Social Identity In Literature

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Identity may be considered as the variety of personal and behavioral characteristics that describe one as a member of a particular group; therefore, individuals can differentiate themselves from other groups of individuals and create their own understanding of who they are depending on race, religion, culture, ethnicity and language (Fearon, 1999). On the other hand, as a result of the geographical and social movements and the keenness of belonging to a certain social community, individuals possibly will acquire more than one single culture (ibid.). Identity in literature might be the way that is used by authors to express themselves by presenting a new culture and language after the exile from homeland to another country hence, the genre of …show more content…

They claim that a person has not got only one “personal self; however, she/he can carry countless selves that connect to extend circles of group membership (ibid). The individual may be led by different social contexts to think and act on basis of his personal, familial and/or national level of self (Turner et al, …show more content…

In social identity theory, this process is termed “self-categorization” (Stets & Burke, 2000). Tjfel and Turner (1987) claim that social identity theory confirms that the in-group or (self-categorization) is built by the group membership in ways that the in-group is preferred at the expense of the out-group. They proposed the example of (minimal group paradigm) by which they argue that the mere individuals’ categorization is sufficient to lead them to the in-group favouritism. In that experiment, groups were randomly categorized (Trepte, 2006). Social group is a group of people who see themselves and are seen by others as members of this group (Tajfer & Turner, 1979). Tajfel (1979) considers (a group) as a cognitive component, an evaluative component and an emotional component. Thus, he suggested four main basics of social identity theory which are social categorization, social identification, social comparison, and self-esteem achievement (Trepte, 2006).Tajfel (1979) claims that one can only facilitate the process of decoding and encoding messages by defining information into schemes and categories, and it is the same with the other entities in our environment, we divide people into groups to build and comprehend a social interaction (Trepte,

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