Autoportrait in Modern Iraqi Literature Mohammed Khudair’s What Is Held and What Is Not Held as a Case Study

Abstract

Iraqi academic research has not ever tackled the limitations of Autoportrait. Moreover, it doesn`t describe any biographies as Autoprtrait despite that some writings classify it as biographies or diaries. Yet, it is nearer to Autoportait than to biographies. As a result, the recent research is concerned with the dialectic nature of this literary genre. The Iraqi writer Mohammed Khudair`s book "What is Catchable and What is Uncatchable: biographical constructions" is selected as a sample for accurate understandingof such genre in order to identify its characteristics and occurrence. The research issystematically divided into theoretical description and applied analysis. Firstly, within the theoretical framework, the term problem of Autoportait is tackled as well as its many counterparts among Arab translators. Among five counterparts, the research adopts a translation of "Autoportrait" due to three reasons. Secondly, within the concept of Autoportait, the research delves into important questions related to the genre, such as the question of self-encoding writing, of which Autoportrait is a form, and the question of inclusion and juxtaposition in clarifying the relationship between autobiography and Autoportrait. Then, there is a question of the form of Autoportrait and its identifying characteristics despite the difficulty of their identifying because of the absence of generic conditions of   Autoportrait  as an independent genre due to the absence of own characteristics that can distinguish it. Yet, the research attempts to identify universal and general characteristics of Autoportrait  based on the three bases of text "author, text and receiver". Thirdly, the research tackles the occurrence of Autoportrait  in Arabic literature in general and in Iraqi literature in particular. In applied analysis, what are introduced in the theoretical description is applied to analyze the book "What is Catchable and What is Uncatchable" through: 1) the paratexts to acknowledge Autoportrait   as a literary genre of the book, and 2) the text to reveal the formal characteristics of the genre.