Critical reading of Dolatabadi's "Bani-Adam" collection based on Theo Van Leeuwen 's social semiotics approach

The Bani-Adam collection includes six stories from "The Lives of Contemporary Humans". The actions of the characters are a reflection of the author's social and political atmosphere.In this paper, this collection of stories has been examined from the perspective of Van Livon's principles of social semiotics to determine what tacticsDolatabadi - in the action of the actors -uses to represent the social and political harms in society.To achieve this goal, the stories were studied in a descriptive-analytical method based on the principles of Van Leeuwen 's social semiotics.The findings show that the narrative form of the story, in the imaginary and surreal atmosphere, includes social and political harms.The separation of the framing of stories in the infrastructure reveals the opposition between tradition and modernity, right and wrong, selfishness and otherness.The personal and impersonal authority in the lower layers of the stories speaks of the domination of the individual over the individual and the state over the people.The absence of female, lack of her naming and denial indicate the ignoring of women in the patriarchal society of Iran at that time.