Journal of Literary Studies
Year:2023 | Volume:56 | Issue:2|Papers Count:7

Foucault has argued that overt surveillance such as surveillance cameras or government agencies are not the only forms of surveillance. Rather, it is deeply embedded in social institutions and practices that form behavior and perpetuate power imbalances. He elaborates how panopticism, as a discipline mechanism, works by creating a sense of constant visibility and potential surveillance, encouraging individuals to regulate their behavior. Foucauldian surveillance structures are not limited to physical surveillance. They include bureaucratic procedures, identification techniques, and categorization systems. These mechanisms allow social control, normalization, and the exercise of power by shaping and directing individual behavior, choices, and identity. This study focusd on surveillance culture and its relation with the notion of family in young adult literature through the perspectives of Lyon and Falangan to discuss how surveillance culture affects young adults’ identity and their status of citizenship. To this end, Call me Ziba (2015), an acclaimed novel by Iranian author, Farhad Hasanzadeh, was examined. This study used descriptive-textual analysis to discuss the notions of “gaze”, “participatory surveillance”, and “lateral surveillance” to elaborate on their effects on young adults’ perception of the self, the Other, and moral values drawn from them. It has been argued that along with the emergence of post-humanism, young adult literature has adopted a different mission of the classic, didactic version. In other words, despite the classic version which did its best to nurture docile young adults in whom the social norms are naturalized and inculcated, the contemporary version tries to represent the confrontation of revolutionary young adults with disciplinary culture and to reveal the depth of such discursive control in people’s lives. The outcome is the redefinition of notions of the Self and the Other as well as moral principles; the issues which are the prerequisites for civil life in the current world.

The purpose of this research was exploring the components of life skills in selected children's books. Among the books published for children, some are selected as the best books that parents, educators, and those who somehow deal with children accept them. These books were examined and analyzed to see the number and way of dealing with life skills. Content analysis method was used for this study. The statistical population consisted of children’s books and the sample were top winners the most awarded selected by purposeful sampling. The researcher selected fiction works that had won more awards in their own field and analyzed them based on the quality and extent of components of life skills. The results showed that empathy skills, creative thinking, communication skills, and critical thinking are the most frequent components in these books. In most of the investigated stories, the characters who had life skills were the successful and the characters who lacked skills failed at the end of the story.

Studying the concept of art in persian language is taken from universal discourse of art and its concept in persian language and literature, as it should be, not reviewed. In this research the concept of art in the poems of Khorāsāni style with the componential analysis approach has been demonstrated. After illustrating conceptual relations woven between the word art and wider context of poems, all of the semantic components of the concept of art have been justified and classified. With classifying these semantic components in a larger semantic level, twelve semantic fields have appeared for the concept of art in the poetry of Khorāsāni style. These fields in order of frequency of their subordinate components are: eulogy, aesthetics, war, literary language, craft, practical wisdom, zoology, ethics and habits, religion, social criticism, literary criticism and love. Paying attention to these semantic fields and their semantic components approves that significant relations are seen between semantic fields of the concept of art in the poetry of Khorāsāni style and dominant stylistic features of that style. Also with surveying these fields and their constituent semantic components understood, on the contrary of presuppositions, the concept of art in the poems of Khorāsāni style has been dynamic concept with diverse and sometimes different significations and a summary of the concepts of art in the history of aesthetics is settled in the poetic texts of the Khorāsāni style.

