مشخصات پژوهش

Despite extensive scholarship on Saint Joan’s historicity, gender politics, and Shaw’s socialism, sustained rhetorical analysis of Joan’s language—and its systemic antagonism with institutional discourse—remains underexplored. Much criticism treats her speech as expressive of inner conviction or as emblematic of proto-feminist agency, but few examine how her utterances function as tactical interventions within asymmetrical power relations. This study aims to investigate how rhetorical contestation, discursive asymmetry, and epistemic resistance interact in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan through the lens of rhetorical theory and critical discourse analysis. The research will examine how Joan’s “wit” functions not as rhetorical ornament or charismatic charm, but as a structured discursive practice—arising spontaneously from embodied certainty, without deference to textual authority or procedural convention—and how her linguistic defiance, subsequent condemnation, and posthumous canonization reflect deep institutional anxieties about voice, legitimacy, and control. It will explore how authority, destabilized by Joan’s refusal to speak within sanctioned genres (theological citation, feudal deference, legal syllogism), resorts not to overt suppression but to discursive containment: pathologizing her immediacy as “pride,” recasting her irony as ignorance, and ultimately neutralizing her resistance by absorbing her voice into dogma. The study will also investigate how Shaw uses the formal architecture of the play—the forensic tension of the trial scenes, the procedural solemnity of ecclesiastical discourse, and the ironic distance of the Epilogue—to mirror the asymmetry between institutional rhetoric (grounded in precedent, abstraction, and third-person objectivity) and Joan’s rhetoric of immanence (rooted in sensory experience, first-person assertion, and situational pragmatism).