019) as a convert/revert bildungsroman in which Islamic virtues operate as structuring narrative principles. The aim is to develop a transferable ethics-of-form protocol and to provide a teachable vocabulary for analysing religion-in-form within American classrooms. Methodologically, this research employs a stringent close textual methodology, informed by the principles of Islamic virtue ethics, and incorporates a dual frame of analysis that includes Genette's narratological constructs as well as Boulton's anatomical model of the novel. To do so, classical Islamic virtues and narratological categories are exploited to scenes of interior reflection, ritual learning, public disclosure, and school-based interaction. The that first-person internal focalization renders niyyah (intention) legible as practice; taqwā (God-conscious restraint) functioning as micro-corrections in speech, dress, and social relations; iḥsān (excellence/beauty in conduct) reframes “doing it well” as beauty-inflected care for self and others; and adab (ethical comportment) structures respectful dissent and communal belonging. It is shown how risk, mediated through whiteness and passing, modulates ethical practice without disrupting the grammar of attention, self-address, and act. In conclusion, the study contributes to both literary criticism and pedagogy by highlighting the ethical operations of form in American Muslim YA fiction and by proposing a replicable model for integrating Islamic narrative ethics into classroom practice.