A Critical- Stylistic Study of the Linguistic Construction of Cultural Alienation in Selected Contemporary Fictions

Cultural alienation refers to the loss of connection an individual experiences when living between two cultural worlds, and it is a recurring theme in migration narratives. Although cultural alienation in contemporary novels has been widely examined from literary and sociological perspectives, its linguistic constructions remain underexplored. The current study will full this gap by applying Jeffries' (2010) Critical Stylistics to analyse how cultural aliena-tion is linguistically constructed in two selected contemporary novels: Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) and Adichie's Americanah (2013).16 extracts eight from each novel. The study adopts a qualitative methodology to gain a thorough understanding of the data. It aims to examine the linguistic construction of cultural alienation, identifies the most and least commonly employed Critical Stylistics tools used to construct this alienation, it examines the ideological implica-tions these tools reveal. The findings show that four of the five Critical Stylistics tools occur with comparable frequency in both novels, while Naming and Describing emerge as a consist-ently dominant tool, underscoring the centrality of lexical choice in constructing cultural identi-ty. Equating and Contrasting appear least prevalent in The Namesake, which mirrors the novel's subtler, more implicit construction of alienation. Exemplifying and Enumerating is least domi-nant in Americanah, pointing to explicit social contrast. Negating functions differently across the two texts, marking absence and lack in The Namesake, and resistance to imposed labels and stereotypes in Americanah. Overall, cultural alienation is constructed through distinct linguistic strategies shaped by each novel's narrative style.