Research Journal of Literary Schools
Year:2018 | Volume:2 | Issue:3 |Papers Count:6

If, according to Heraclitus, the world is known as the unification of tensions which are manifested in different parts of universe especially visual and written texts, the output of these tensions can be found in some symbolic characters of world literature such as ‘ Urfa’ and ‘ Majnoun’ as well as in both written and visual texts like paintings. In the present research we have tried, comparatively and from the vantage point of Expressionism based on the fictional aspects of life and death of these two characters (Urfa and Majnoun) in literary texts, to investigate the striking similarities of the allegorical pictures of them, demonstrating that how personal perceptions are connected to each other in literary and artistic texts. We have found that in addition to the appropriate correspondence in the initial process of symbolization of ‘ Majnoun’ and ‘ Urfa’ , there is another probable relationship between two characters which, prior to the knowledge of their creators, were in the fictional world of Arabic narration of Majnoun and also in pictures of Majnoun among animals in Iranian literature and painting with a life account and examples of Urfa’ s paintings. It is due to the background knowledge of Greek mythology and shared astronomical symbols in Ptolemaic system. All of these is not an association and mere copying. Even if we take it as a kind of copying, we inevitably need to approve of similar aspects between two characters in both early Arab narrators and later Iranian poets and painters in Iranian-Islamic literature who did this copying. We have also demonstrated that the unknown creators of such paintings much like expressionistic artists tried to look at the world more from their own feelings and emotions than outer realities. In other words, they devoted themselves in displaying those realities which they appreciated from their own impressions and emotions.

The schoolism approach in literature refers to those studies that are in the domain of literary history. The study of authors and their works in a specific time period is an attempt to create order, coherence and discontinuity in a heterogeneous set of discontinuity. The present research aims to investigate the idea of literary school and its composing elements, exploring the connection of these components with history and aesthetics. It also strives to analyse the performance and consequence of such a chronological approach in the light of critical perspective. The concluding words of the present study is that schoolism and standardisation, while dictating a historical and patriotic attitude on literature, is quite prescriptive and reductive which by centralising the author propagates the causal approach in literary studies. Although each literary school, by taking advantage of such ideas as freedom, innovation and creation of new possibilities, challenges and opposes the other schools, and claims to set literature free from its shackles and limitations, it will lead to another prison for literature. Normally, the advent of every new school is conceived and perceived as a break in literature. However, repetition, imitation and continuity reduces the aesthetic function of the new school, bringing about its fall, and seemingly suggesting that literature cannot tolerate any kind of limitation and restriction and is constantly and relentlessly at work to achieve its freedom.

Nowadays, applying postmodern narrative strategies in Persian novels started a movement which attracted literary criticism to itself in order to appreciate its reasons and methods of usages. These strategies have been tested in all levels of narrative discourse. Metafiction is a term which is ascribed to the self-conscious nature of fiction and the imaginative state of fictional narratives. It is also concerned with the constructiveness and artificiality of the world outside the text. Metafiction has been one of widely-used narrative strategies in Persian novels for the last two decades, which through writing stories explores and examines the novelistic theories. Through metafiction, the author puts a distance between the reader and story, leaving a gap between reality and narrative before the reader. Metafiction strategy, which is employed by Persian novelists who utilized postmodern narrative techniques, has been represented in different ways and various styles. The present research has tried to study its stylistic forms in a few novels.

Romantic imagination has been the underpinning philosophy of almost all of the later intellectual and artistic movements until present. Romanticism, thanks to wide arrays of definitions as well as examples attributed to it and also due to its paradigmatic shift in man’ s perspective from “ general ego” to “ individual ego” , in one form or another is permeated in most of literary and artistic schools and movements. Romanticism, which originally was the outcome of its opposition to the strict framework of classicism, reappears more protesting than ever in Postmodernism which is in itself the outcome of man’ s frustration of modern principles and frameworks. The present article with a comparative approach, while focusing on the similar literary features of Romanticism and Postmodernism in Iran, aims to explore and investigate the correlation of these two movements. Studies demonstrate that postmodern poetry both thematically, in its protest and denunciation, and formally, in its linguistic deviation, has a close connection with the black Romanticism of 30s and language-oriented poetry of 40s. By incorporating the formal pattern of postmodern writing and adopting a polyphonic poetry, it strives critically to appropriate the old Persian poetic style for the new worldview and offer its own distinct poetics.

Although the present world is seemingly free from myths, yet they have their own place in modern man’ s mind. Artists especially poets of every period more than the others have a significant role in designing and foregrounding of myths. Among different literary schools, Romanticism has a greater regards for myths. Hussein Monzavi, the contemporary Iranian Romantic poet, has considerably benefited from a variety of myths in his sonnets. They are manifested in his works in three major forms of “ repetition” , “ alteration” and “ reinvention” . The present research aims to explain how in the light of Romantic thinking myths were mythologized and innovatively utilized in Monzavi’ s sonnets. Also, in order for a more precise analysis, some charts have been provided at the end.

Postmodern novels are a specific kind of contemporary novels. They are based on a wide diversity of tendencies which, albeit subsumed under some common aims and objectives, brought about profound novelistic differences among them and attributed them such different titles as Syberpanic novels, magic realism, metafiction, historiographic metafiction, etc. Basically, postmodern novels are oriented to one of such tendencies. However, the primary concern of the present article is the study of a Persian novel entitled as Sooratakhaye Taslim by Mohammad Ayoobi whose postmodern features are multilateral and based on a variety of tendencies. Whereas in some aspects the novel is magic realist, in some other it is a metafiction and also in some other, thanks to its historical orientation is a historiographic metafiction. In this context, the present research, highlighting the magic realist and metafiction aspects of the novel, focuses on one of the postmodern aspects of the novel which is based on the manipulation of history and the parody of what is called the historical facts in the novel. The research is written in applied form and in the light of Linda Hutcheon’ s theory. The research demonstrated that there are such features in this novel as specific novelistic techniques, multiplicity of points of view, unreliable narrator, fake history, anachronism, intertextuality, irony, discrediting history, challenge the dominant historical discourses and highlight its historiographic Metafictional aspect.