فصلنامه متن پژوهی ادبی
پیاپی 42 (زمستان 1388)

For athletic clans and Indo-European warriors, horse was an ancient widespread totem. Therefore, horse is the most widespread animal symbol in epic poetries such as Ferdowsi’s Shahname. Hence, we must analyze the symbolism of horse in connection with the ancient hero archetype. This animal symbol is related to water and sea, and the full force of the earth and nature. This animal is a symbol for the unconscious instinctive power of the hero who strives for perfection, victory, and sublimity by taming it (i.e., by restraining his ego). For this purpose, this symbolic view of Shahnameh’s horses in conjunction with the ancient hero pattern can be divided into four parts: 1. mythic interpretations of taming horses, 2. the totemic horses in athletic clans, 3. the human like character of the horses and their complementary roles in hero's sublimity, and 4. the horses which symbolize charisma.

The Views and theories of the prominent French philosopher and theorist Jacques Lacan are based on the fundamental concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis and at the same time expand these concepts by a set of new terminologies and methodologies. Lacan’s theorisation of the unconscious is a characteristic example of his complimenting and modifying of the classical psychoanalytic theory. The attention that Lacan pays to language in his theory is indicative of the Freudian basis of his thought. However, the status and importance of language in his theory of the unconscious go further beyond Freud’s general linguistic considerations. Drawing on, and at the same time modifying, Saussurian linguistics, Lacan proposes a new framework for understanding the concept of the unconscious, a framework which cannot be found in Freudian psychoanalysis and which is itself an instance of interdisciplinary expansion of psychoanalysis. The present study starts with an exposition of Lacan’s language-based theorisation of the subject’s psychic development. With this end in view, the Lacanian concepts of the “Imaginary Order”, “Symbolic Order” and other related concepts will be examined. In the final section of the study, the applicability of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the examination of literary texts will be examined in a critical reading of the modern Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan-Salles’s celebrated poem “Winter”.

Every poet utilizes some special techniques in creating his or her poetry. One of these techniques is innovating new vocabulary and combinations, which is called Lexical deviation in Formalists’ point of view. To create resurrection in his speech chain the poet utilizes some vocabularies in his poetry language that did not exist before. These new vocabularies are artistic and aesthetic only when they do not cause a weakness of discourse in the poem’s language and in combination with other vocabularies bring some cohesion to the poem. Sereshk is one of the Nimai’s poets in whose poetry this method is outstanding. It seems that his unique mastery of classic literature and the potential of Persian language for synthesizing provided the ground for the innovation of new vocabularies in his poetry. In this study, the researcher investigated the methods of innovation of new vocabulary in Sereshk's poetry. The study revealed that the poet owes the use of the great number of new vocabularies and combinations in his poetry to his deep knowledge and indefinite potential of Persian language.

William Jones is one of those who has been involved with extensive research and translation works of Persian literature in East India Company and has inferred from the examination of Shahnameh’s texts and words that there are similarities in Indo-European languages. James Atkinson from the Fort William College in Calcutta released his translation of the story of Rostam and Sohrab in 1814 A.D. Matthew Arnold (1888-1822 A.D.) has dedicated his famous poems to the story of Rostam and Sohrab. Arnold has attached too much significance to two categories of exploiting Shahnameh and Iranian passion plays or “Tazie”. James Russell Lowell (1891-1819 A.D.) praised Shahnameh highly and offered expression of regret at those who haven’t focused on these works. Jones, Arnold, Jules mole, Atkinson, Fon Shak and others, have all translated and exploited many works of Persian literature, especially Shahnameh. People such as Alexander Rogers have occupied a crucial cultural role in terms of strengthening the west literature through exploitation of Persian literature.

The feminist movement of the early ages of the 20th century began to administer justice in the issues of women's rights such as financial independence, education, and the right to vote. However, this movement has gradually changed from a political movement to a cultural and literary one. Some of the radical and post-modern theorists of feminism claimed that the “ecriture feminine” has just entered this arena as a new species of language by the poets and authors of this movement. In fact, this theory was formulated in the context of western social, political, and cultural changes and the dominant ideology prevented it from being reviewed or examined scientifically. The assumptions of the ecriture feminine are inconsistent with the nature of language itself and the gender factor can not be a determining element to create a new exclusive language. Therefore, this unconfirmed language is an imaginary one. This study is an attempt to show the cause for the refusal of this language and to finally prove that in the female’s literary works, there is a kind of style that can reflect the female experiments, tone, and themes. However, it is difficult to determine an exclusive Ecriture feminine as it is claimed.

In this paper, a survey on prose humor in the Persian official press on humor has been done. The research data includes 260 prose texts taken from 7 humor journals which have been published in the recent 25 years (1363-1388) in Iran. The data has been examined and analyzed within the General Theory of Verbal Humor framework. The General Theory of Verbal Humor, which nowadays is one of the well-known linguistic theories applied to humorous studies, was presented by Raskin and Attardo in 1991. In this theory, the humorous texts are analyzed on the basis of six basic variables or knowledge resources, including script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and language. The results of this study reveal that the presented framework is applicable to the Persian humorous press texts and among the six mentioned basic variables, script opposition and logical mechanism are the ones which are of the most importance in Persian, because they can be found in all of the examined texts. Therefore, it is concluded that these two variables are the effective factors in forming the structure of the prose humor in Persian. The results of the other variables have been presented in the “conclusion part” or the final section of the study.

In this study, interpretation of artworks in hermeneutical phenomenology is introduced while the advantages of its methodology over current, competing commonplace viewpoints such as Structuralism, are manifested and emphasized. To this end, Ahmed Shamlou’s celebrated poem “The Wall” has been analyzed and examined. The new analysis has delved into phenomenological order, mythological, temporal, historical, and finally intersubjective domains of the meaning of the poem in a cyclic manner. Every cycle has shed some light on the meaningfulness of parts in the totality of the poem and cumulative nature of the meaning of the whole in terms of the parts in the unity and integrity of the poem. Moreover, the interplay of signifier and signified in Saussurian terms has been put into question and elevated beyond the so-called one to one relationship or correspondence between signifier and signified.