Darabnameh or Firouzshahnameh written by Mohammad Beyghami (9th century AH), following Samak Ayyar, is the most important and detailed text of "Ayari-Pahlavani" in the history of Persian literature. "Ayari-Pahlavan texts" are narrative and long prose texts which are narrative texts on the actions of Aiyar and Pahlavan. At one level, it seems that this long story is the continuation of the same series of narratives in verse and prose about the Darab family, which has been discussed many times in the tradition of Shahnameh writing, prose narration, and Persian and Arabic historiography. But reflecting on the form of this long story reveals two hidden issues: First of all, the whole form of Darabnameh is based on the same narrative model of Samak Ayar and not Darabnameh of Tarsusi and other stories related to the Darab family. The second and more important issue is that probably the narrative form of Beyghami’s Darabnama which is based on the work and deeds of the main shah/pahlvan in the main plot, and the secondary shah/pahlvans in the parallel sub-plotes, is probably the concrete form of the Parthian “Moluk al-Tawaef” system and their pahlavani culture. Accordingly, it can be said that despite the lack of historical data of the ancient historians about the Parthians, the "literary form" has been able to carry the generality of the Parthian world and transmit it through history. In this case, the bravery of Firouzshah and his companions is not only a narrative fiction to heal the historical wounds of the era of Alexander the Great, but more important, the memory of the bravery of the Parthians in defeating Alexander in Iran, and their efforts to preserve Iranshahr.

Although the concept of Habsyeh (prison poetry) can serve as a literary genre in the thematic and stylistic classification of poems, the issue of genre unity conceals the sociological and discourse manifestation of Habsyeh. Therefore, instead of stylistics that seeks to depict integrated spaces under the control of one thought, with more precise discourse analysis, the historical layers of a genre can be seen. The present study, with a genealogical approach and with an emphasis on Lacan's theory of imaginary and Anderson's imagined communities, shows that contemporary Habsyeh poetries do not follow the same imagined community and imaginary that prevailed in classical Habsyeh poetries. The common imagination that Masud Sa'd Salman refers to is vertical, holy and providence; while Farrokhi Yazdi's collective imagination is horizontal and at ground level; therefore, Masud Sa'd Salman looks to the stars and the inevitable decision of fate for liberation, and Farrokhi looks to the earth and people's awareness and uprising. For this reason, Masud Sa'd Salman's concepts and metaphors aimed to preserve the existing status, while Farrokhi Yazdi aimed at revolution.

The familiarity of Iranians with Greek myths is not so long. If we put aside a few exceptional cases of the past (such as Khajeh Nasiroddin Tusi's mentioning the myth of Sisyphus), we can say that Iranians' familiarity with Greek myths is limited to the contemporary period. It is in the contemporary era that the names of many mythological characters appear in the works of Iranian intellectuals, including Aga Khan Kermani and Ali Shariati. The intellectuals use Greek mythology to explain their thoughts. Likewise, contemporary poets (e.g., Shamlou, Atashi, Naderpour, and M. Azad) paid attention to Greek myths and were inspired by them in various ways. Among the Greek myths, the myth of Prometheus, Sisyphus, Icarus and Achilles have attracted the most attention of contemporary poets and inspired them. Poets like Shamlu and M. Azad took turned to Prometheus due to the similarity of contemporary poets’ mission (informing the mass of people) with this myth; Just as Prometheus steals the fire (the symbol of knowledge) from the gods and gives it to the people, these poets also consider it their mission to bring awareness to the society and the mass of people. This has sometimes even made some poets to identify with Prometheus. The myth of Sisyphus and Icarus are not the same and there are differences between them, but contemporary poets have taken them as symbols of failure after victory. In contemporary poetry, the two mythical characters have been a metaphor for the developments in the history of contemporary Iran, which is a history of successive victories and defeats. Unlike Prometheus, Sisyphus and Icarus, the beauty of the myth of Achilles was the main reason the poets, like Shamlu, paid attention to it.

This study examines a verse used in Lataif al-Tafsir of Zahed Darwajeki. In this context, in addition to mentioning the relatively remarkable mistakes in correcting and using the manuscripts, we focused one verse of this commentary, containing a very important from the viewpoint textual criticism studies. The editor, informed by his wrong reading of the available manuscripts, have impaired the authenticity. According to the available manuscripts of Lataif al-Tafsir and other secondary sources, it seems that a part of the commentary has been misinterpret, which contains verses by Muhammad Kateb Abdoh, and this reference of Zahed Darwajeki could be one of the oldest sources for the poems of this poet.