LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2008 | Volume:1 | Issue:1|Papers Count:10

The occurrence of speech is dependent on the presence of three principal factors: speaker, addressee and discourse. In the past, literate people were few in numbers and there was no means of reproducing texts; consequently, communication between the speaker and the addressee was oral. In modern times, as a result of the rise in literacy and the invention of the means of reproducing texts this communication occurs in a written mode. The author produces the text in the absence of readers, of whose knowledge and emotional condition he has no information. Likewise, the reader reads the text in the absence of the author and usually with no information about the latter’s emotional condition or knowledge. If we take communication to be a kind of dialogue, it could then be argued that the author’s dialogue with the reader takes place at the moment of the text’s production and in the reader’s absence, and the reader’s dialogue with the text occurs in the author’s absence. In view of the four factors making up the context for the text’s production and consumption, the radical shift in man’s view about the universe, and the transformation of literary communication from an oral to a written mode which allows the reader to contemplate and comprehend the text, the conventional conditions and aesthetic devices of literature, too, undergo a radical change and, among other things, rhetoric, which was an attribute of the speaker and speech, becomes the addressee’s attribute and his interpretation of the text. For in such circumstances, the text breaks itself free from the authority of the author and comes under the control of the reader. In its first section, this paper discusses various Persian poetical genres in the classical period, the effect of the kind of addressees on the type of discourse and the speaker, the relation between content and form, and the effect of written communication and the production of the text in the absence of the reader. In the second section, a poem by the modern Iranian poet Nima Yushij is analysed as an example of how rhetoric is shifted from the speaker/author to the addressee/reader as a consequence of the new communication situation between the author and the reader.

This essay examines the structure of statements and their artistic function in poetic discourse. I have adopted a critical approach which questions some elements of classic rhetoric and investigate the process of completion of these subjects in modern poetics according to the findings of general linguistics and literary theory in the ideas of Russian Formalists and Structuralists. In the second part of the essay, an attempt is made to apply the ideas discussed in the first part to the selected poems of the modern Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and the statements of these poems have been classified. Because qualitative differences in poetic statements is such that we cannot show them by statistical methods and graphs the analytical method has been used to show the application of sentences and formation of the power of narrator in presentation of powerful poetic statements.

An axiom of modern critical theories, relativism is the outcome of the intellectual developments which can be traced back to Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy and in critical theory has been particularly associated with the theorists of the Constance School in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the emergence of these theories, critical theory was principally oriented towards attempting to find a changeless meaning in a text. This absolutist approach considered the ultimate goal of literary criticism to be the “uncovering” of a meaning concealed in the text by the author as its Supreme Authority. The first part of this paper discusses the background to this absolutism in the nineteenth century and argues that even the New Criticism, which in the first few decades of the twentieth century purported to free the text from the boundaries of the author’s biography and such extrinsic considerations as history, failed ultimately to rid itself from anti-relativism in literary criticism. The next part argues that the phenomenological approach, by questioning the validity of the subject/object duality, paved the way for relativism as an influential view in literary criticism. Hans Robert Jauss and Volfgang Iser’s introducing of Reception Theory contributed greatly to advocating the idea that critical practice has an intersubjective nature and is therefore necessarily relative.

This article attempts to read Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Dastforush (1987) in the light of literary theories of modernism. The approach adopted here derives its main concepts and terminology from the literary theories of modernism, which include in particular the episodic nature of narrative structure and alienation as a prevailing theme in modernist film/literature. It is argued that as a result of the emergence of relativity principle in science and philosophy, modern implications of time and subjectivity have overshadowed “objective” descriptions in modernist film/literature. The first part of the article (Techniques) deals with the film’s modernist narrative structure and multiple points of view adopted by the camera; in the second part (Themes) alienation has been discussed as a prevalent theme both in modernist literature and in Dastforush. References are also made to some outstanding modernist texts such as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Samuel Beckett’s plays.

