Saudi Arabia's Very Short Story on Platform (X): A Semantic Study of Selected Models

Abstract

This study explores a genre of Arabic literature; namely Saudi literature, known as the short-short story. The short-short story emerged in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s, drawing inspiration from classical Arab literary traditions such as maqamat, religious texts, and historical narratives. Some scholars argue that the short-short story was influenced by Western literary traditions, arriving through Arabization, translation, and adaptation.

The short-short story has spread widely across the internet and social media, attracting considerable interest and gaining rapid popularity among writers, readers, and critics—particularly through the X platform (formerly Twitter). As one of the most prominent social media platforms, X has played a central role in fostering the writing and dissemination of short-short stories. The platform has hosted numerous creative works by emerging and established writers alike. X has become a significant and expansive incubator for the Saudi short-short story, attracting a wide range of authors drawn to its emphasis on brevity, symbolism, and narrative compression. The genre has been widely embraced by audiences in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, largely due to its readability, accessibility, and broad availability on the platform. These stories convey psychological, social, semantic, and intellectual content, articulated in a few lines yet rich in meaning. They are characterized by textual cohesion, incorporate core elements of the literary genre, and rely on concise, expressive language to depict specific events. This study investigates the Saudi short-short story digitally produced on the X platform, focusing on its poetics and the range of embedded connotations, including literary, intellectual, and social dimensions.