فصلنامه نقد ادبی
پیاپی 7 (پاییز 1388)

This paper aims at a Jungian reading of Shazdeh Ehtejab and thus tries to find the traces of archetypes in the novel. Among the most important archetypes and primordial images that have found expression in the text, one can mention the hero archetypes, the images of water, fire, desert, colors and numbers along with the archetypes associated with Jung’s theory of individuation, i.e., the shadow, the persona and the anima. I have tried to use this conceptual framework to shed light on the way one can interpret different characters of Golshiri’s novel. Thus in my reading the grandfather symbolizes the devil while the prince himself is the exemplification of the hero archetype

Among contemporary playwrights, screenplay writers, and film directors, David Mamet is undoubtedly one of the best and most famous, especially in America. This study tries to analyze Glengarry Glen Ross, the best-known work of Mamet, which received Pulitzer Prize. We have chosen New Historicism as our main approach and we resort to Foucault's views and ideas in order to have a richer conceptual framework. The main concern of this paper is to analyze the concept of gender identity, the direct interrelation between power and sexuality, and the trace of this interrelation in social and business challenges. This study also discusses the traces of American capitalism as a circulating and dominant discourse and the way it exercises its power over different classes. Furthermore, it tries to give an account of David Mamet's attitude on gender roles. Finally, the paper deals with the question of language as a means of linking and signifying gender and power.

This paper examines the correlation among different aspects of speech and thought representation with a focus on free indirect discourse. The paper first examines Genette’s views regarding speech and thought representation and then focuses on the analysis of various types of speech and thought ranging from the most mimetic to the most autodiegetic. I will then focus on the free indirect discourse and try to shed light on it by resorting to the theories of Bally, Toolan and Machill. Our analysis demonstrates the fact that the linguistic features of FID can represent the thoughts and ideas of characters and narrators of story in a special way while they also bring about a kind of discourse replete with irony and ambiguity.

In his Notebooks (1914-1916), Wittgenstein announces that ‘artwork is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis’. At nearly the same time, in another part of the world, there was a critic and thinker, who thought art as making objects ‘unfamiliar’. He was Victor Shklovsky. I argue that there is a noticeable and yet unintended similarity and relation between these two aesthetic viewpoints. Wittgenstein and Shklovsky’s emphasis on art is its power to pave the way for the readers (in the extended sense of meaning) to feel things in themselves and ‘out of their normal context’. As Shklovsky claims ‘art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways’; in contrast, through ordinary way of seeing, objects are ‘reckoned as nothing’. According to Wittgenstein and similar to Shklovsky’s attitude ‘aesthetically the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist’. In this paper I attempt to show that the early Wittgenstein’s ideas of aesthetics are in harmony with the Shklovsky’s formalistic theory of art. In this direction, I focus on Wittgenstein’s sub specie aeternitatis’ and Shklovsky’s defamiliarization; because I think that they fill each other’s gaps. An artist defamiliarizes objects and the spectators see the objects sub specie aeternitatis. In Shklovsky’s thinking Habitualization (which ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war’) is very near to what Wittgenstein means by ‘the usual way of looking at things’.

Among the various critical approaches to literary works, psychoanalytical criticism is of special eminence. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was able to introduce a new reading of literary and mythical texts as well as art works to his readers, based on his new and innovatory perception of human mind and his discoveries of new aspects of human existence. His tendency to analyze the author's psyche through his/her work(s) is his greatest achievement in this field. After him, psychoanalytical criticism was subject to many developments. Jung, Adler, Ernest Jones, and Erik Erikson were amongst those whose activities have had magnificent effects on the development and evolution of this critical method. As a result of these developments, the practice of analyzing the characters of a literary work from a psychoanalytic perspective was pursued by Freud's pupils, and in particular by Ernest Jones and this critical approach became one of the most remarkable methods of literary work analysis.Due to its dynamic and structured nature, the method still remains a pre-eminent and well-known trend in modern psychoanalytical criticism. Thus in this study we have tried to analyze and scrutinize the character of "Zal" in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh from a psychoanalytical viewpoint in order to shed light on his psychic features. We have chosen Alfred Adler's psychoanalytic speculations on the inferiority complex, superiority, and compensation as our methodological guideline.

Time is an abstract notion, and it is always being understood by objective things. In the contemporary theory of metaphor, with its cognitive bases, there are some metaphors such as "time as a location or bounded space" or "time as an object". In these metaphors the relationship between time and observer is also being considered and two categories are extracted including "time moves and observer is motionless" and "time is motionless and observer moves". On the other hand, the amount of conventionality or novelty is also noticeable in cognitive view. In this article, time metaphors in Forough Farrokhzad's poems were extracted firstly. Evidence showed that these metaphors were the same as those which are used in ordinary Persian. In the next step, conventionality or novelty of poems was studied and it is found that in her first three books, "the wall", "the captive" and "rebellion", metaphors are mostly conventional but in her last two books, "rebirth" and "let us believe in the beginning of old season" conventional metaphors are extended and they were accompanied by novel features and even completely new metaphors were created.

Suhrawardi’s hermeneutical approach to the elements, components and narratives of the Shahnameh, as they are expressed in his mystical treatises, delineates the metamorphosis of the epico-mythic Weltanschauung into a mystico-gnostic worldview. We will best understand this metamorphosis by contrasting the hermeneutical principles of Suhrawardi with those of Ferdowsi in interpreting various myths and epic narratives. Ferdowsi’s hermeneutics can be described as “logocentric,” a term which highlights the role of λόγος in imposing a rational interpretation on the seemingly illogical and counterfactual aspects of myth and epic narrative. In contrast, Suhrawardi’s hermeneutics is dominated by different ontological and epistemological principles that turn it into what can be designated as “radical hermeneutics,” a theory of reading whose radicality consists in making the Erlebnis of the reader and his or her intentiō lectoris the focal point of interpretation. The paper will scrutinize the way in which Suhrawardi interprets the epico-mythic elements of the Shahnameh as mystical symbols in the context of his Gnostic and illuminationist worldview and thus metamorphoses the epic into the mystical.