Intercultural Communications
M. Rahimi; S. Faeghi; S.R. Mortazavi
Abstract
Nonfiction is a new type of narrative literature influenced by the praxis of cultural-political discourses in the representation of reality. The dominant discourse seeks to display its desired patterns of action and life, with fictional literature being one of its channels. This study was conducted with ...
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Nonfiction is a new type of narrative literature influenced by the praxis of cultural-political discourses in the representation of reality. The dominant discourse seeks to display its desired patterns of action and life, with fictional literature being one of its channels. This study was conducted with the aim to highlight the semantic construction of Afghan immigrant women in the contemporary fictional literature in Afghanistan through the theoretical perspective of Homi K. Bhabha and Theodor W. Adorno. It also aims to identify the representations of these women in the nonfiction literary genre and interpret them according to the cultural context of the destination. To achieve this goal, "Border" from Why Shouldn’t Make Darkness My God? A collection of short stories by Masoumeh Jafari, a contemporary Afghan writer, was selected as the case study. It was analyzed using Seymour Chatman's narrative method in three sections of story, discourse, and ideology to illustrate the concept of Afghan immigrant women from lingual and ideological perspectives. The findings show that the identity of Afghan immigrant women was changed according to the cultural discourse governing the society, leading to identity diffusion (confusion) and their re-immigration to new land rather than their homeland to deal with this crisis. The interruption and cultural interference of the host society with the Afghan immigrant women is represented through the marginal and protesting voice of the author of "Border" to the existing situation and the context of the dominant realities, reflecting the "critical" function and "emancipation" of art in the analysis and criticism of the structures of domination and oppression.
Abdollah Giuvian; Shahram Ahmadi
Abstract
TV commercials as multifarious media texts use various contrivances of which narrative and fundamental elements of short stories can be mentioned. These texts also make use of cultural codes in order to alter audiences\' opinion and to function as influential apparatus of persuasion. So, in order to ...
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TV commercials as multifarious media texts use various contrivances of which narrative and fundamental elements of short stories can be mentioned. These texts also make use of cultural codes in order to alter audiences\' opinion and to function as influential apparatus of persuasion. So, in order to read and interpret such texts one would need to call theories and insights from diverse disciplines such as Narratology, advertising, TV and Communication studies. Based on theoretical dissimilarities, this research started with differentiating two sorts of TV commercials: those based on narrative structures and others without being developed on a narrative base. In doing so I conducted a survey among aired TV commercials during a season (Winter 2008) and due to the results I selected TV commercials developed on a narrative base to study. In terms of narrative structure there can be distinguished four main categories. Also, I divided these ads into four categories based on the ways in which these ads represented their main actors. The basic criterion in this classification was the relationship the ads established between main actors, goods, and type of preferred consumption. Using semiotics and critical discourse analysis methodology, I studied the chosen samples in dept. As the findings of my research show and you can see in this article polarization in story persons/ personalities is based on their \"consumption\" or \"their knowledge about the advertised good or service\". The ads due to their textual nature are open to different interpretations.