JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMANITIES
Year:2005 | Volume:38 | Issue:1|Papers Count:13

Poetry has its own characteristics in each culture, but a comparative study of poets from different cultures no doubt provides us with a deeper insight into the nature of poetry. In this article, the writer, offering a short biography of Paul Valery (1871-1945), the symbolist poet of France, examines the most fundamental principles of symbolism and Paul Valery's view of philosophy of poetry. This is followed by a translation and analysis of one of his most known poems. An understanding of Paul Valery's views, the writer concludes, though written in a different time and place, can help us develop a deeper appreciation of Persian poetry.

In this article, the writers make a distinction between two types of text, open text and closed text. While the latter has a fixed and limited meaning, fixed signifiers and signifieds, with the signs always referring the reader to a fixed world, the former has the potential to be loaded with various meanings. To explicate the two types of text and the factors that make a text open, the writers draw on the views of great thinkers such as Rolan Barthes, Wolfgang Izer, Jacques Derrida and Carl Gustav Yung. The purpose of the article is to show how a familiarity with the western interpretations of Hermeneutics can affect our appreciation of Persian literature.

In spite of abundant scholarly research on Khayyam, the writer of the present article argues, he is still shrouded with mysteries. What scholars of Khayyam have failed to notice are the requirements of poetic discourse, the relation of poetry to thoughts, philosophy, facts of life and the personality of the poet. This article is based on the belief that Khayyam's quatrains cannot present a valid criterion for knowing him, and that we should not select Khayyam's quatrains based on his personality as a mathematician and philosopher. The language of emotions is different from the language of thought, and they need to be interpreted based on different criteria.

Nima, founder of modem Persian poetry, revealed romantic tendencies especially in his earlier poems, maintaining a milder romanticism for the rest of his life. The purpose of this article is to explore Nima's romantic tendencies and his views on romanticism regardless of his poetry. Nima's romanticism borders the social romanticism of the constitutional period and the sentimental romanticism of the 20s and 30s. The main characteristics of his romantic poetry are as follows: romantic love, desire for nature, primitivism, idealism, subjectivism, desire for isolation, appreciation of the poetry of European romantic poets, etc.

The novelist's interest in adventures, being the backbone of the traditional novel before 1950s, has undergone various changes in the era of the new novel. The purpose of this article is to describe these changes and the factors responsible for a renewed interest in adventures in the French postmodern literature.

Love is the most common theme in the works of Hafiz, Goethe and Pushkin. Hafiz calls himself "slave of love", and considers love the most enduring voice under the sky in all ages. Inspired by Hafiz, Goethe, too, talks of an earthly, divine love in his Western Eastern Divan, and in Faust, he treats love as the saver of Margaret's lost soul. In the Captain's Daughter, the love between Peter and Maria has a happy ending. In Eugene Onegin, he uncovers the tragic love of Anne Gene and Tatiana. Love is a recurring theme in his other works including the Village Girl, the Station Guard, Doubrofski and Rouslavolv. The purpose of this article is to compare the three poets' views of love in its various manifestations. It also describes how love has affected the lives of the poets and comments on their stories.

A profound change in man's world view in the last two centuries, a radical change in scientific-philosophical concept of stability to constant change, the relativity of all external realities, and the conception of the matter as the origin of existence, all these changes in the one hand, and the political events, specially those happening in the first half of the 20th century on the other hand, have provided the grounds for accepting the ideas of absurdity and purposelessness of the universe. Such changes affected not only philosophical ideas but literature and art as well, and the contemporary Arabic poetry was no exception. The purpose of this article is to show some of these influences as reflected in the contemporary Arabic poetry.

This article describes, first, the status of literary texts and the importance of incorporating this pillar of cultural heritage in the educational curricula in the universities. The writer then discusses the approaches to literary texts adopted at different levels of the educational system of Iran. It proceeds with the necessity of observing a sequence in teaching literary skills, comparing the literature course descriptions in the three programs of Persian Literature, French and English, placing emphasis on writing skills as the most important literary skill, as compared with the status of teaching French in French universities. Finally, the writer touches on the importance of literary texts interpretation as a practical and creative exercise to develop the literary skills of the students of literature.

Guy de Maupassant began writing stories at a time when the schools of realism and naturalism were in their heydays. Although he took inspirations from the masters of these schools, especially Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, he developed his own style in wiring stories. The purpose of this article is to describe Maupassant's art of writing and the way he depicts his characters. The article also touches upon his attitude toward the society of his time.

The novel kouli kenâr-e âtash (The gypsy by the fire), written by Moniroo Ravanipoor, is not exactly a postmodern novel, because the novel has a definite ending, whereas postmodern novels are characterized by an indefinite ending. However, there are elements in the novel that bear striking resemblances to those of the postmodern novel. In this article, the writers, presenting a definition of postmodernism and explaining its basic components in fiction, analyze kouli kenâr-e âtash based on the conventional characteristics of the postmodern novel.

The purpose of this article is two-fold: to find out the reasons why "Address", one of Sepehri's great poems, is superior to his other poems; and to present an interpretation of the poem which is closet to the poet's mental structure. To do so and to avoid dogmatism, the writer has interpreted the poem based on the poet's fluidity of thought as expressed in his collection of poems Hasht Ketab. In other words, the writer has found the various meanings of the key words of the poem in Hasht Ketab, and interpreted the poem based on those meanings that are in complete agreement with the poem.