A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Transcultural Identity in Lyer’s The Global Soul (2001) Using the Tool of Negation

Abstract

This study is intended to examine the concept of transcultural identity in the travel book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home by (Iyer, 2001). Jeffries’ model of critical stylistics (2010) (henceforth, CS) has been selected to analyze the book. To be more specific, Negation is selected to analyze the concept under study. As such, the study aims at finding out how Negation is used to portray ideological meanings representing the concept of transcultural identity in one non-fictional travel book; and finding out the ideologies related to the concept analyzed. The analysis of the data shows that Negation is a suitable analytical tool to reach the ideational meaning of the text towards the concept of transcultural identity. It is also a powerful tool that provides a means for a coherent and rigorous discussion for the analysis of identity. Besides, the concept of transcultural identity, as the analysis shows, is used to reveal the ideologies of homelessness, identity globalization, spiritual connectedness, imagined homes, etc. The importance of the study stems from being an attempt to investigate transcultural identity using a critical stylistic approach which constitutes a gap in the literature since such a study of transcultural identity is very rare or even nonexistent.