LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2016 | Volume:8 | Issue:32|Papers Count:9

Influenced by the avant-gardism of his time, especially Expressionism and Surrealism, Hedayat in the Blind Owl chooses the horror genre, internal monologue, and a poetic structure to represent the psychology of the narrator. In this genre, the sense of fear and impending violence is often conveyed through the atmosphere of the story. The dominant ambience of the story is enhanced through not only direct description but also, and especially, the rhetorical figures such as simile and metaphor. In this article, I discuss what role these rhetorical techniques play in creating a suspenseful atmosphere of terror and emptiness the Blind Owl. This paper employs a formalist approach.

In classical Persian literature, there are many references to the “green” sky. However, many Persian speakers today use the color blue to refer to the sky. Several researchers have discussed the status of the green color in mythological, astrological, poetic visualization, and religious beliefs of Iranians to explain this difference. Nevertheless, they have ignored the fact that this discrepancy is not limited to classical texts and still can be observed in different parts of the country and, moreover, there are similar examples in languages and cultures all around the world. This article studies the colors attributed to the sky in Persian literature drawing on linguistic relativity theory about the influence of language on color perception. I conclude that Persian speakers in the absence of a word indicating all shades of blue have associated the color of the sky with a type of green color. This, however, was not just a linguistic choice. Older generations under the influence of linguistic relativity perceived the color of the sky as a shade of green color.

The Iranian TV series, Gohar-e Kamal (1998), is written and directed by Abbas Ranjbar and was shown on IRIB. Parts of this TV series resemble Abbas Maroufi’s novel Sal-e Balva (1992); nevertheless, there are no references to this novel in the credits of the show. This article studies Maroufi’s novel and Gohar-e Kamal and points out some possible influences of Maroufi’s novel on Ranjbar’s series. As the screenwriter, Ranjbar borrows certain phrases and dialogues from the novel. Furthermore, some of his characters, such as “Raziye Nobakht,” “Hatam Khanpour,” and “Ghobad” are modeled after characters such as “Noushafarin Niloufari,” “Hosseina Kouzeh-gar” and “Dr. Masoum” from the novel. However, certain themes and motifs of the novel have been modified so that they comply with the cultural norms of society.

There seems to be a strong dualism throughout the novel, Chess with the Doomsday Machine, both in the images of the text and its narrator’s viewpoint. The story revolves around the eight-year Iran-Iraq War and purportedly follows the typical novels of the “Holy Defence” genre in which the most significant theme is the human choice of divine sacrifice; on the other hand, there are elements of an absurd worldview in the text in which wars and the entirety of the creation are viewed fatalistically. This dualism gets stronger in the paratexts of the novel. Paratexts, in Genette’s theory, are the surrounding elements of the text by which the text proposes itself as a book to its readers, and more generally to the public. While inner paratexts of the studied novel, like the title, the cover, and its appendages and epigraphs show an absurd viewpoint, its outer ones, such as the dedication of the work, notes of the author and the publisher’s propaganda, try to misrepresent it as a work with a “Holy Defence” discourse. Some of this dualism is because of the open ending of the story and some is due to the authorial out-of-text decisions such as choosing the publisher, Sure-ye Mehr, that is famous for its ideological books. It seems that the dualism of the paratexts of Chess with the Doomsday Machine is a result of the author’s insight into the different types of readers whose satisfaction has been at the center of the author’s attention.

Dogmatic approaches interpret literary texts in definitive ways. However, literary texts do lose their supposed absolute and final meanings when approached from a poststructuralist perspective. Consequently, it is possible to have multiple readings of a text from different perspectives. Drawing on Derridean deconstruction of binary oppositions, this paper studies a miniature painting by Sultan Mohammad Naqqash based on Hafez’s poetry. Hafez’s divan is always open to various interpretations between spiritual and worldly approaches. Contrary to the classical interpretations in which a definitive meaning is sought after, “Heavenly and Earthly Inebriation” painting by Sultan Mohammad deconstructs this opposition and presents a new reading of the poem. Based on an analytic-historical method, we argue that this painting creates a new hermeneutic world by geometric composition, colors, and characterization. The painting, we conclude, maintains the poetic ambiguity of Hafez’s poetry. Accordingly, we can say that there is no final meaning in this painting because the spectators simultaneously experience both poles of this opposition and, as a result, for them there is no absolute interpretation.

This research explores power relations in Touba and the Meaning of Night, focusing on the gender issue and gender representation in the novel. Studying modal structures and modality is one of the tools provided by Halliday’s social linguistics for examining texts and revealing their ideological functions. Focusing on the role of modality in the production of texts and reproduction of power and gender relations, we study modality in this novel with an analytic-descriptive method. The novel offers a seventy-year-old historical perspective on Iranian women. However, in the course of this seemingly progressive historical movement, Touba, the heroine of the novel, not only does not achieve her ends but also, quite on the contrary, shows signs of regression. In the beginning of the novel, Touba is a self-assured woman who talks and acts decisively, but toward the ending of the novel she turns into someone without certainty or any kind of conviction. Indeed, Touba’s modal structures evolve from external certitude and determination to internal doubt and hesitation. In the end, Touba’s internal evolution and spiritual barrenness are closely related to more general social discursive relations and functions during the Qajar and First Pahlavi dynasties, especially those convictions that prevent women from thinking, speaking, and participating in external practices in the social scene.

The present study attempts to determine the citation status in printed articles in the Journal of Literary Criticism. This study applies a survey method with a citation analysis approach. All articles published in this journal during 1998-2014 (1387-1393) have been our case of study. Some achievement of this study includ: the co-authorship shows that researchers tend to product articles individually. Ferdowsi University of Mashhad was the most productive institute. Most co-authorship between institutions was conducted by Tarbiat Modares University. The average of citations for each article was 21.9 percent. The book citations (76.24%) were more than the journals (21.16%). Most of the citations were to Persian sources (69.05%) and Sirus Shamisa, Mohammad Reza Shafie Kadkani and Tzvetan Todorov were the most cited scholars. Mohammad Nabavi was the most cited translator. "Structure and Interpretation of the Text" is the most cited book. "The Journal of Literary Criticism" and "New literary History" are the most cited journal. "The Journal of Literary Criticism" and "New literary History" are the most cited journal.

Figurative language by omitting direct reference and employing metaphor, allusion, symbol and etc. always conceals its referent and as a result causes tension between different elements of the text. One of the efficient means to escape from transparency is irony. Following a descriptive method, this article analyzes nine existing articles in Persian language on this issue in order to clarify some of the semantic ambiguities around this term. These studies often suffer from conceptual errors that stem from the fact that irony is a Western figure of speech. The authors of these articles often do not define a specific meaning for this term and mix the opinions of Western and Iranian critics. The main weakness of these articles is in identifying examples of irony in Persian literature.