Discourse Models in Passion Drama: A Comparison of English Tragedies and Persian Tazieh

Abstract

Looking at discourse in drama, this paper intends to deconstruct the cultural aspects of language used in this genre in two very different cultures, that is Western, British culture and Eastern, Persian culture, and examine the functions language serves across these cultures. Drama is selected for investigation since it is of the repartee genre and therefore allows a variety of language genres to fit in. In drama, the features which mark the social relations between two persons at the character level become messages about the characters at the level of discourse pertaining between author and reader/ audience. Of special interest are tragedies since they represent the human anguish and therefore require a lot of connotative meaning. In this study a sample of English tragedy, namely Macbeth and King Lear, and one from the Persian Passion Plays Tazieh (consolation), or shabih (simulated), namely Hazrat AliAkbar and Hazrat Abbass, are chosen for analysis. The rationale behind this selection is the similarity of motifs in writing them. For the purpose of analysis, the author has employed a model suggested by Gee (2005) in which he thinks of seven building tasks for language-in-use. The results show that although the origins of the tragedy in English and Tazieh in Persian differ greatly, they share many features, both from a discourse structure point of view and a literary perspective. The results confirm the view that cultural differences account for discourse tasks, not universal features of language, as depicted by the Western models of discourse.