At the dawn of the modern period, the English society was a patriarchal one. In other words, men dominated the society and the family. Patriarchal standards of Elizabethan age introduced women as figures that should be dominated and controlled. In most of Shakespeare's plays the conflict between women and the patriarchal ideology is shown. Women's resistance is the point of disagreement between Stephen Greenblatt who founded new historicism and Alan Sinfield who is one of cultural materialists in Britain. Greenblatt has a negative understanding of the mechanisms of power relations in which he states that resistances are contained within the standards of the dominant while Sinfield believes in the faultlines of the texts in which the dominant cannot hold the ground. Paulina can be seen as a clear manifestation of the text's gap. This study focuses on this disagreement with special references to The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare. It also tries to analyze how female voices tried to gain power and space to be articulated.

Mohammadreza Mirzadeh Eshghi in Persian Literature is comparable to Percy Bysshe Shelley as one can compare the reign of terror that emerged in Iran after the Constitutional Revolution to the reign of terror that existed in England after the French Revolution. Mirzadeh Eshghi and Shelley composed poetry and drama in response to the ruling powers of their eras. They both showed resistance and questioned the ruling discourses of their time in order to make their voices heard. This can be interpreted from the point of view of Cultural Materialism. Allan Sinfield, a notable figure among cultural materialists, suggests dissident reading of texts and talks of faultlines in texts that challenge the ruling discourses. This study argues that the difference between the poet’s voice and the ruling discourses of the era depicts faultlines in such discourses and thus challenges them.

In contemporary American society the dominant discourse of the white contend to suppress ethnic minority cultures. Throughout the American history, Euro-Americans have devised their own discourse in order to legitimize their colonization and suppress Native and African Americans as it is evident in Toni Morrison’ s Beloved. In order to reach the goals, the white people attached certain meanings to the signs which privileged the white culture over other ethnic minorities. How they have tried to articulate their discourse, its effects on the mentioned minorities and how this dominant discourse is resisted are the sole concern of this essay. Laclau and Mouffee’ s theory on discourse is used to show how opposing cultures have tried to articulate their discourse in the mentioned novel and also how the ethnic minorities in the mentioned novel try to attach different meanings to the floating signifiers in order to construct a discourse specific to their own culture. In this sense, Alan Sinfield’ s theory of faultlines and Raymond Williams’ theory of Dominant, Residual and Emergent and also theories of Michel Bakhtin, Louise Montrose, and Antonio Gramsci are used to show how the minorities channelize their resistances against the dominant Euro-American discourse...

The present article studies the interaction between the myth of America as a cultural discourse and Saul Bellow’, s The Adventures of Augie March. Thus, we would consider the active role of this text in the reproduction of this discourse. To do so, we use the Cultural Materialism approach to see how what, in the words of Alan Sinfield, we call a “, faultline”,or contradiction in the structure of the dominant discourse, first allows the “, dissidence”,to come about and then in its interaction with this dissidence, “, contains”,it and uses it for circulating and reaffirming its principles. Therefore, for the sake or organization, first we formulate the dominant cultural system which is termed “, the discourse of America”,in the form of American Dream and then, consider the reduction of this discourse to the mere pursuit of materialistic interests and its ignorance of human values as a faultline. After that, we consider Augie’, s desire for being intellectually different and independent as a voice of dissidence which occurs in the lack of such values (faultline). We argue that this psychological tendency in Augie’, s disposition sends him out in search of self-made “, fate”, , but finally, for seeming sane and being accepted by the social norms, mainly materially represented in the beliefs and behaviors of other characters with whom Augie inevitably interacts, Augie has to repress his spiritual desire and follow the way toward being rich and economically prosperous, while by doing that, he reaffirms the values of the discourse of America.