Form/ Content Match: A Study on Tamir's Collection "The Neighing of the White Horse"

Abstract

Literature is the art of the language. Through language the writer can create the artistic sensibility. Language is not a minor issue in the literary work, because it is the literary man’s only means of expression. Language form determines content. Talking about form without content is impossible because they are the same fabric. At the same time content may differ based on the formulating concepts from which the text takes off. There is always inter-relatedness between form and content in the literary work.

Among the most important issues we face in Zakariyya Tamir’s short stories is the clear relative change in the formulating and stylistic concepts which accompany the development of the inner content. Studying the form in this context does not necessarily mean removing the form from its content and separating it from the story. Rather, as Mohammad Badawi says, “That the critic focuses on the form to study it through its relationship with other things (…). In other words: The fact that the critic is obliged to study form as one of the levels of the structure does not necessarily mean being entrapped in dividing the text into two parts (…) We would rather say that his work is similar to that of a physician who studies the heart in light of a live human body’s mechanism..”[1]. Therefore our study of the form in this article is a study of the live relationship between form and content and reciprocity between them.[2]

Let us begin now analyzing the most important features of the form in the short stories of the first collection: