College of Arts

The Department of English Language held a viva for a master’s thesis on “THE PERSUASIVE DISCOURSE IN BOOK BLURBS: CONSUMER’S VIEWPOINTS” on (Tuesday) corresponding to November 30, 2021 at the Faculty of Arts hall, part of which was attended by Prof. Dr. Basem Yahya Jasem with a group of faculty members.The thesis submitted by the student (Son Kaul Jaafar Mahmoud) in the Department of English, dealt with the persuasive discourse in the book’s publicity from the perspectives of consumers, as the book’s publicity discourse is the key for the reader to make the decision to buy it or not. Linguistic and visual blurb text thresholds are a good field for linguistic research based on the readers’ views and the reasons that motivate them to buy a book.The study touched on the concept of persuasion in book covers in general and text thresholds in the back cover in particular, and investigated areas such as rhetoric, discourse analysis, advertising art and advertising discourse as the main colonies under which the text thresholds for books fall, with special attention to persuasive strategies used in advertising.The study aims to identify and analyze the views of Iraqi and Arab book readers on a variety of persuasive strategies (both linguistic and visual) that international publishing houses and book companies adopt on the back covers of hard-copy books published in English.The viva committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Nashwan Mustafa Salih, with the membership of Prof. Kamal Hazem Hussain from the College of Education for Human Sciences at the University of Mosul and Assistant Professor Dr. Ahmed Haider Sakr from the University of Dohuk, under the supervision and membership of the teacher, Dr. Hoda Fadel Ismail.