A Comparative Study of Juvenile's and Adult's Contemporary Short Stories within the Framework of Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis intends to reveal the interaction between language, power and ideology. To do so, it tries to uncover the discursive features by which power and ideology are inherent in language. CDA has been usually applied to political texts. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the discursive features in juvenile's and adult's short stories to find how and to what extent, literature writers use these features and conceal their ideas. To this end, 10 adult's and 10 juvenile's short stories were selected. Discursive features in these texts were examined on the basis of Van Leewen's model. T-unit was utilized to determine the length of the stories. Then, the percentage of the discursive features was determined in both kinds of stories. Also chi-square (X2) was calculated to show the significance of the differences between the two groups of books. The results are as follows:1.In literature, there are some other discursive features which are used for concealment.2.The difference between juvenile and adult short stories in using the discursive features is not significant.3. Adult short stories apply more discursive features than juvenile short stories.4.There are more literary features in juvenile's short stories than adult's ones.5.Discursive features in literature are not used to conceal the reality, but to reveal and emphasize it.6.Literary texts can also be used to exert power for political purposes.