A pragmatic approach to persuasive discourse in the poetry collection "A City Without a Heart" by Ahmed Abdel Mo'ti Hegazi

Abstract

The study focuses on a pragmatic (or pragmatic-discursive) approach to the poetic discourse of Ahmed Abdel-Ma’ty Hegazy, particularly in his collection City Without a Heart, and on the capacity of modern poetic discourse to embody issues of existence, identity, and politics through linguistic tools that transcend mere aesthetic structure to reach a communicative and argumentative horizon interacting with both the reader and the context. The approach revealed that the textual pragmatics extend toward uncovering latent meaning, hidden intentions, and persuasive strategies embedded within language, transforming poetry into a dialogical space where the personal intersects with the collective, the abstract with the real, and the symbolic with the historical.

Hegazy’s discourse, characterized by shifts, multiple pronouns, temporal layering, and poetic structures that merge with narrative and rhetorical elements, emerges as a model of post-defeat poetry, where the poem becomes a site of communication, contestation, and interpretation. Although the pragmatic methodology faces challenges when dealing with the density of symbolism and the fragmentation of meaning in poetic texts, it provides a dynamic reading of literary texts as discursive practices that deconstruct and reconstruct the system based on understanding speech acts, context, speaker intentions, and audience responses.

Consequently, this study does not merely offer a new reading of Hegazy’s work, but also contributes to reopening the horizon of modern Arabic poetry through pragmatics as a revealing and interpretive tool, integrating the linguistic with the cultural, and granting the text an enhanced capacity for persuasion and impact.