Research in Contemporary World Literature
Year:2010 | Volume:- | Issue:58|Papers Count:9

What is imagination and image? How is a mental picture formed? How does the product of imagination appear as an artistic or literary from? What are the factors that cause man to prefer the world of imagination over reality, making it, his/her choice and becoming an artist or a writer? These were the questions that made Jean- Paul Sartre busy between 1920 to 1940, and after that he was thinking about the lives of the poets and writers. Sartre has based his idea of imagination, on the quality of “Conscience” from mental images; emphasizing on the “existence” of these pictures, and their relationship with real experiences, he considers the world of imagination as a far fetched world and the result of “rejection of the concrete world. ” Meantime, looking for the reasons that attract a person to the world of imagination and then to the “writing profession”, he evaluates the position of the writer and his own position as a writer.

Emperor Jones in O'Niell's play passes through a terrible night in which he confronts with himself. Reviewing his actions, Jones is caught by revolutionaries. In his short reign, he was dependent on a spell that had captured him and his people. This delusion is what captures Macbeth's mind, too. This article investigates this illusion in Emperor Jones, Macbeth, Peer Gynt, and Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias", on the one hand, and in Persian literature, on the other. The objective is to see how different cultures comment on the fate of tyrants.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays stages of spiritual developments of a young artist. Based on some mystical backgrounds, particularly Aquinas’s mystical aesthetics, and referring to theosophists like Bruno and Saint Augustine, Joyce comes to a kind of mystical aesthetics of art. He, accordingly, depicts a young artist whose aesthetic attitude is mystical, encounters epiphany, and becomes a mystic artist. This article analyses Joyce’s novel from the perspective of his mystical aesthetics and shows the stages of the artist’s spiritual perfection up to Divine perfection, which according to Joyce is the final stage of spiritual development necessary for being an artist. These stages are represented in spiritual developments of a young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in five chapters of the novel in which he achieves the position of mystical epiphany and artistic creativity. Finally, the article concludes that the artist’s aesthetics, passing through stages of ‘integritas’, ‘consonentia’, and ‘claritas’, achieves its ultimate perfection and, thus, he becomes a mystic artist.

François Mauriac, a scholar and a famous French author and the winner of the nobel prize in literature, unlike any of his contemporaries is not known in Iran. In this article, it has been attempted to know him better on the basis of his viewpoints toward two famous contemporaries, André Gide and Marcel Proust. Mauriac believes that these two writers incorporated a detailed reflection of religious crisis dominating the 20th century. This has caused some decline in the religious value of their work, deriving from the aesthetics which was undoubtedly the most influential aspect of their work.

The present paper examines the schools of thoughts of two poets and researchers from two different cultural geographies. In contrast with Molana, impressed by occidental school of thoughts, J. Salomé is a researcher with a different approach. The literary adaption of the anecdote "The Merchant and the parrot" from Masnavî by Salomé entitled "The tale of an infatuated man" denotes this belief that despite differences in their visions, they have commonpoints. To illustrate the point in occidental contemplative doctrine, metaphysical concepts have minute importance in contrast to the privilege of the same concepts in the beliefs of oriental mysticism and philosophy (not merely Iran). The influence of British philosophers on mainstream thinking, especially on French philosophy, resulted in positivism. Empiricism and observationhave been considered as the pillars of allegations and contemplative analyses. Focusing on the role of their common educational backgrounds and applying a comprehensive research on the ideas of Salomé and Molana, this research attempts to analyze the effect of one of the main elements of literary theosophy on western literature, and finally conclude that it has played a crucial role in recognizing the powerful culture and rich literature of Iran in western societies, endorseing the fact that Iranian Sufist and didactic literature has been exploited from a cultural standpoint.

Does the poetic (poetry), which is usually believed to belong to the realm of word and language; occur also in images and objects and embrace them? Or is the expression "poetic" considered for things and images? In order to answer these questions and trace back this concept in painting, this essay approaches surrealistic ideas and paintings because surrealism more than other artistic styles and schools claims to discover the essence of poetry in both literature and art, although in their artworks the reflection and development of imagination and dream expands beyond the borders that surrealism itself defined. This essay studies different methods and techniques of some surrealist painters i. e. "Magritte", "Dali" and "Max Ernst" who have very different ways to reflect poetic aspects in their paintings, although some common rules can be found in their work. Consequently this essay reveals the common features of poetics that are represented in both words and images, such as: recovering the lost value of dreams and regaining things to themselves, not in relation with other things, giving unusual specifications to usual things; assembling words, objects and concepts in an unrelated form and position, disarranging the relation between subject and artwork, surrendering to the unconscious, madness and accident… so the poetic images do not represent the mind but establish it. And through this establishment create a new world that destroys the visual habits, and encourages the mind to dive more deeply.

The present study is an attempt to offer a study of the researchers' views regarding the interaction between literature and human discoursal interactions through a comparative, descriptive, and analytical approach. Five variables of discourse experimentation, research and educational consequences, anthropology, pragmatics, and intertextuality are investigated. The results of the study reveal a cause and effect relationship between literature and the human discoursal interactions. From educational and scientific point of view, the study reveals that poetic discourse consists of a creative system of relationships, strategies, and a special methodology for the comprehensive exploration of the nature of human communication. Therefore, the exploration of the literary system would result in the proper and appropriate exploration of the human communication variables, which in turn would influence the decision making in the processes of curriculum development and research orientations in intercultural areas such as teaching foreign languages and literature, translator training, and critical studies in language, literature, and translation. Moreover, the results of the study show that without the application of the literary discoursal strategies and structures, educational and research outlooks in human communication will not work. Since, literature- as a comprehensive social discourse- helps the researchers discover and develop gestalt teaching, learning, and problem solving strategies and resources in the area of human interaction and stops the unfavorable separation of sciences. So, to solve the multivariate problems of human educational system, the authorities should assume an interdisciplinary outlook.

The Nocturnal Harmony of Wood Orchestra, Reza Ghassemi’s first Novel, is a rare example of Iranian postmodernist novel. Though the novel has a complicated structure, it is still well-crafted, readable and pleasing, a virtue that very often is not observed in Persian postmodernist novels. The present study analyzes the novel in the light of such terms as metafiction, ontological ambiguity, short circuit, the fall of grand narratives, decanonization, paranoia, absence, lack of certainty, and fragmentation. It hopes to conclude that The Nocturnal Harmony possesses all these characteristics of postmodernist fiction, not as an artificial collection of technical details, but as a natural consequence of narrating the confusion of a contemporary man who reflects the confusion of the world around him.