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Given the socioeconomic conditions of the African Americans in the mainstream American culture, the African American authors have almost always had to grapple with the issue of identity and subjectivity. Toni Morrison, as an African American woman novelist, has gone beyond the issue of identity within the paradigm of hegemony and counter-hegemony to throw into relief the multivariate character of identity formation in African American community. In an attempt to investigate the identity formation in Toni Morrison’s Paradise(1997), the present article has selected the analy-tical framework of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse theory and Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). After analyzing the linguistic and discursive practices of the novel through analytical concepts ofLaclau and Mouffe, it is concluded that subjectivity in Paradise is a construct contingent on the overdetermination of a myriad of discourses and relations of power which operate within the African American community. Therefore, subjectivity is a political formation.

In Iran, as well as in Iraqi Kurdistan, the critique of literary texts using ‘literary theories’ has grown in recent years. The present study investigates published articles in ‘Literary Criticism’ and ‘Sulaimaniyah University’ journals. The research method in this article is criticizing the critiques. The aim was to answer two questions: Why has this kind of critique and theory taken up so much volume? How have researchers applied this theory? The volume of the articles includes 188 Persian and 76 Kurdish articles. After discarding 46 Persian and 29 Kurdish articles in terms of the basic structure, the scope was reduced to 142 Persian and 47 Kurdish articles. After analyzing the articles, it was found that the theory of structuralism was used in 47 Persian articles (33.9%) and 15 Kurdish articles (33.09%). The theory had the largest share in the articles compared to the type of critique and other theories. An attempt has been made to apply the critique and theory of structuralism in these articles, to express the differences and correspondence of the type of attitude in Kurdish and Persian articles. The findings of the research are that in the published articles of both journals, this theory is not fully understood and they have a general view that can be one of the reasons for the great application of this theory in published articles. Looking at how this theory is used, it can be said that Kurdish researchers have dealt with this theory more superficially and most of the time there is no analysis of the type of structure in the text. Also, unlike Persian articles, theories such as structuralist mythology, paleontology, structuralist psychology, Bakhtin conversation logic, do not exist in Kurdish articles at all. Another point in the published articles of the two journals is the refusal of researchers to study the sources in the original language or the sources of the first degree of constructivism, which is directly related to the type of application and analysis of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]