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Dolatabadi is the most prolific author of the last two decades in Iran. Before writing novels and creating his great works such as Saluch's Absence and Kaleidar, Dolatabadi wrote long short stories, which shows his interest in writing novels. There have been only a few studies on his works and those available are mostly about the content of his stories and novels. This paper is a study of fourteen short stories by him with a particular attention to issues such as plot, point of view, characterization, and the type of beginnings and endings in them. A brief review of Dolatabadi's life and works before 1357 as well as some scholars' views of the narration and narratology in his works will precede the main discussion.

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The Gone by Days of Elderly People, authored by Mahmoud Dolatabadi is a well-known Iranian novel, which has been written based on magical realism literary style. Beneath the realistic and historical layer of this novel, the permanent and firm presence of a legendary world is evident. In this manner, the legendary savior or Sushians plays a fateful role. This article studies Sushians and related topics in connection with the formation of magical realism in this novel. It is concluded that the author in an apparent attempt to pull out of the corrupt human community, is after the creation of utopia; the example of which is evident in Sushians, within the framework of the artistic world. The writer recreates these legends: Sushians in the framework of Se Saamoun and Saam; the impostor in the framework of caliph of Chalang; Gouaak Pad, the mother of Sushians within the framework of Baluch girl/ the mother of Saamoun. Also, in this novel, mentions have been made of the satanic world and expectation of the savior; three phases of creation; seven immortals and salvation, in line with their narrations based on Zoroastrianism.

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own self dimensions and delegitimize the others’ elements; legitimation, from the semiotic-discursive point of view, is a process that hegemonizes power through discourse articulation. The authors’ aim in this paper is to investigate and identify the way in which the legitimating mechanisms of gendered discourses function in contemporary Persian story literature. Hence, they provide a deconstructive reading of the methodology of Van Leeuwen (2007) based on Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Derrida (1983) and take advantage of a variety of linguistic tools. Then, in order to analyze the functions of these mechanisms, they go through the “Solok” and purposefully examine some of its parts. Finally, they respond to the research question about how the legitimizing mechanisms of gendered discourses operate and introduce four structures, i.e. simple, compound, complex, and chain, in those mechanisms. Moreover, they show that after gaining and achieving the legitimacy, the gendered discourses step forward to maintain and fix the legitimacy and delegitimize the other explicitly and implicitly- by the way of recontextualization.
 1. Introduction
Legitimation is a discursive mechanism that seeks to hegemonize the operation of any discourse. The purpose of this study is to investigate the function of de / legitimation mechanisms of gendered discourses in the contemporary story literature.
The importance of this research can be discussed in three dimensions. First, the researched body is story literature which benefits from the tools that make it more hegemonic than other wirtten texts such as political ones. The second is its methodology which provides a deconstructive reading of Van Leeuwen (2007) theory of legitimation. Finally, it goes beyond the description and tries to explain how discursive legitimation works in the story under study.
The main question is how gendered discourses in the Dolatabadi's Solok try to legitimize own self dimensions and delegitimize the others’ elements. And finally, the hypothesis is that the gendered discourses in Solok try to legitimize their dimensions by changing their articulations, creating discursive nodes, and crystallizing around those nodes, and try to de-legitimize the other by rejecting the signs’ concepts.
 
2. Methodology
The methodology of this study benefits from the deconstructive reading of the methodology of Van Leeuwen (2007) based on Laclau & Mouffe (2001) and Derrida (1983) and it takes advantage of a variety of linguistic tools.
Van Leeuwen (2007) identified four legitimation mechanisms - each consists of some subcategories - that operates separately or jointly to de / legitimize discourses:

1. Authorization: Legitimation by reference to the authority of tradition, custom, law, and/or persons in whom institutional authority of some kind is vested. It has six types: personal authority, expert authority, role model authority, impersonal authority, the authority of tradition, and the authority of conformity.
2. Moral evaluation: Legitimation by reference to value systems. It is consisted of evaluation, abstraction, and analogies.
3. Rationalization: Legitimation by reference to the goals and uses of institutionalized social action and to the knowledges that society has constructed to endow them with cognitive validity. It could be instrumental or theoretical rationalization, which the former is consisted of goal, means, and effect orientation and the latter of expreintial, scientific, definition, explanation, and prediction.
4. Mythopoesis: Legitimation conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward legitimate actions and punish nonlegitimate actions. By definition, this category is consisted of moral tales, cautionary tales, single determination, and overditermination which in its turn it is of two types: inversion and symbolization.

