A Discursive Analysis of Dāneshvar's " Wandering-State Island" and its Semantic Relations to Her Other Novels

Specialists of Discourse Analysis support their formal and lexical studies of literary texts with socio-cultural elements. Norman Fairclough analyses the texts in three levels of description, interpretation and determination. This method is very beneficial in discovering the writers’ perspectives as well as their socio-political approaches. This article, following Fairclough’s method, reads “Wandering-State Island” by Simin Dāneshvar in order to show how the elements of identity, freedom, colonialism, wandering-state of modern man, tradition and modernity, and religion are significant when considering the different layers of the novel; meanwhile the cohesive combination of these elements form the dominant discourse of Dāneshvar’s novel which relates it to her other novels.