Critical discourse analysis of Alavi's novel "Her Eyes" based on Norman Fairclough's theory

  INTRODUCTION
Recently, the study of contemporary political literature, especially fiction, has established a strong link with critical discourse analysis. Accordingly, critics have tried to use this approach to find power relations within the text to discover the types of ruling political power and authorship ideology. One of the important approaches to critical discourse analysis is Fairclough's theory, which can help find features in the text that are ignored by ordinary reading.
      This article examines BozorgAlavi's work "Her Eyes" based on Fairclough's theory of critical discourse analysis in order to measure the effectiveness of the theory in political novel analysis.
     Compared to other theories of critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's theory is the most comprehensive method in case of the analysis of novels. This approach delves into the relationships between linguistic events as well as cultural, political, and social factors (Crystal, 2008, p. 123). Fairclough considers discourse as consisting of three elements: i.e., text, interaction", and social context". He describes his method of analysis in the three stages of "text description", "interpretation of the relationship between text and interaction", and "explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context" (Fairclough, 2000, p. 168).
     The main purpose of the present study was to conduct a critical analysis of the novel "Her Eyes" in the three layers of description, interpretation and explanation. To serve this purpose, the linguistic constructions of the novel are explained by analyzing the linguistic forms at the level of description and their relationships with the sources of power in society in order to provide a scientific and accurate analysis.
     Following Fairclough's theory, the present article aimed to answer these questions: 1. Has the content of the story revealed the socio-political situation? 2. How are the author's ideological views represented in the text? 3. What linguistic tools are effective in explaining the author's ideology? In order to address to these questions, the research project in this article was undertaken to represent the ideology affecting the mind and language of the author. Moreover, efforts were made to explain the relationship between the text of the novel and the society at both the micro and macro level.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The approach adopted in the present study was descriptive-analytical and its analysis method was qualitative. The research data consisted of the ideological linguistic structures of the novel that expressed the author's ideology. These data were described, interpreted, and explained following Fairclough's strategies. Three stages were distinguished in the process of data analysis: 1. In the descriptive stage, the linguistic structures of the text were analyzed in terms of vocabulary and syntactic features. 2. In the interpretation stage, the authors paid attention to the act of discourse to analyze the text of the story based on the contextual factors. 3. In the explanatory phase, the authors dealt with the issue of social action, (i.e., the reason for the production of the text) in order to examine the dominant discourse and explain the socio-intellectual views governing the text.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The results related to the discourse analysis of the novel in Persian showed that, although the present study was similar to some other works in this field in terms of method, no researcher has so far analyzed the novel "Her Eyes" based on Fairclough's theory. Therefore, the present article, which examined the mentioned text, was the first essay in the study of Alavi's novel from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. In this regard, the authors claim that the article is innovative in terms of the new data it presents.
     At the descriptive level, focusing on vocabulary and grammatical aspects, the frequency of Fairclough's ideological strategies in the text of the novel is shown in the table below.

Table 1. Frequency of ideological strategies at the level of description
"Reference to PDF article"

     As the table of ideological strategies shows, Modality and Wording are the most important strategies used in the text.

CONCLUSION

The findings indicated that Fairclough's theory would be appropriate for analyzing political novels due to its potency to establish relationships between a story and its formation in the social context. The results of the text description showed that the author's experience of the social world was the product of his attention to the binary opposition. Accordingly, there were elements and signs of two different discourses in the novel, right (Pahlavi Dynasty) and left (Marxism) tendencies, each with its own linguistic features. The reflection of these issues in the novel suggested that the content of this discourse has revealed the socio-political situation. The ideological syntax in the discourse expressed the author's firm belief in the issues he had raised. In this respect, the use of declarative sentences that would express a definite judgment was more common than other types of sentences. The main finding of the article is that Bozorg Alavi's choices of vocabulary and syntax reflected his inclination towards the ideology of Marxism, which at the time of the production of the text was in conflict with the discourse of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Considering that the dominant discourse in the novel "Her Eyes" is the discourse of socialism, the ideology behind this work is not separate from the culture and society of the author's era.