The above is the start point of our methodology in this study. While using it as the core of the methodology, we tried to deconstruct its categorizations by the use of Derrida’s approach on deconstruction and threshold as well as Laclau & Mouffe’s explanation on the concept of discourse.  
Derrida (1983) discusses about “deconstruction” in “Letter to a Japaness Friend”. He believes “Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organisation of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs it-self. It can be deconstructed.”. Then, he emphasizes on the importance of “context”. While describing Derrida in detail, Nojoumian writes: “Derrida believes that the boundaries between discourses are invalid and says that discourses leak into each other” (2016: 56). Thus, the legitimation cannot remain tough and untouchable, because the discourse fixation is limited and temporary, and it collapses at the discourse boundaries - the threshold - and is placed in a paradoxical status.
Moreover, Laclau & Mouffe (2001) define the discourse as to the following:
we will call articulation any practice establishing  a  relation  among  elements  such  that  their  identity  is modified  as  a  result  of  the  articulatory  practice.  The  structured totality resulting from  the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential  positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated.
Following Van Leeuwen (2007) we asked the narrator “Why should I accept your narration?” and / or “Why should I accept the gendered discourses as you represented them?”. And finally, having new tools of analysis with regard to the concept of discourse, its articulation, and its unstable boundaries, i.e. the threshold, as well as the deconstructive reading of Van Leeuwen (2007), we analyized of Dolatabadi’s “Solok”.
 
3. Conclusion
The innovation of this research has two prominent aspects. First, the authors dealt with the story literature which uses a high degree of hegemony and the narrator benefits from a variety of linguistically narrative and aesthetic mechanisms to legitimize his omniscience and narration. Second, the authors methodologically adopted a deconstructive reading of Van Leeuwen (2007) by use of Laclau & Mouffe (2001) and Derrida (1983).  
In the analysis, it has been noticed that despite the narrator’s efforts to gain, maintain, and fix the legitimacy for the intended discourses in the story, he had no way but to be caught in paradox. Hence, the research hypothesis of changing the articulation of gendered discourse in SOLOK in order to legitimize their own nodes and simultaneously de-legitimize the other’s dimension is confirmed. 
Also, the linguistic structure of de/legitimation mechanisms can be generally presented in four categories: 1) simple: a proposition de/legitimize another proposition, 2) compound: at least two propositions de/legitimize the other proposition, 3) complex (nested): a proposition that is de/legitimizing the other proposition, has a de/legitimation structure in itself. 4) chainlike: sequences of propositions that move one after the other in the direction of legitimizing, maintaining and fixing it.

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Authorization is a process in narration that according which the narrator constructs her/ his own legitimation and narration using the discursive articulations. The authors’ aim in this paper is to investigate the linguistic processes of development, maintenance and fixation of authorization which the female and male narrators use in the narrations. Hence, they provided a deconstructive reading of the authorization by Van Leeuwen (2007) based on Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Derrida (1983). Then, in order to identify the linguistic tools of development, maintenance and fixation processes of the personal authority, they went through the “Se-Ketab” by Pirzad and “Solok” by Dolatabadi and purposefully examined those parts. Finally, it was found that Pirzad and Dolatabadi try to legitimize their own dimensions by using their selves and others’ positions, creating discursive nodes, and crystallizing around them. At the same time, they try to delegitimize by rejecting the meanings of the signs from others’ narratives. Also, on a larger scale, it was revealed that the two narrators’ self-representation was different; Pirzad constituted the discursive “We” and Dolatabadi an omniscient narrator. Neither of these two narrators could escape the paradox.

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Meaning-based theory is one of the new approaches to character analysis in narrative. The present article seeks to analyze the character of "Golmohammad" in Kudlar's novel based
on this theory. And to answer these questions using a descriptive-analytical approach
1. What are the traits and characteristics of Gul Mohammad according to the components of meaning-based theory? 2. In which textual contexts are these traits represented? The result of the study shows that according to the principles of generalizability The repetition, similarity, contrast, and implication of Mohammad's flower have contradictory traits and characteristics That these traits and characteristics were represented in contextual contexts such as direct description Exterior appearance of personality, action, speech, temporal analogy.

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The ratio of government apparatus to social institutions has a special place in Mahmoud Dolatabadi’s short stories which has often been overlooked due to being in the shadow of Kalidar. Accordingly, by analyzing the actions and reactions of social groups with the state institution that are the Quasi-nation of the nation, one can define and explain this two-way relationship which takes into account the legitimacy of the power institution from the point of view of society. The results of the receipt and explanation of these works reflect the fact that there is a kind of alienation, rupture, and fission between the institutional power and the community that led to the confrontation between the two institution. On the other hand, the reflection of this confrontation is based on linguistic and literary techniques embodied in fictional masterpieces. From the point of view of ideological function, it means the increasing deepening of the discontinuity. In the final analysis, it focuses on a kind of decriminalization of the dominant political discourse of the Pahlavi era.