Analysis of Mouse & Cat Mock Heroic Stories by Obaid Zakani and Sheikh Bahaie with an Emphasis on the Adolescent Readers

Authors
Pariya Ansari 1
Shahin Ojagh Alizadeh 2
Ghadam Ali Sarami 3
1 PhD student, Faculty of Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, Tehran, Iran.
2 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, Tehran, Iran
3 Associate Professor, Faculty of Persian Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Zanjan Branch, Iran,
10.2634/Lire.22.87.43
Abstract
Mock-heroic, as one of the most important types of parody, uses completely different elements of epic and humor to express a single goal in a creative text format. In this type, with the help of inverting the content and form of the noble epic and combining humor and epic discourses, the dissonance between the subject and the style of a work is achieved in a satirical format, with the help of inconsistency. A subject that can have a higher effect on meeting the needs of the teenage readers by emphasizing their growth characteristics and attract more of this special class to literature compared to other undesirable cultural options. One of the most well-known titles of the mock-heroic is the symbolic confrontation between the Mouse and the Cat, which is undoubtedly the most famous in Persian works written by Obeid Zakani and Sheikh Bahaie. In this research, a comparative analysis of these two works for teenagers is presented using the content analysis of story elements. This study has been done by using the identified teenage humor indicators resulting from discursive and semantic inconsistency of humor. Based on this, the differences and similarities of these famous writers in dealing with a single genre using the weighted-sum method have been identified as one of the well-known multi-criteria decision making methods. The results show that the work of Sheikh Bahaie's Cat and Mouse gets a higher score of teenage humor indicators such as humiliation, simile to animals, anagram of things, idiotism and sarcasm.


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Literary Research
Volume 22, Issue 87
Spring 2025
Pages 43-72