Alzheimer by Ghazi Al-Kosaibi: The Semiotics of Ambiguous Genre and the Application of the visual Sign

Abstract

This research addresses the issue of literary genre in Ghazi Al-Kosaibi’s text Alzheimer, viewing it as a work situated at the intersection of several literary genres, namely short stories, autobiography, memoirs, novelistic autobiographical fiction, and epistolary writing. Moreover, it combines the use of discursive linguistic signs with visual signs to produce an amazing and puzzling narrative text.

Approaching the text from a semiotic perspective led to the following results:

All these genres find both aesthetic and thematic justifications within the text.

The generic label printed on the cover “oqsousa” is a misleading indication. It acts as a clever stylistic trick devised by the experienced writer to position his text within a problematic area, raising questions and encouraging inquiry into its genre. The conflict between remembering and forgetting, and the resistance to Alzheimer’s disease, drove the narrative path.

This conflict created a space for fluctuation between various concerns, ranging from literary, intellectual, and historical to emotional.

The interconnectedness between linguistic and non-linguistic signs, such as numbers and pictures, reveals the structure of the text in a way that is not pre-determined, rendering the work open to multiple interpretive possibilities.