Parvin E’tesami’s Debates from a Social-Political Perspective, Based on Fairclough’s Paradigm

Discourse puts emphasis on linguistic knowledge above the level of words, phrases, clauses and sentences that is essential for establishing a successful relation. This approach studies linguistic patterns of text and the connection between language and social and cultural contexts that the text is based on. In addition to this, discourse analysis deals with this issue that how the usage of language is affected by the way the participants in the conversation have relation with each other and it also focuses on the impact that language has on social identities and relations. In its third stage of development, discourse analysis reaches the phase of Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical discourse analysis is a new viewpoint towards linguistics and is applied to clarify and explain the social situation. In fact, in critical discourse analysis, it is presumed that language, grammar and context can perfectly show the social and cultural conditions of society. The belief of the analyst is that “no truth is found out of the context” (Jorgensen &Philips,2002, p48), so what counts is “discourse” which is analyzed. Discourse indicates that context is a social matter that forms amid social relations (Paltridge,1947, p14). From the point of Harris (1952), discourse is a relationship that is created inside a specific situation. Parvin E’tesami, a poet whose life has coincided with the monarchy of two Qajar kings and the entrance to Pahlavi’s reign, has been the main focus of this article. In contrast to the importance of changes that exist in Parvin’s life, her poem has been less assessed politically and socially.
We can point to Constitutionalism and the start of the First World War as the most significant incident happened in Parvin’s life that led to the change in her life’s stream. The Constitutional Revolution or Movement is described as a series of efforts made to oblige Mozafar al-Din Shah, the King of Qajar to sign the Constitutional Order that continued until Mohammad Ali Shah’s era in order to transform an autocratic government to a constitutional one.(Kasravi,1998,p5) As stated above, the First World War also occurred in this period that brought the change of poets’ attitude and style. Because of kings’ incapability of running the country, in the beginning of the First World War, Iran was approximately a full colony of the western governments and just on paper was assumed as an independent country. After the start of war, although Iran had formally announced its neutrality, in reality it was converted to the battlefield of armed struggles (Salehi,2008,p178). For a better evaluation, Fairclough’s paradigm has been taken into account in this article. Norman Fairclough is one of the most famous theorists of critical discourse analysis that his three-dimensional paradigm consists of description, interpretation and explanation that thanks to its coherence and efficiency, lots of people are in favor of it. Fairclough(1995) has named his attitude “the critical study of language” and has recognized his aim as a help to enhance the conciseness of language, power and specifically the role of language in dominance of some on others. He also tries to prove that how far the language of people is  from the assumptions of common sense and the fact that how these assumptions that are on the basis of common sense are ideologically formed by the power relations. In order to demonstrate cultural and social conditions of Parvin Etemadi’s era clearly, in this research, seven debates of Parvin’s have been examined by the method of Fairclough. In the phase of description, in Fairclough’s point of view, grammar and the existing naming are evaluated. For a better understanding, in this phase, functional grammar of Halliday, with the emphasis on experiential metafunction is used. Halliday’s functional approach is known by the name of “Systemic Functional Grammar”. Halliday(1989) believes in the existence of formal system in language that is dependent on communicative function of language, emphasizes on functional representation, explanation of formal system of language, and in analysis of clauses by experiential metafunction. The main focus of Halliday is on the process of predicators. Processes are the controller of incidents, acts and states. Processes play the main role and the participants of that processes contain the leading elements of the process. In fact, participants of a process revolve around the process. For this reason, the main concern of this research is about the processes of predicators. In addition to this, some of grammatical features that are used for stabilization of ideology and power are assessed. Then, in the phases of interpretation and explanation, the relation between grammatical aspects and context is surveyed. Considering what is reached by analysis of these seven debates, injustice and inequality in Parvin’s community have been totally reflected in discourse of her debates. In other words, in discoursal structure of Parvin’s debates, government is on the higher level and entirely has dominance on citizens. From Parvin’s perspective, the ideology that has led to this unequal dominance is the religious ideologies and it is due to the lack of knowledge, that the participant of citizens are under the control of this dominance. This article is descriptive-analytical and is written on the basis of library resources.