Reader

Hooshang Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab, as a very influential novel in the Iranian history of novel writing, has drawn attentions from plethora of critics with different approaches and attitudes. The present article draws on the ideas and concepts introduced by deconstructive theoreticians to investigate the nuances and delicate contradictions the novel offers about the nature of power relations. The article mainly centers around the opposition between the binary of author/reader, how it is reversed or subverted in the novel, and the way it is extended to the novels’ involvement with power relations which may be representative of the general social and power structure of particular historical era in Iran. To avoid the major critique against deconstruction's abstract armchair theorizing, the present article would also draw upon some of the well-known ideas and concepts used by famous writers in power relation namely Louis Althusser and Foucault to move the analysis beyond the text to the social sphere.

Experience and subjectivity influence how texts are read, with reading involving “filling in the blanks”. This impacts the usefulness of intercoder reliability exercises in collaborative textbook analysis. Specifically, scholars’ individual backgrounds limit possibilities for substantive and meaningful intercoder reliability, particularly in international, cross-cultural, and multicultural settings. In this case, reliability is a problematic goal in textbook content analysis, possibly precluding substantive recognition of reader subjectivity—of researchers as well as students and teachers. In contrast, we argue that collaboration in textbook research can reveal the multifaceted nature of texts and generate multi-perspectival interpretations which are more meaningful in diverse contexts.