LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2009 | Volume:1 | Issue:4|Papers Count:9

This paper examines two modes of fantastic genre, i.e uncanny and marvelous, with regard to the stories of Tanookhi's the Relief after the Grief. We will start by a discussion of Todorov's work on the 'fantastic'. In doing so, the etymology of the keywords and the review of literature are also given. Then, it is referred to Todorovian structural approach to 'the fantastic'. Due to this approach, it is told that in the fantastic stories of the book (sometimes titled as "keraamaat" genre), the reader has to experience the world described as a possible or impossible world full of fear and strange: depending on the readers to explain the occurrence of strange events naturally or supernaturally, the stories may undergo the category of uncanny or marvelous, respectfully. Finally, as conclusion and new results, it is said that in the Relief after the Grief: 1) the focus is on one central character as the center for all events 2) events of the stories are seen through the focal point of this character as the main narrator- focalizer and 3) The reader’s point of view should be that of the central character and the events should be focalized through his eyes.

According to the intertextul approach there is no text that is selfsufficient; rather,in this approach, it is supposed that every text is an intertext from previous texts and for following texts. In this essay, first different aspects of text and intertextuality are explained and then, a tale from Marzbanname is analyzed according to this approach. At the end,it has been shown that as Barthes, Bakhtin, Keristova, Genette, Todorov and other adherents of Intertextulity approach have emphasized, there is no authentic and original text; therefore, the mentioned tale from Marzbanname, like other texts, is a retelling of previous texts.

Structuralists consider literature to have a structure similar to language and try to compile special syntactic rules for it. In fiction, Structuralism mainly studies narration. Structuralist narratologists try to compile a single coherent narrative structure for the different domains of fiction.In this article, we have tried to analyze one of the most famous Persian novels,Shazdeh Ehtejab by Houshang Golshiri, within the framework of the structuralist viewpoints of Genette, Greimas, Bramond, Todorov and Barthes. To do that, we have studied the structure of Shazdeh Ehtejab in three levels: in the first level which we call "narrator and point of view in Shazdeh Ehtejab" we study the point of view, method of narration and the narrator/narrators who narrate Shazdeh Ehtejab. In the second level we study the narrative structure of Shazde Ehtejab and in the third level we structurally analyze Shazdeh Ehtejab.

The purpose of present article is to introduce the basic constituents of the story blueprint, and principles governing them. By the story blueprint I intend the reader's inference about some relatively short sequences of narrative events. The local rules operative on these sequences help the reader discriminate story characters' goal-directed actions from unintentional events and states, before mentally modeling an overall structure of interlinked larger sequences within a storyworld. Action, event, and state are among the concepts inextricably connected with the notion of story and reiterated through the history of narrative analysis. The concepts at issue, and with them the nature and scope of narrative itself, have been further illuminated by recent insights offered mainly by linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. Most of these developments occurred long before the establishment of cognitive sciences, and even before the heyday of structuralist narratology. But despite their availability at the time, they have been brought within the compass of classical theories of narrative since only a couple of decades ago. Narrative theorists argue that to tell and comprehend stories is to operate within a system of rules in which events are preferentially viewed as structural sequences of intentionally-oriented actions. In recent works on the semantics of verbs, however, language theorists have made finer-grained classifications of expressible events, with actions as a mere subcategory. This article is thus meant to explore some of the implications of verb semantics for narrative theory, especially as concerns typology of narratives under various genres.

The views of the great poets on the essence of poetry and its constituent elements, expressed implicitly within the lines of their poetry, offer invaluable points that are often missed by literary critics. These critical views, which are sometimes expressed in pseudo philosophical statements, and are often wrapped in artistic expressions, are based in their actual experiences. These views are usually expressed in brief, or wrapped in imagery, or even in an elegant indirect language, which may be extracted and, through analysis, may lead to our deeper understanding and invaluable views on poetry. These conclusions, we realize, are sometimes confirmed by the bulk of criticism. It is worth noticing that such conclusions were already preceded by great poets who were apparently the best critics themselves.The classification and the analysis of these poets’ views on poetry are considerable, and can constitute a new branch of study in the field of history of literary criticism in Persian Literature, and subsequently change the traditional system of evaluation of poetic styles.

In the history of world's literature, there have always been authors who see literary works as a place to express human’s position in the society and try to describe man in relation to the nature and the world surrounding him and warn him of the perils this world may bring to him. Today's world is a world of unrest, tension and identity loss due to rapid technological changes and ideological instabilities. With machines overwhelming human life and his conformity to the cold tune of today's world, a distance has emerged between man on one hand and morality and spirituality on the other, and this has led him gradually to a severe critical atmosphere.Some creators of literary works have tried to show this reality in their works. They have employed creative literary techniques to show an intensified view of human position in relation to the current world in order to refer man to his inner nature and notify him of the peril and distress governing the society. Kafka, Ionesco and Saramago are among those writers who are mindful of the crisis man is experiencing in his modern and postmodern life and have reflected the situation in their works, the Metamorphosis, Rhinoceros, and Blindness, respectively.In this article we have used the intertextual approach to analyse these three works based on their structure and theme and have remarked their semiological relationship.

Formula is a structural element of popular romances. This essay analyzes the situation of this element in the romance of Amir Arsalan. First, the concept of formula in the field of oral composition is defined; then functional arrangement of formulas is presented (formulas construct linear process of the story, shape the space of the story and dialogical formulas); afterward, through analyzing the subset of this three major groups, qualitative and quantitative effects of the factors such as literary tradition, naqqali's (storytelling) tradition, naqqal (the storyteller), addressee, writer, social setting and other factors depending on this romance have been demonstrated. It should be pointed out that among the above factors the influence of epic and lyric text and artistic prose, domination of metaphorical pole of language and poetic quality of the text and sensible effect of the addressee and the writer of romance (Naser al-din shah and Fakhr aldowleh) on the process of creating the romance have been also influential.