Document Type : scientific-research
Authors
1 Department of General Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Semnan University, Iran.
2 Semnan Univesity
Abstract
The following research examines the representation of identity in the Persian play Parvin, Sasan’s Daughter, written by Sadegh Hedayat. The purpose of this research is to identify and investigate the role of language in representing identity in Persian historical plays and to provide a linguistic perspective on the issue of identity in the writing of Persian plays and scripts. The work under study was selected based on its depiction of a specific historical period, when the Iranian identit`y was threatened with extinction. This work was analyzed according to the framework of Stuart Hall’s representation theory (1996, 2003). The results obtained from the analysis of the work showed that identity representation was mostly used in the intentional and constructive approaches, and the least in the reflective approach. It was also observed that among the levels of identity, individual identity had the highest frequency in both plays, followed by national identity and historical identity, respectively. The author also encountered a case that was not compatible with the identity of that historical period and categorized it as a fake identity. The author suggests that the inclusion of fake identity cases in the text is due to the author’s lack of familiarity with the language, culture, and beliefs of the people of that historical period. Moreover, the findings of the research indicate that among the identity-forming parameters, sentence and word were the most influential ones, followed by clause and group, respectively.
Keywords
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