Dialectic of Enlightenment and Popular Culture in the Young Adult Novel Scorpions of the Bambak Ship: A Critical Analysis Based on the Frankfurt School

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Postdoctoral in Persian Language and Literature, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

2 associate professor of Persian of Language and Literature, Persian literature group, Faculty of ‎Literature and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran‎

Abstract

The Frankfurt School, through a critical engagement with the concept of the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and the notion of the “culture industry”, reveals the dual face of culture in the modern world; a culture that can function both as a chain and as a key to liberation. Meanwhile, popular culture, like a flowing river, intertwines people’s narratives with the structures of power; at times serving the consolidation of domination and at other times moving toward its disruption. The novel Scorpions of the Bambak Ship by Farhad Hassanzadeh, through the use of local language, indigenous horizons, and a symbolic setting such as an abandoned ship in Abadan in the turbulent days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran, constructs a scene where adolescents reconstruct their identity and consciousness amid the tensions between media, memory, and resistance. This study, employing a descriptive-analytical method, sought to uncover the hidden connections between elements of popular culture and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in the structure of this novel. The study aimed to understand how critical consciousness is generated from everyday life and to decode the strategies adopted by the adolescents in the story to resist the dominant current. The findings indicated that the adolescents in Scorpions of the Bambak Ship, by relying on vernacular language, collective memory, the creative engagement with public spaces, and their familiarity with new forms of consciousness and mass media, transform dominant narratives and, out of constraints, construct a dissenting and self-aware identity. These actions demonstrated that popular culture, contrary to common assumptions, is not a passive periphery but a dynamic center for the reproduction of meaning and the stimulation of critical awareness, a center that can simultaneously preserve the past and generate possibilities for liberation in the future, even within conditions of domination.  

Keywords

References

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Journal of Resistance Literature
Volume 18, Issue 34
July 2026
Pages 38-58

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