زبان پژوهی (Feb 2020)
Reading the discursive origins of cultural poverty in the short stories Znoon ayoub (A case study: the series of "Al-zhaya")
Abstract
Discourse analysis originates from the ideas of linguists, hermeneutics analysts and researchers. This method explains the analysis by examining the textual context and situational context, the dominant discourse on society, and the dominant thought on it. The short story of Al-Changiya, written by Iraqi writer Xenon Ayub, is a representation of the realities and problems of the traditional Iraqi society, which provides a directional image of the ideological processes governing society; the significance of these illustrated images is that of cultural poverty in the society, and the characters depicted in these stories represent a the true personalities of the society and display behavior consistent with the false stereotypes in their society. The present paper uses a descriptive-analytic method in the form of discourse analysis to answer the question of how the discourse-based system or systems governing the community have become a bedrock for the promotion and reproduction of cultural poverty in traditional Iraqi society. Zenon Ayoub (1908-1988) is a posthumous of short story in Iraq, with about fourteen short story collections. The dominant thought and theme behind his work is a reflection of a rebellious spirit and a realistic attitude influenced by French and Russian realists, a vision that directs his work to a new structure with a focus on human freedom, especially women’s freedom and defended of their rights. In his view, the greatest task that any literary writer, especially the storyteller, must fulfill is to expose the truth and criticize inaccurate political and social realities they see in society, without fear of its consequences or the hope of reward. “Zahaya” is the title of a series of short stories by Zenon, the subject of which is to criticize traditional society and to deal with characters who, with their traditionalism and false beliefs, are the ground of oppression and their surroundings, in a better sense, we come across characters who are each a victim of cultural poverty and false traditions. The collection consists of six short stories, titled: “Al-Saqetah”, “Man Vera al-Hijab”, “Al-Aatraq al-Khalas”, “Al-Sharif”, “Jonun” and “Al-Jarima and Al-Aqaba”, all of which are in the tradition index. Commonism and witness are the same, stories that all share the same traditionalism and bear witness to the same look, which gives insight into the attitudes of intellectual writers with deep human concerns. Discourse analysis came up with a term called discourse analysis. The term is originally a Greek word for dis which means different aspects and course means movement. A linguistic approach is to discover and analyze the way the speaker or audience thinks based on the existing text. Discourse analysis is one of the topics of modern linguistics in the field of contemporary literary criticism which has also been translated into spoken and word analysis in Persian. In discourse analysis, we do not merely deal with the lexical elements that constitute the sentence as the main basis of the description of meaning, that is, the context of the text, but beyond that we consider factors outside the context, namely situational, cultural, social, and so on. In other words, the followers of this school describe how the units of linguistics crystallize and form meaning and message in relation to intrinsic factors (text, syntactic and linguistic elements, etc.) and extrinsic factors (social, cultural, political, etc.). The theme of the Al-Changiya story series provides an opportunity to enter the inner layers of the cultural problems of women and men in the traditional Iraqi society, and the author, by illustrating the routine social relations, a simple language and a thriller for complex issues in relationships of human; by analyzing the lives of the characters of these stories, will have some kind of critical and social perspective. In analyzing these stories, we will see that cultural poverty is a pervasive problem in the feminine and masculine discourses in the story, and it is not just for the lower classes of society. In this collection of stories, life is suppressed, suicidal characters prefer to survive, the personality is on his own suspicion to preserve dignity, and the other inevitably leads to a tidal vortex, but the common point of all these stories is a bitter and fatal fate, which is the result of incorrect and false cultural beliefs embodied in the minds of the patriarchal society. The most important cultural expressions that have meant the meaning of cultural poverty in the “Al-Changiya” collection are: superstition and the belief in magic, discrimination and adultery, and belief in the superiority of men over women, the masculinity of science, maternal look to woman, poverty and financial dependency of woman, forced marriage, violence and ultimately hot shame, all of which are traversed by traditional and patriarchal society, which incorporate gender stereotypes from the beginning in the minds of each man and woman. In other words, these discourses show the plurality of power relations in the context of the story and, consequently, in the society of the Xenon Age, which is inevitable due to the kind of education, low cultural level, social connection, etc. and even dominated by society in many cases. The dominant discourse on each of the stories of this set of poverty is social culture and false customs, which all take place on the basis of people’s words and sentiments, not through the use of reason. The review of Xenon’s stories in this collection illustrates the fact that his stance in his stories is neither patriarchal nor feminist, therefore, he did not have any effort to stabilize the stereotypes. Rather, it tries to inform the audience through narrative, to counteract cultural poverty and incorrect beliefs and traditions that have left women in the dark and kept them in shadow, and in many cases denied their social rights, and the negative consequences of some of the stereotypes that have mutually challenged man’s life.
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