Zohreh Ramin - Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Tehran
Parisa Pooyandeh - PhD Graduate in English Literature, University of Tehran

The basis of this study is on the definition of discourse as sets of texts affecting and directing each other in a dialogic context. As such, regarding the fact that there is a diversity of classes and groups co-existing alongside each other within a discourse, and that the power resides in the dominant class order determining their interests, there can be found contradictions in these texts. These conflicts are not necessarily intended by the writer from the very beginning as is the case in this short story by Toni Morrison. The writer puts the riddle of binary opposition of blackness/whiteness on the part of the reader to find out how sets of texts in the discourse are affecting each other. However, since the style of any writer with special ideological and linguistic choices, reveals ‘motivations’ as well as ‘effects’ of those choices, the aim of this paper is to trace these effects as well as the writer’s motivations, which are overshadowed in the narrative of the story, forming specifically a sort of black narrative and showing Morrison’s outlook toward black and white people and their way of thoughts toward each other. For this purpose, the method of Critical Discourse Analysis with the IDF approach (ideological discursive formation) are chosen to derive the idea of the implied binary.

Black Narrative, Critical Discourse Analysis, IDF, Binary opposition.