LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2014 | Volume:7 | Issue:25|Papers Count:10

There is a close relationship between stylistics and literary criticism. Many works of criticism are based on data analyses of stylistic studies, and analyzing status of the two fields-literary criticism and stylistics-couldpave the way for better classification of them. Through a content analysis of the two scholarly journals, Bahar-e Adab-proseand poetry stylistic studies-and Literary Criticism published in 2010, I have tried to show the relation between different aspects of the two fields in the previous decade in Iran. Both quantitative and qualitative indicators have been taken into consideration in this study. Quantitative indicators cover theoretical and practical domains. Qualitative indicators have been chosen according to a fewbasic questions on stylistics and literary criticism: have the articles on literary criticism transformed from descriptive nature into analytic one? Is critical thinking dominant in all studies. Do articles on stylistics consider works as representations of individuality of their author? The article concludes that, although the studies on stylistics and criticism, which in some cases follow the same academic or social discourse, seems to have correlation, there are some differences between the two fields. For example, when it comes to selecting texts, critics mostly tend to choose prose fiction while experts in stylistics prefer poetry. Impartial and independent theories and approaches are more widespread in literary criticism articles than in works of stylistics. Stylistic studies, on the other hand, are not independent. Most articles on criticism have passed descriptive mode and are closer to their expected form, i.e. analyses of the data. The number of articles on stylistics that clearly consider style as representation of the author’s personality or consider repetition of stylistic features as a deviation from standard rules is about half of the total number of the articles.

Realism is a term with different significations in literary studies. It may refer to a literary movement in the nineteenth-century Europe. It also may refer to certain styles and representational tactics in literature. Under the latter, realism is a kind of narrative that adopt, insofar as possible, a verisimilar approach to the world it describes. This article examines different attributes of realism. For this purpose, in the first step, I have studied realism as a literary movement of nineteenth century that emerged in opposition to romanticism. Then, I have elaborated on the social nature of realism and, in its extreme manifestation, the socialist realism. The notion of verisimilitude in relation to society and to the literary text has been expounded upon in the next part. Finally, I have sketched out some of the critiques of the term realism.

Taxis, or mora’atal-nazir, did not occupy a considerable position in rhetorical books until the fifth century after hijra. Radouyani introduced it for the first time, and then, another rhetorician elaborated on this figure and, gradually, the termbecame established in rhetoric. There are traces of this term in earlier descriptions of other tropes such as i’etelaf, taqsim, and moghabeleh. This article, drawing on Islamic rhetoric, gives a more nuanced definition of this term. Reviewing the history of mora’atal-nazirshows that this trope shapes a chain of semantic relation between different parts of speech. A similar relation, under the category of ‘alagheh, can be found in different forms of figurative language. I have also studied different functions of this trope and how we can evaluate it.

Most Iran-Iraq War novels are considered to be an ideological device for the “Holy-Defense” genre; however, in the recent years, a number of distinct polyphonic novelshave emerged, one of the most important of which is Ahmedzadeh’s Chess with the Doomsday Machine. Bakhtin’s distinction distinguishes between monologue and carnivalesque novels. Polyphonic novels, like carnivals, act as a centrifugal force supporting nonofficial dimensions of the society. Images of food and carnal elements, cursing, reciprocal relation between characters and settings according to the double aspects of carnival, and rebellion against a victorious closure by postponing the narrator’ sactions distorts the linearity of narration common in in the Holy-Defense novels.

Semiotics is an approach that studies the signs and their hidden meanings. This article is a social semiology of Bivatan-amodern novelwritten by Reza Amirkhani. The novel struggles with fundamental issues such as identity, culture, and social traditions. Like most other postmodern novels, Bivatan is a combination of reality and imagination. Most parts of the story happen outside of Iran and show the conflict between Islamic-Persian culture and the Western culture. The conflict between humans and their surrounding is another major aspect of this novel. This article elaborates on the identity-related signs such as religion, food, costume, job, social relations, and so forth. The fundamental role of religion, drawing on Quranicverses, identity crisis, and differences in social class are among the other subjects which will be discussed in this paper.

The idea of the ritualism of mythpoints out that the existence of myth depends on rituals. The recent developments of this theory underline a common paradigm between myth and ritual. This paper explores the emergence of the “Siavashan” ritual in relation to the Siavash myth in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Siavash is one of the pre-Zoroastrian Persian gods who is associated with fertility myth and the agricultural culture. The ritual of his invocation is an inseparable part of the Siāvashān ritual. At the core of this ritual is “holy death, ” which can be analyzedalongside the rite of the sacred king’s sacrifice and the dramatization of mourning for him during the New Year’s festivals. According to the anthropologists’ analyses of Dionysian ritual, the poetry associated with the holy death of Dionysus played an important role in the birth of tragedy. A similar relation existsbetween the Siāvash myth and the Siavashan ritual.

Bahram Bayzai’s cinema can be considered as a visual interpretation of the Persian myth. Bayzaihas tried to modernize the myths and present new versions of them by breaking the old versions and making new ones. In this way, he makes the narrative structure of his works closer to the myth. Discovering and elaborating different aspects of form and structure of Bayzai’s works will not be possible without considering the theories of structuralists such as Claude Levi- Strauss. In this article, drawing on structuralism and narratology in the works of theorists such as Prop, Barthes, and Strauss, the form and structure of the time in four of Bayzai’s works have been compared to their counterpart, mythical narratives. I have concluded that in his cinematic narration time becomes closer to its mythical structure; in other words, time becomes endless, fixed, and sacred.