A Socio-semiotic Reading of the Children's Novel "The Pipe-Smoking Bear": based on Marxist Approach

Document Type : scientific-research

Authors

1 MA in Children ̓s and Young Adult Literature, Payame Noor University, South Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran.

2 Professor Department of Linguistics, Tehran University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Introduction: Marx, the founder of the theory of Marxism, by emphasizing the internal contradiction of the class system, calls economic conditions the foundation of social consciousness. Marx and Engels envisaged a world in which globalized market forces reigned supreme, careless of the human damage they inflicted, and in wich the gap between rich and poor had widened intolerably. The Marxist critical heritage is a superlatively rich, fertile one and like any other critical metod, it has to be assessed by how much it illuminates work of arts, not just by whether its political hopes have been realized in practice. Whereas intersubjective conflicts in the novel of “The Pipe-Smoking Bear” is the product of economic conditions and their plot is based on the formation of bourgeois society, and class antagonisms in the transition from tradition to modernity; So this approach has been adopted, for that novel.
Purpose: Given that semiotics is a method of reading the text, which examines the relationships of signs and how the mechanism of meaning production; The present article, by descriptive analytical method, seeks to re-read the text by analyzing the signs that confirm the dependence of social relations on material conditions.
Questions: The question of research is how to semiotically read the text, relying on Marx's approach to sociological theories. In this regard, the present study is seeking answers for the fundamental question: which are the signs based on Marx's Theory of Classes that gives rise to different readings of the text? And how do re-reading the present text make sense within the framework of Marx's sociological theory?
Conclusions: The present article show that: The novel is a critical novel that reveals the effects of the discourse change resulting from the presence of modernity. In this novel, "the transformation of man into an income-generating animal" is a metaphor or symbol that signifies the alienation of subjects and their disconnection from their lost human-centered nostalgic world. This alienation leads to the dissolution of the family and then to the collapse of the human relations of the whole society.
Significance: The collapse of the Soviet Union, as the leader of the Marxist system, does not mean the complete inefficiency of this system. Reveals the need for research, the lack of sufficient attention to the committed paradigms of this system  and the lack of interdisciplinary research in this field.
Novelity: This research uses for the first time in Iran Marx's Theory, for reading literary texts and uses the Marxist approach for reading literary texts of children

Keywords

References

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History

  • Receive Date: 17 September 2020
  • Revise Date: 14 October 2020
  • Accept Date: 26 October 2020

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