The purpose of this study is to review and analyse the role of the writer in telling stories which aim to persuade the reader to believe that he is reading a real event. This can be achieved in three different ways. The first and the most common way can be seen in stories and novels in which the writer acts as a reporter. Considering this kind of stories, they are just like presenting somebody' s diary that the writer has found by chance. Sometimes the writer may pretend that he has only published the story and has done nothing else. By using this method, the writer can make the reader feel a great gap between the text and the writer. The second method is observed in stories where the writer plays a more active role and narrates the story as somebody who had seen a certain event himself. In other words, in this kind of story the writer acts like a witness to the event and narrates it carefully to the reader. This kind of story may also be narrated by the person who has experienced the event himself in the past and at the moment he is telling it to the writer. In this situation the writer usually helps the story to move forward by asking questions from the narrator. Then the writer retells it to the reader in his turn. By using this strategy, the author tries to persuade the reader that the story had really happened. Even he can make the reader believe that the story is part of a historical adventure. In the third method, which has been derived from the second one, the writer tells the story that is not directly narrated by somebody. In fact the story runs around something that can be a kind of taboo. This taboo may be a magic object, a forbidden situation or a banned room. In general, it can be a place that nobody has been allowed to enter or an object that cannot be touched. In these stories the writer has unintentionally experienced the adventure and has gone through it successfully. Now, after experiencing the danger, he is narrating it to the reader. These techniques have some effects on the story such as documentation and putting greater emphasis on the role of fate and destiny. They also help the writer to keep the desired distance between the reader and himself. On the other hand, they can appropriately differentiate the author from the narrator.

This paper attempts to decode the film Not Without My Daughter in order to find how Iranian culture and society is represented in this film. My purpose is to use a cultural studies approach in this research, with emphasis on semiotic analysis, to decode the text and find its preferred reading. In accordance with this approach, I assume that this film is a text and therefore has a discursive nature. I argue that semiotic analysis is particularly suited to discovering the hidden ideology of this text. My reading of this text shows that the image of Iranian culture and society is a negative image in this film.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the two structural modes of narration and description. One of the structuralist methods is to analyse the relations and oppositions. Structuralism predominantly opposes narration to description, in which the former concerns the events in the story, while the latter is the representation of the indexical facts. In other words, narration negotiates the dynamic aspect of the narrative text and description negotiates its static aspect. Narration deals with story-time and action, wile description tackles space, things and characters. Therefore, description without narration does not constitute a narrative text. These two modes of expression are examined in the classical Persian narrative of Nezami’s Haft-paykar.

Gender in Iran has always been defined by men’s discourses. For centuries, the production of semantic systems has been monopolised by men. The majority of the writers of literary works in this country have been men and women’s voice has but exceptionally been heard. However, in recent years we have been witnessing an astonishing surge in the number of female writers in Iran. Their works have found large audiences and have also sparked off many cultural debates. Iranian women have now been able to express themselves, making their voice heard and participating in defining their own gender. Their literary works, like any other cultural product, can be viewed as a form of representation that provides important hints as to a certain ideological cultural system. By tracing systems of representing gender in some Iranian woman writers, this paper attempts to answer the questions: How has female gender been portrayed in the works of woman novelists of Iran? Does the representation of women in these novels contribute to the reproduction of the dominant gender ideology or react against it? And also are there any differences between the various representations of women in these novels? This study concludes that the novels reveal two distinct systems of representing femininity that may be termed “the traditional portrait of woman” and “the portrait of the new woman”. The traditional woman is associated with such concepts as home, stasis, consumption, reading, housework, dependency and the past; in contrast, the new woman is associated with concepts like movement, production, independence and the future. The portrait of the traditional woman is at the service of the gender power relations that the dominant patriarchal ideology seeks to maintain and reproduce, whereas the portrait of the new woman proposes an alternative to this ideology. Whereas popular novels function to reproduce the dominant patriarchal ideology, elite novels attempt to subvert it. However, adopting a critical and challenging approach to the present cultural traditions without ever dissociating itself from them, a newly-emerging kind of women’s novels which has disrupted the distinction between popular and elite literature is aiming to revise the condition of women in society.

Myths are communal dreams of human beings and mythological symbols are the artistic and secret language of the myths. They increase the depth of meanings when they are used in poems. Symbols have a flexible nature which enables them to reflect deeply-rooted concepts and subjects in a comprehensive way. They are able to produce different meanings and uses out of a single form and to continue their novelty and continuity with a consistent growth. Of course symbolist poets and artists, because of their cultural background and their individual and social real needs, may be especially keen to use symbols; but the author of this article, while considering the theoretical basis of the usage of symbols and related subjects, attempts to survey the most important factors that lead poets to use plants symbols and myths. The author also tries to have a look at the uses of these kinds of symbols in the myths of different tribes and nations so that he can compare them in a better way.