LITERARY CRITICISM
Year:2014 | Volume:7 | Issue:26|Papers Count:7

This paper studies the conjoining of story and narrative discourse in postmodern Persian fiction. According to narratologists’ definition, story is the sequence of actions on a chronological order that characters or existents undergo; narrative discourse is the medium for narrating the story. Some postmodern fictions rely on narratives with no rich story in their deep-structures. In these narratives, surface structure and deep-structure are combined in a way that we cannot summarize the story, or adapt it to another medium. On the other hand, the existence of the story is dependent on the narrative discourse. This narrative technique is evident in some postmodern Persian fictions. The paper concludes by looking at some of the examples of such works of fiction.

Hyland’s Model was the first framework to examine interaction between writer and reader of a text under two key concepts, namely, stance and engagement. According to this model, any writer (un)consciously employs a number of linguistic devices such as hedges, boosters, attitude markers, and self-references to present his or her stance over a topic, and likewise uses some other devices like reader pronoun, imperatives, interrogatives, shared knowledge as well as personal asides to establish reader’s engagement. In this study, a number of book reviews on Persian literary books have been analyzed based on the model proposed by Hyland (2005). The corpus of study includes 100 book reviews; 50 reviews are selected from academic, refereed journals and 50 ones are taken from general journals. When the corpus was prepared, the linguistic devices of stance and engagement were identified, extracted, and counted. The findings showed that for each 11.7 words of the corpus, one word or expression of stance or engagement has been used. The negative attitude markers and imperatives are respectively the most and least frequent devices. It is shown that book review articles, printed in academic journals, tend to be more critical, and, furthermore, the articles published in the 2000s put much more weight on attitude markers. It is also shown that the density of interaction markers is higher in the ending section of book reviews. Taking the gender variable into account, it is revealed that male critics are more explicit in presenting their stance, while female critics are more willing to use engagement devices.

In extensive studies on women’s speech and writing across different historical periods and cultures, certain stylistic features have been identified as essentially feminine. Such studies have constructed a binary opposition between masculine and feminine writing. Feminine style, as identified in these studies, consists of frequently used forms of expressive language, vague and simple language, intensifiers, prayer forms of language, hailing forms, incomplete sentences, detailed descriptions, speaking from a position of weakness and lack of authoritarianism, and use of processes that do not require a lot of mental activity. Comparing the Taj al-Saltana’s Memoir as a feminine narrative with memories of Aziz al-Sultan-also known as Malijak-as a masculine narrative, which was written in the same historico-political context, this article demonstrates that attributing some of the aforementioned features to feminine writing do not have a solid basis and social circumstances and cultural factors play a major role in the formation of a particular style. Among the distinct characteristics of the styles of writing investigated are writing from a position of power, active voice, and use of complex mental processes.

Pierre Bourdieu pioneered a new theory for sociological studies of literature. According to his theory, people engage in various economic, political, cultural, and literary fields which greatly affect their personalities. Literary field is one of these fields. Based on Bourdieu’s theory, although a literary work is affected by various fields, it is the field of literary production that determines the literary value of a text. In the field of literary production, form is the innermost issue. The more form-based a literary work is, and the less dependent on other fields, the higher its literary value would be. Kasraei’s Arash-e Kamangir1 is the first and the most popular reproduction of the Arash myth in the field of literary production in Iran. Analysis of this poem based on Bourdieu’s theory proves that the traces of the poet’s Marxist objectives in this poem and the fact that the poem several times slides into other fields have reduced the literary value of the work.

All the talks of the global village have not curtailed different nations’ tendency to maintain and distinguish their national symbols. One of these symbols is national anthem. This paper studies national anthems drawing on Van Dijk’s and Laclau’s critical discourse analysis and discourse theory. The objective of this study is to answer the following questions: What are the nodal points of each country’s national anthem? What are the linguistic similarities and differences between the texts of these national anthems? To this end, the national anthems of 48 Asian countries as well as the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have been reviewed. In these national anthems, 62 frequent nodal points have been identified. The findings of this study indicate that the use the present tense (97%) is significantly higher than the future (65%) and the past (59%) tenses. 12 Asian countries (25% of all the Asian countries), all of them among the developing countries, in their national anthems emphasize on the opposition between “Us” and “Them.” The remaining 36 countries (75%) only praise themselves and refrain from constructing an opposition with the other. The frequency of positive words in 93% of the Asian countries’ national anthems is greater than negative words. The use of negative words and structures in the developed countries is much lower than other countries-63% of these countries have used only positive words. Among the permanent members of the Security Council, the Russian national anthem is discursively the most similar to the Asian countries and has the greatest divergence from other members of the Security Council.

Narrative, like language, is a concept abstracted from various representations of a semiotic system in the name of “narrative poetics,” i.e. a kind of grammar which maintains structural cohesion within a narrative text and provides such a text with the features necessary for its narrativehood. For the concept of narrativehood to be defined more clearly in this article, the bi-stratal mechanism of narrative system is investigated, following structural narratology, just at the story level. Focusing on narrative structure at this level, the article holds that the mere chronological sequence of events in a discourse is quite sufficient for it to be judged as narrative-whether logically consistent or not. Also, comparing narrative with linguistic semiosis and analyzing it within the frameworks of structural linguistics, the article points up the indispensability of poetics and its key concepts (including narrativehood) from narrative studies, however outmoded they may appear long after the scientific credibility of poetics was deluded by traditional narratologists. These objectives are achieved through a structuralist analysis of Pagard (Shahsavari, 2005), scrutinizing the novel for the major constituents of narrative and the hierarchical relations among them. In spite of structuralists, thus, narrativehood is defined both as a function of one specific superstructure, and an attribute common to all narrative texts.

Tanab Keshi, written by Majid Gheisari, is a realistic novel about the Holy Defense. This novel depicts the living conditions of a traumatized Iraqi family of a Persian origin, away from the Iran-Iraq war. Drawing on Barthes’ theory of intertextuality, Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma, and Adler’s notion of inferiority complex, this article identifies the remedy proposed in the novel to save the blemished identity of a traumatized character. This study indicates that the novel has an intertextual relation with three other texts: Quran, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and Mawlana’s Mathnavi. Ethnic-religious stigma that involves other family members is a sign of the psychological and cultural problems of an autocratic society. One of the consequences of this kind of stigma for family members is the disappointment about being shunned by the society. Other consequences of stigma are the feeling of having an ominous destiny, insecurity, and also being stranded in perilous mental obsessions such as inferiority complex which has plagued Fares (the narrator) and forced him to a defensive, revengeful life.