Document Type : Original Article
Author
Assistant professor of childhood education, Dep. Psychology and educational sciences, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
This research is grounded in a semantic-linguistic analysis, undertaken with regard to the centrality of the school as an institution in children’s and young adult literature and its role in either reproducing or contesting social structures of power. It aims to analyze the critical discourse surrounding the representation of the school in The Tale of That Jar by Houshang Moradi Kermani, based on Norman Fairclough’s three-level model. At the descriptive level, the findings show that lexical choices, syntactic structures, and metaphors reflect the severity of deprivation in rural schools, while linguistic elements highlight the school’s position within the village and the role of collective cooperation in addressing educational challenges. At the interpretive level, power relations are represented through the fluid subject positions of teachers and students: teachers oscillate between disciplinary authority, emotional support, and social mediation, while students, beyond their educational roles, appear in service, supervisory, socio-ritual, playful, and imaginative roles. Villagers also represent a range of subject positions. Intertextuality and interdiscursivity with local beliefs, rituals, and folk discourses are particularly notable. At the explanatory level, the study examines the ideology of educational justice in rural areas, the relationship between governmental shortcomings and social cooperation and solidarity, representations of gendered and disciplinary ideologies, as well as the phenomena of shame and resistance within the school, along with the intertwined roles of humor and resistance. The findings indicate that the school story genre in Iranian children’s literature takes on a meaning distinct from that of its Western counterpart,.
Keywords
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