LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2013 | Volume:6 | Issue:21|Papers Count:10

Metalepsis is divided into two types: first, the movements from extra diegetic to diegetic levels; and second, the movement from diegetic to extra diegetic levels. This article analyzes the various modes of the first type of metalepsis in Mathnavi. Mathnavican be considered as the most prominent example of narrative text in Persian literature with instances of transgression of levels.

The never-ending discourse of Hafiz of Shiraz has become an artistic enigma and many have provided with recurring themes by the exploration n of his words. The ghazals of Hooshang Ebtehaj (H. A. Sayeh) particularly bear the rich textual and extra-textual resemblances to the ghazals of Hafiz and declare a historical and inmost dialogue with the Hafizian art and thought. In this paper, I aim to present dialogism to put the Mikhail Bakhtin's literary-social theory of the text in practical use by application of Sayeh's approaching to Hafiz besides a Persian poetic tradition, entitled Javab-gooyee. By this we can also criticize some remarks on the decadence and imitational style of Sayeh's poetry. Here the Sayeh’s dialogical Hafizoriented ghazals will be studied in intertextual analysis and discursive manner on the basis of some views of structuralists as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. I should conclude briefly that Sayeh's dialogisms haunt between the text and the society. On one hand, his intertextual references are often restricted to the syntagmatic axis, especially to reproduction of lingual codes, rhetorical devices, and prosody of Hafiz and on the other hand, his historical discourse, especially on three characteristics namely society, human, and love take a polemical stand against the Hafiz’s statement.

This study addresses Karl Mannheim’s definition of democracy according to which democracy goes beyond the political sphere and dwells in the realm of culture. A democratic culture is distinct from a pre-democratic one in its reduction of vertical distance, i.e. qualitative distance, and recognition of horizontal distance, or differences. Based on this distinction, we will refer to some of the representations of a democratic culture, namely, individuality and objectivity and will discuss how they emerge from the context of a democratic culture. Using this perspective, we will look at Nima’s poetry (1299-1336 S.H.) and try to determine its poetic features. It seems that one may see the zenith of Nima’s poetry, regarding its tendency towards individuality and objectivity, around the time of the Constitutional Revolution; while at the middle of Reza Shah Despotism, these characteristics started to dwindle. We will investigate the possible reasons behind this shift in Nima’s poetry and will look into the impacts of Pahlavi’s despotic regime. The social circumstances of the time, we have concluded, restricted the socio-political life of the poet and, eventually, led him to draw on an abstract world rather than the real life as his main source of inspiration for poetry.

Memories of the Iraqi war against Iran are often narrated by men. In these narratives, women are mostly defined through their relation with a solider, for instance as a martyr’s mother or wife. Da (The famous and best-seller auto-fiction of war in recent years in Iran), however, presents a different case. In this paper, we studyDa and its relation to the dominant social discourse using Fairclough theory and method.Fairclough refers to a three-dimensional model for studying discourse: (1) analysis of language texts; (2) analysis of discourse practice; and (3) analysis of socio-cultural practice. Unlike the traditional discourse, Da emphasizes on the other roles of women in the war. In addition, Da tries to create a feminine verbal construction that is unprecedented in other books by women writers. With a male act and a female speech, Da creates a new text and a new discourse.

Ahmadreza Ahmadi is a famous name in the world of children literature in Iran. Yet his special style raises doubts about the capacity of his works to establish an appropriate relation with his audience, i.e. children. In this paper, we study some of Ahmadi’s stories in relation to the question of audience. Accordingly, we will draw on Chambers’ “The Reader in the Book” (1977) in this paper. In this approach, Chambers studies the implied reader that the story itself is looking for. To know the implied reader and his/her characteristics, he suggests studying four factors in the text: style, point of view, manipulation of expectations, and “telltale gaps.” These factors play an important role in children’s books and help the author communicate with the reader. In this paper, we have chosen two of Ahmadi’s recent works, namely, Parvaneh rooye balesh-e man be khab rafteh bood1and Dokhtarak, mahi, tanhayi2 published in 2011 for our studied of the implied reader. The results show that Ahmadi has a different point of view about children and the concept of childhood. He believes in children’s intelligence, power of critical thinking, perspective, and high imagination and he gives them the opportunity to participate in different parts of the story. Thus, the implied readers in his books are thoughtful and capable children with pure imagination and innovative souls who are able to enjoy the beauties of the story and discover the hidden concepts in it. Also the depth and complexity of Ahmadi’s books provoke the adults and the young adults to read and enjoy his works equally.

All phenomena have macro- and microstructures. Microstructure refers to the parts, details, and sentences by which a text is constructed; and macrostructures is plot, summary, or a large-scale statement about content of a text. The interaction of these structures produces another structure: a macrofiction. This structure can be found in the stories that have similar schematic structures, in a way that the given schema of a text or paratext with its details is projected to the other space (story); and finally, they are both conflated in a new space. This paper examines the nature of this new structure and its function for fictional discourse as well as the interaction of macroand microstructures for construction of a layer of joint structures. It explicates the nature of macrofiction and the process by which it is created in Ebrahim Golestan’s collection of short stories, Shekar-e Sayeh. Consequently, according to the untold story inferred from the link between the short stories, there are people in a society with different characters which repeat the same absurd life through having a wrong purpose. An important feature of macrofiction is the narration of the story through a particular arrangement of the stories and not through a direct narrative.

It is generally acknowledged that Sadegh Hedayat was an intellectual who dedicated his life to struggling against the Pahlavi dictatorship. According to many biographies written about him, although Hedayat belonged to a royal family, his love for the human freedom placed him in opposition to the Pahlavi regime. Against the common belief, after analyzing the Blind Owl from the viewpoint of Michael Foucault’s theory of power, especially his notion of “panopticism,” this article concludes that Hedayat, influenced by the dominant discourse of nationalism of the era, has worked, consciously or unconsciously, for the dictatorship of the Pahlavi regime.