Research in Contemporary World Literature
Year:2012 | Volume:16 | Issue:4|Papers Count:7

The authors of this article aim to compare character types in Persian oral folktales and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales. For a better clarification of this topic, the authors address issues such as morality, character’s will, and the portrayal of women in these stories. This paper comes to the following conclusions: First, both the content and the characters in Hans Christian Andersen’s tales follow the moral codes of the middle class. Second, Andersen’s characters confront death more often than the character types in Persian Folktales. Third, there are by far more anti-heroines in Persian folktales. Fourth, in Andersen’s tales, in addition to humans, animals, and growing plants as character types, the reader is persuaded to sympathize with a wide range of objects. Unlike Persian tales for which no exact date of creation has been mentioned, Andersen has appropriated the oral folktales of his nation in the nineteenth century, contemporary to the rise of Romanticism in Denmark; a fact central to explaining these dissimilarities.

The novel, When Nietzsche Wept, by Arvin D.Yalom, has efficiently manifested the ties between literature and psychology, and it was so imperssive that immadiately a movie with the same name was made that became very famous and won many awards. The writer has aimed to demonstrate the psychoneurosis treatment of two western geniuses. In this essay, attempts has been made to evaluate the novel from a psychoanalytic perspective, especially whith a particular reference to Id, Ego and Superego and Libido. It was percieved that this novel has been written in two separate episodes. The first one includes: Broyer (ID), Matilde, Broyer's wife (Superego), Nietzsche (Ego) and Berte (Libido) and the second one includes: Nietzsche (ID), Elizabet, Nietzsche's sister and his mother (Superego), Broyer (Ego) and Salomeh (Libido).

The Nouveau Roman is considered as an influential literary movement of modern literature. There are some traces of the usage of elements and narrative techniques of Nouveau Roman in contemporary Iranian literature. This tendency is more characteristic and typical in Bahram Sadeghi's work, which is named the representative of Nouveau Roman in Iran. Nevertheless, Sadeghi has denied any conscious influence from this literary movement. Based on theories of Comparative Literature, this paper is an attempt to study the correspondence of plot and consistency of the elements of Nouveau Roman in Robbe-Grillet's Erasers and Sadeghi's The Sleep of Blood. Hence, without any prejudices about possible influences of Nouveau Roman on Sadeghi's work, we aim to respond to a main question: in comparison to a typical Nouveau Roman novel like Erasers and according to its criteria, is there a possibility to concider Sadeghi's The Sleep of Blood as a Nouveau Roman text?

Immigration is an important subject which has always attracted the attention of critics and authors. Tahar Ben-Jelloun, the French author, is one such instance. His opinion is exceptional. With Downcast Eyes is a masterpiece by this author. In this masterpiece, he displays the problems of an African girl in two parts (before and after immigration). The setting of this masterpiece containes the oppositions through which we can interpret the notions in the text. Therefore, this research is an opportunity to study in this masterpiece, the oppositions through which we can understand the author's aims and messages.

Western Imperialism always depicted a biased image of the colonized nations. Therefore, portraying the reality of Africa to restore the lost dignity of the natives is one of the aims of postcolonial literature. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an attempt in this regard. Employing postcolonial narratology, the present study examines the relation of the novel’s point of view and the concept of decolonization. Dwelling on Gerard Genette’s narratology in which point of view is divided into two different concepts of focalization and narration, this study investigates how the potentialities of extradiegetic narrator such as high degree of reliability are at the service of decolonization in the novel. In other words, the choice of this sort of narrator provides Achebe with options to fulfill his very aim which would not be accomplished with a different choice.

This essay examines the practice of free indirect discourse (FID), as a narrativestylistic device, in Hossein Sanapour’s Lips on a Blade (2010). After a brief overview of the novel’s narrative structure, the four modes of representing characters’ discourses in narrative fiction are introduced and exemplified. Among these modes, FID is the most important since it is the only one which leads to textual ambiguity and semantic plurality of the narrative discourse. Next, the functions of FID in Lips on a Blade are elaborated upon, through analyzing two extracts from the novel. The basic argument of this essay is that the use of FID in this text results in the co-presence of the narrator’s discourse and the character-focalizer’s, without one of them subordinating the other. This characterizes the novel as polyphonic because, through FID, the narrator’s voice and those of the characters become engaged in constant dialogue with one another.

Religious themes are dominant in the works of Georges Bernanos, the Catholic writer. Good and evil and the human condition have always been the main concerns of religious writers. These writers try to dramatize the confrontation of man with temptations. Recurring topics in the writings of Bernanos are; a desire for innocence, seeking truth, fighting evil, divine grace, and the role of faith in man’s salvation. The main conflict in his early works is between the saint and the sinner. The quest for God and salvation suffuses his works and finally, in his novels, light wins over darkness. This article attempts to delve into the central theme of this spiritual quest in Bernanos’ works, specially in the two novels: Under Satan’ Sun and Journal of a Priest of the Campaign.