Critical analysis of the novel Ashkaneh based on Fairclough's theory

Since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, three generations of writers have written novels on the resistance. In these novels, in line with the changes that have taken place in the social, cultural and political arenas of the society, one can observe a gradual transformation and the emergence of new types of discourse. Ebrahim Hasanbeigi's novel Ashkaneh is one of the works in the resistance literature written during two decades after the war with an almost different approach compared to previous works. An important theme highlighted in this work is the transformation in macro-structures and ideals after the war. Through a descriptive-analytical method, this study seeks to examine the discourse in the novel Ashkaneh based on Fairclough's critical approach and to answer the question ‘Does the discourse of the story serve to maintain the ideological power relations in the layers of the social structure or does it aim to weaken and transform it?’. The findings of the research indicate that the author of the novel presents the developments caused by the dominance of construction discourse at the social, cultural and economic levels of the post-war society and highlights the changes that have occurred in the identity of this period. Thereby, it criticizes the semantic system that dominates the era of construction and weakens the existing power relations in the layers of the social structure in this period.