نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
The story of Siyāvash in Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh represents one of the most prominent narratives of the epic cycle, in which persuasion plays an evident role in orchestrating character interactions. Within this narrative, persuasive exchanges function as vital devices for storytelling and the establishment of causal relations across the plot. Grounded in the persuasion theory of social psychologist Carl Hovland (1912–1961)—one of the pioneers in the empirical study of persuasion—this study analyzes how persuasive messages govern character relationships and delineates the fundamental elements of these communicative acts. According to Hovland’s model, every persuasive process comprises four essential components: the message source, message content, communication channel, and target audience. Employing a descriptive-analytical method combined with exhaustive induction across the text of the story, this study demonstrates that source characteristics (such as credibility and popularity), presentation strategies (such as clarity, logical argumentation, and emotional arousal), transmission channels (such as direct dialogue, oral messages delivered by messengers, and epistolary correspondence), and audience traits (such as intelligence and self-esteem) critically determine the trajectory of persuasion throughout the narrative. Beyond elucidating the function of persuasion in epic literature, these findings indicate that persuasive messages in the Shāhnāmeh operate not merely as instruments of transmission, but as substantive carriers of meaning forged within the cultural and psychological matrices of the characters. Consequently, analyzing persuasion illuminates the deeper mechanisms of meaning construction in interpersonal communication within classical literary texts.
کلیدواژهها English
