Critical Discourse Analysis of the Story of " Rostam and Shaqad" based on Van Dijk's Ideological Square

In this paper the story of “Rostam and Shaqad’ fromShahnameh, the masterpiece of Persian epic poetry, is analyzed on the basis of Van Dijk’s method of Critical discourse analysis (CDA). After the statement of the problem and the review of literature, CDA is introduced briefly and then Van Dijk’s method is represented in details. This part presents the theoretical structure of our analysis. Then along with a short review of the story, we have shown that the producer of this story has tried to understate the ingroup faults and negative points and the outgroup positive points and overstate outgroup faults and ingroup positive points by means of different discursive structures in the text. These strategies are called the ideological square by Teun Van Dijk. This ideological square shows that some part of reality in the texts can be ignored or falsified. Many of the classic Literature stories can be analyzed and reread by CDA approaches and this allows the addressees to look at and read back the stories from different viewpoints. This is also the goal fallowed in this paper.