The Lighthouse Journal of Literature & Linguistics

Resilience in Silence: Portrayal of Female Loneliness in Selected Contemporary Short Stories

Alia Ismail — 2025-12-31

This research examines the portrayal of female loneliness in contemporary short fiction, emphasizing the concept of resilience in silence. While traditional literary criticism often interprets silence as weakness or submission, this study conceptualizes silence as a nuanced and strategic form of emotional endurance and resilience in a digitally mediated world. Three short stories—“A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999), “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009), and “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian (2017)—serve as primary texts for analysis. Through qualitative textual analysis and feminist theoretical frameworks, the research investigates how silence, emotional withdrawal, and digital communication shape female experiences of isolation and resilience. The analysis demonstrates that contemporary short fiction reframes silence as a conscious, situational response through which women negotiate emotional vulnerability, relational uncertainty, and technological mediation. This study contributes to feminist literary scholarship by addressing the underexplored intersection of digital communication, female emotional labor, and contemporary short fiction.

رحیم گل بحیثیت رومانوی ناول نگار

Bibi Fatima — 2025-12-31

Rahim Gul was a famous Urdu Pakistani writer, literary critic, film director, writer and filmmaker. With various books of fairy tales, critique, biography and art to his credit, Rahim Gul was a major figure in the Urdu literature of the time.He was the author of ten books. Rahim Gul was a novelist, dramatist, short story writer and sketcher. He was born in a village shaker Darra, Distract Kohat in July 1924. At 1st he joined armed force. After some years he left Army and was settled in Lahore. He had to write dialogues for movies. When he did not succeed in film industry then he begin story writing. Basically he was a romantic novelist. He mostly concentrated on romantic dialogues and he tried to explain his own real stories. In this article we have to evaluate the romantic element of his novels. He wrote seven novels in which “Jannat kiTalash” is his very famous novel. This novel is the reason of his fame. He got literary award due to this novel. Rahim Gul died on April 28, 1985 from kidney failure at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Lahore.

Euphemistic Metacognition and Taboo Sensitivity: A Socio-Psychopragmatic Comparative Study of Male and Female Speakers

Nida Tariq — 2025-12-31

Gendered patterns of language have been investigated by many researchers in terms of prestige, formality and stylistics in general and it has been seen that females tend to be more formal and elaborate than men (Syafrizal, 2020; Ramadhani, 2014). Such studies have not looked specifically into the comparative euphemistic tendencies of males and females, the detailed in-depth specifications of their euphemistic strategies, their conceptual knowledge and awareness of euphemism, the contexts under which they prefer to use or not use it, which is an area that requires thorough exploratory analysis. For this purpose in the present study, a sample of 60 Undergraduate students comprising 30 boys and 30 girls, from two institutes at Mardan was constructed. Concepts from Bandura’s (1986) Social Cognitive Theory have been used to gauge metacognitive aspects of the study and to explain the findings, which reveal that females are more eloquent in their use of euphemism in that they use a plethora of expressions whenever and wherever needed to be polite and articulate themselves as appropriately as possible compared to males. This, as revealed in the present study, seems to stem from their increased awareness of social taboos and socially sensitive subject matters compared to males and also from their more precise anticipation of negative and positive outcomes of certain expressions. Females have also been found to be more innovative in their use of euphemism as compared to males. This study is helpful in understanding the deeper relationship of gender and language use; context, need and psychological associations surrounding the individuals’ use of euphemistic language when dealing with subject matters of certain natures.

Comparative Analysis of War Metaphors of Pak-China Print Media

Humaira Jabeen — 2025-12-31

This study is a comparative critical discourse analysis of the “COVID-19 IS WAR” metaphor in the print media of Pakistan and China by employing Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).The study recognized the war metaphor’s power in framing public understanding and mobilizing behavior during crises and investigated its deployment in two distinct sociopolitical contexts. A corpus was constructed from COVID-19-related news stories published in Pakistan's Dawn and China's Global Times throughout 2020. Using the Pragglejaz Group’s (2007) Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and assisted by AntConc software for corpus analysis to identify and quantify war-related lexical items. The findings reveal a significant difference in usage frequency: the metaphor was positioned 544 times in the Global Times corpus, compared to 246 times in the Dawn corpus. The qualitative cross-cultural analysis interprets this disparity as curtailing from differing governmental communication strategies and media ideologies. In the Chinese context, the metaphor was employed pervasively as a uniting and mobilizing tool, aligning with a state narrative of collective struggle, national strength, and top-down mobilization against the pandemic. On the other hand, in the Pakistani English-language press, the metaphor was used more selectively, often serving a primarily cautionary function within a more pluralistic discourse. This study concludes that while the "war" metaphor was a universal rhetorical feature of pandemic communication, its frequency and strategic purpose were fundamentally shaped by the specific political and media cultures of each nation. The research underscores the necessity of contextual, cross-cultural analysis in understanding the discursive construction of global crises.

اظہار اثر کا ناول "تھری ایکس": اردو میں سائنس فکشن کی ایک نمائندہ مثال

Shumaila Iqbal — 2025-12-31

“Three X”, written by Izhar Asar, is one of the best and pure science fiction novels in Urdu. Izhar Asar is a pioneer of urdu science fiction novels. Asar wrote pure science fiction novels, while other novelists of this category merged myths and legends in their novels. “Three X” is Asar’s representative science fiction novel which embodies all the features of science fiction in it. “Three X” incorporated the major science fiction categories like space opera, bio-punk, cyber-punk, cli-fi and mundane science fiction. All of the events and scientific items emerged alienation and wonder to catch the reader. The article under study is based on the content analysis approach of the qualitative research. The novel has been analyzed and the data have been shown through table to draw the objective findings and reach conclusion. .