marzieh askari

Art is a fundamental component of the culture of a society, and its motifs can serve as a reflection of the society’s cultural, social, political, and economic status. In this investigation, the text of Mohammad Yaghoubi’s drama “Drought and Lie” from the 2000s serves as the data for analysis. The purpose of this research is to study the concept of gender in the aforementioned text in order to identify the manner in which this concept is generated or perpetuated within the context of the social conditions of Iran in the 2000s. Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach has been selected in the research methodology section. The research results indicate that the drama “Drought and Lie” presents the definition of gender and gender roles in a state that is between the traditional official dominant discourse and the modern discourse (as the rival discourse), which was established in the 2000s, by employing the historical-social horizons of the era and utilizing Wodak’s fivefold strategies to analyze the linguistic aspects of words, phrases, and key contents of the text. The final conclusion posits that the author of the drama “Drought and Lie” has effectively conveyed the position of Iran's transitional society toward modernity in the 2000s, as well as the repercussions of cultural changes in the private sphere of family and marital relations.

Inserting rhymes and poetry into Persian prose has a long history. Looking at the ancient prose texts, we can see that most of the writers after the birth of Persian poetry tended to this mixture; it is as if they were aware of the effect of poetry on the soul of the audience and the persuasion caused by it. Incentives based on literary and social-political goals have caused poetry to enter prose texts. By looking at the list of old and new rhetorical science books, it became clear that so far rhetoricians have not paid enough attention to the types of poetry insertion in prose texts, which is one of the aesthetic aspects. The only term that fits this technique better than other interpretations is "Esteshhad" (affidavit); a general term that includes verse, hadith, news, and poetry in the text. Other terms such as solution, adaptation, and guarantee have been proposed, which according to the existing definitions, are not exactly related to poetry. The appearance of poetry among prose text has types and rules that have not been discovered so far, and terms for these types have not been provided. The present article tried to examine the prose texts mixed with poetry in the 8th century as an example of research, because Persian poetry has reached the peak of its development in this century, and tried to explain the types of poetry insertion in prose and its purposes by citing examples of the texts and presenting its proposed definitions to solve the problem. The suggested term of this writing is the completely Persian and literary term «شعرآمیزی»  "She’r-Amizi".

The objective of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the pictures on the cover page of chelcheragh magazine that is known as a popular magazine. This interpretation aims at decoding ideological codes of the pictures and discovers how magazine uses these codes to naturalize some myths. We offer Roland Barthes’s approach to decoding images as framework for a semiotic analysis of the cover page pictures of chelcheragh magazine. It should be noted that popular magazines represent the external reality according to their ideological stance. The present paper aims at investigating some samples from the cover pages of the Chelcheragh magazine in order to reveal the magazines concealed ideology. Methodologically, some six cover page images from among 144 images were selected based on the critical case-sampling model. When the validity of the sampling method was guaranteed, then we analyzed the samples in according to the above-mentioned semiotic methodology. Some of the results show that Chelcheragh magazine uses a critical ideology toward the dominant cultural order. The myths used by the magazine include myth of hero, myth of destruction, myth of transcendent femininity, myth of being popular, myth of motherhood, and myth of black exponential. Theses myths provide the ideological interests of the magazine and contribute to naturalizing worldviews and interests of the magazine. Such ideology criticizes the government’s policy on leisure time of the youth, National Broadcasting Corporation, air pollution; the government is shutting down of the house of cinema, and the ban on the women’s travel to foreign countries by themselves. At the same time, the images support the critical TV program called “90” which critically reviews Iran’s soccer league games. The images also, support the movements that are divergent in relation to the dominant cultural system.