A Stylistic Analysis of Foregrounding in Yousufi's Mirages of the Mind

Abstract

Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi is a titan of Urdu literature, known for his distinctive satirical, humorous, and existential approach. His magnum opus is ‘Aab-e-Gum’ (Mirages of the Mind), which is a unique version of the ‘absurd' based on the postcolonial experience of partition and displacement. However, there is still a lack of systematic linguistic analysis that explains how these effects are created. In this paper, this is addressed by contending that the absurd humour of Yousufi is mostly a result of the linguistic "foregrounding," which is the strategic incorporation of deviation and parallelism as the two main mechanisms of generating absurdity. The study, based on the model of stylistics by Leech and Short, examines how Yousufi employs lexical deviation, semantic deviation, and grammatical deviation to build new Urdu terms, logical contradictions, and inversions in syntax, respectively, and his use of strategic parallelism to create rhythmic contrast. Here it is shown that the absurdity of Yousufi is not just thematic but is created by a deliberate "linguistic architecture", consisting of stylized prose which deliberately undermines reader expectations at various linguistic levels in a systematic way. This study adds to the body of knowledge in Urdu literary studies by offering an easily replicable, evidence-based model for analysing humour, and to stylistic and postcolonial literature theory by giving an illustration of how absurdism is rooted to a particular culture but can be systematically analysed using a linguistic model.