The Semiotics of Pictorial Discourse in Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq’s The Legend of the Late Night

Abstract

This paper analyses visual discourse in Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq’s The Legend of the Late Night (2002) by investing in semiotics as a critical method, gripping the essence of the image, especially if it involves an imagination imbued with horror literature, as it will give rise to a kind of novelistic narrative through the enjoyment and amazement at the new form that jumps to the mind to formal camouflage with an artistic and functional impact.  The prominent approach to tackle this reading is characterized by its ability to analyze literary discourse, reveal its secrets, and interrogate its symbols to reach its goal or approach. Critical reading is considered a simulation analysis of the conceptual procedure through analyzing the physical form of the sign within the discourse or image, studying the semiotic units such as words, colours, shapes and images, and then linking the signs to their cultural, social and other contexts,  and an attempt to observe the effect of narrative employment of two types that come together to establish a genre that inspires in terms of novelty and excitement; they are: the semiotics of the image and horror literature. The research problem can be defined by the question that searches for the nature of the encounter between method and procedure. In other words, how suitable is the semiotic approach for analyzing Arab novelist discourse and revealing its secrets? The conclusions lie in completing the accumulated knowledge to enhance the energies of the different genres and in an attempt to cross-fertilize some genres capable of producing their fruits due to valid hybridization in a place where procedure and employment interact.