Journal of Literary Studies
Year:2009 | Volume:42 | Issue:3 (166)|Papers Count:8

The “human mud” is one of the motifs of the poetry attributed to Khayyam. The imagery, concepts and philosophical thoughts about the human being's origin (creation, death, life after death) form the essence of this poetry. Are the Khayyam's quatrains about creation original and new? Or do they have a precedent in the ancient world poetry? Why does the Iranian literary criticism claim that this sort of poetry about the mystrey of human creation is Khayyamian? This paper explores the concept of the human mud in the ancient Egyptian, Accadian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arab, and Persian potery.

In every field, typology leads to a better, more complete and more precise knowledge. In spite of the importance and extent of traditional Persian stories, there is as yet no complete classification of these stories. Most of the present classifications are imprecise, mixing the different kinds of stories. This paper merely deals with an analysis, criticism, morphology and typology of Persian traditional stories. At first, the writers survey the views of the distinguished Iranian story experts and story tellers. This is followed by an analysis of the views of non-Iranian story experts. Based on the taxonomies presented here and by giving a special organization and some explanations, the writers proceed to give a complete classification of the stories according to eleven factors. This classification is claimed to facilitate criticism, analysis and comparison in classical narrative studies. The eleven factors proposed are the following: form, narration structure, theme, events, goal, origin, the end, literary level, characters, manner of expression, and size.

Greimas and other semioticians of the Paris School believe that reality is always illusive and that the factors affecting the formation of a narrative are always ambiguous. Based on this view, a narrative is always a simulation of reality. Based on Greimas' actants model, this paper presents an analysis of two stories from Tarikh-e Beyhaghi, with the aim of revealing two types of narratives; the first type cannot be analyzed very well using this model because the author Beyhaghi had no access to authentic details about it and thus presented a poor characterization. The second type can be analyzed using this model because of excellent characterization. The stories reflect reality to a great extent, which shows Beyhaghi's mastery of simulating historical facts in the form of narratives.

Literary adaptation is recasting literary books such as novels, short stories, or even poems in a new form such as films, stage plays, or even video games. Persian literature abounds with dramatic events. There are many fascinating narratives such as Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, Khmseh of Nezami, Mathnavi of Rumi, and Tarikh-e Beyhaghi of Beyhaghi, which have the dramatic capacity of literary adaptation. In this paper, the writer examines the dramatic capability of “The execution of Amir Hasanak the vizier”. The structure and artistic aspects of the story will be studied in the light of the elements of drama.

Interdisciplinary studies have provided researches with new perspectives. The relation between literature and psychoanalysis is rather recent in Iran; but even within this short period we have come to realize the benefits of such a relation to both literature and psychoanalysis. Lacan's theories lead us towards interesting and sometimes decisive results in the analysis of characters and literary narratives. This paper is an attempt to apply Lacan's theory of human psycho structure in the analysis of Sanaeie’s personality. This theory recognizes three orders: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Contrary to the myths told about Sanaei, D. Bervin indicates that Sanaei went through not two but three phases during his spiritual revolution. In this paper, the writers try to explain, using Lacan's theory of three orders, the three stages of Sanaeie's mental revolution.

Most Sufis believe that world of imagination is a world intermediating between pure intelligences and physical phenomena, a world in which spirits are embodied and bodies are immaterial. Mohyedin-e-Ibn-e-Arabi is one of the philosophers who have dealt with this concept. In his view, the concept of imagination is expanded considering his view about Oneness of Being and his special treatment of entities other than God. Imagination, to him, is no longer a mere intermediary between pure intelligences and physical phenomena. According to Ibn-e-Arabi, any thing that bears truth is imagination. Mowlana has also dealt with imagination and its qualities in the Mathnavi. Although the concept of imagination in Mowlana’s Mathnavi is not exactly similar to Ibn-e-Arabi’s notion, this paper tries to show the resemblances.

The present study aims to test Explicitation Hypothesis using a parallel one-directional Persian-English corpus. To this end, ten anecdotes selected randomly form Sa' di's Golestan and their three English translations extracted from Gulistan's translations by Edward Rehatsek (2004), Edward B. Eastwick (1979), and James Ross (1890) were studied. The anecdotes and their translations were compared sentence by sentence to investigate aspects of explicitation and extract the explicitation cases using Klaudy's (2004) typology. The findings of the study confirmed the Explicitation Hypothesis and showed that all types of explicitation, namely obligatory, optional, pragmatic, and translation-inherent were used by the translators, with the obligatory explicitation having the highest frequency.

Since the start of the last century, along with those literary men who took a literary approach to the study of literary texts, there has been another group who has taken a linguistic approach. The ancient and ever flourishing tradition of literary studies of translation can no doubt take benefit from linguistic methods and tools in the investigations of literary texts. As a result of this we come across linguistic terms in three high school textbooks of Persian language and literature. In fact, the separation of Persian from Persian literature and teaching it as an independent course has made it possible to teach various aspects of the Persian language. This paper briefly explores the linguistic studies of Persian literature by surveying all the theses on Persian literature with a linguistic approach presented at 31 governmental and Azad universities from 1954 to 2006. A statistical analysis of the titles of these theses clarifies the emphasis placed on linguistic approaches taken to study Persian literature.