LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2012 | Volume:5 | Issue:19|Papers Count:9

The response from the different branches of humanities to the environmental crisis has led to the formation of a new interdisciplinary topic, Ecolinguistics with its branches such as Environmental Ethics and Ecocriticism in literature. The term Ecocriticism was first coined in 1978 by William Rueckert. It was a reaction to the environmental crisis. Ecocriticism reflects on the relationship between human and physical environment in literary works. It also talks about the relationship between religion, ethic, language, and gender with the environment. This article deals with the necessity of ecocriticism in the humanities and introduces some of the research methods and topics in this field.

Literary period functions as a regulative idea for literary critics in the narrative of literary history. Literary period is a time-section; although in literary history and criticism, it has also other implications and associative meanings. Some of these secondary meanings which can be called components of literary period are: zeitgeist, the conditions of literary production, dominant norms, change and evolution, binary oppositions, individual or collective idealistic narrative, and concept of spatiality. Zeitgeist and the conditions of literary period offer theories about factors extrinsic to literature that manage establishment and change of general and literary periods. The concept of period as time-section ruled by a series of literary norms ascribes some kind of internal unity to literary periods. Periodization based upon organic idea of evolution compares every period with one of the life’s stages of an organism. Some critics understand literary period in terms of binary oppositions such as classic and modern. Others give literary period a spatial aspect. However, literary history is a result of individual or collective idealistic narrative. It is not a concept but an idea. It is not related to knowledge but to thinking.

Since metaphors occur in language, it is an appropriate tool to identify ideology with. The choice of different metaphors in a text by language users would reveal its dominant ideology. Contrary to this, different ideologies may produce different metaphors to support their basic beliefs. Taking conceptual metaphor theory and Teun van Dijk’s theory of ideology as the basic definitions in this paper, the functions of metaphor in an ideological system and also the role of metaphor in different social contexts are being studied.

The ‘diachronic approach to narrative studies’ may take different directions, one of them being a typological research on narrative texts, and the other, a genealogical enquiry into the modern ways of storytelling as to see how they have historically originated from a certain group of folktales. Assuming, in the same vein, that some relics of Persian formulaic oral narration should have survived—through functional modification, or even obliteration—into the Iranian literary fiction, this article introduces just one instance of these Persian-folktale-specific formulae, drawn out from a bulk of more than 270 texts whose inscription dates back at least to 70 years ago. Then the question is whether the formula has completely vanished away, or simply alternated between a numbers of functions.

One of the forms of being is to think and create antagonism in resistance to the Other. Antagonism is the (mis) reading of the action and structure of the thoughts of the other. One of the most evident phenomenological aspects of the modern Persian poem is creation of opposition. Shamlu’s works are the best example of such oppositional discourses. Through this methodology, not only he reaches new structures in his poetry, but also he expands this method to his other cultural activities. This paper has two parts. The first part presents a phenomenological definition of antagonism and how it is formed by opposition, dialogue, and enmity and how it results in creation of linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic structures. In the second part, the typology of Shamlu’s antagonistic discourse has been studied based on these assumptions. The paper concludes that Shamlu has four kinds of oppositions: reversality, myth making, playing with structure, and breaking the taboos.

Metaphor is one of the most important issues in Cognitive Linguistics. This paper tests the contemporary theory of metaphor, particularly, the conceptual metaphor of “Time as Space Metaphor” in children fiction books. The research method is descriptive-analytic and data gathering has been library based. Sixty children story books have been chosen by the researchers from three different age groups: 5-7 year-olds; 7-9 year-olds; and 9-11year-old children. Then, the sentences which have the conceptual metaphor of “The Time as Space Metaphor” were chosen. This study concludes that: (1) Persian native children learn the concept of time which is spatial not only by the linear movement in the space but also by movement in different dimension; (2) Persian native children learn the concept of time which is spatial by the use of ontological metaphors; and (3) the contemporary theory of metaphor is a useful means of teaching ‘time’ to Persian native children.

As a Pioneer story writer, Jamalzadeh by bringing together Western and Eastern techniques in Yeki bud yeki nabud founded a new style that became famous as “short story.” “Veylan od-Dowleh” with a different structure from the other five story of this collection poses the subject of joblessness which is similar to the “Le Vagabond,” the work of French writer, Guy de Maupassant. In these two stories, the joblessness is discussed from two different angles: voluntary joblessness, by emphasizing on the mystical observation, and involuntary unemployment. By posing this question that whether Jamalzadeh, in the writing of this story, was influenced by Maupassant or not, I investigate comparatively these two works, looking at the subject and style of expression. Accordingly, drawing on some textual examples from these two stories, I have investigated the views of the two writers about the subject of unemployment through a study of the personalities, actions, and reactions of the two protagonists struggling with the inner-self and the outside world.

The notion of “the priority of writing over speech” goes back to post renaissance era of Europe and it became the dominant feature of western culture in 20th century with Derrida’s deconstruction of the binary opposition of speech/writing. In the Islamic culture, Quran, the original source of the Islamic civilization, can be regarded as a turning point in the transformation of the oral culture into the written culture. In other words, it was the means of passage from the fundamental speech to the Originary writing. Needless to say, in some areas the fundamental speech remained dominant and few people overtly discussed the superiority of prose over verse. Sobh ol-a’sha fi sana’t el ensha is an exception. After briefly introducing the author and his work, we will examine his notion of the priority of the prose over the verse and its implications.