فهرست مطالب علی سلامی

Eco Critical theory inspects the existing interconnections of the natural world and the human activities. Considering diverse philosophical perceptions of different philosophers discloses the deep existence and survival of ecocritical awareness in human being`s collective unconscious though it might have been articulated in dissimilar terminologies or technical terms. The interested reader can find traces of the same concerns in Swedish Swedenborg. The two notions of Correspondence and Influx signify the connection between spirit and matter, mind and body and it can be claimed to be what connects Man`s physical life with his/her perpetual nonphysical life. Investigating such notions in an Eco Critical realm the essay advocates a type of Eco Critical realization that requires us to unearth the covert long existing correlation between Man and the nature and the relation between this ecocritical notion and some of Swedenborgian specific philosophical notions. The purpose of this article is to analyze the components of ecocritical criticism in Swedenborg's works according to two philosophical concepts of Correspondence and Influx. This spiritual awareness clarifies that human beings cannot live in accord with the universe until they can manage to conduct their lives in harmony with Divinity since this God centric ideology does not let anything except reverence toward the environment as it is the epitome of God, the absolute creator.

 William Blake's long-lasting connection with Swedenborg has long been reflected by many researchers and it is impossible to examine the poet's works within the scope of ecological criticism without considering the importance of the Swedish philosopher in the formation of the poet's mentality. With infrequent exception, every foremost revision of William Blake's works embraces reference of the inspirations of Emanuel Swedenborg's theological books.

Background of the Study:

 There are some of the leaders of Eco-Romanticism such as Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber who fundamentally evade considering Blake an eco-conscious poet in the Romantic era. At the same time there are other critics who try to manipulate and ignore some of Blake`s negative representations of nature and show that he can be enlisted in Eco Critical readings of the present era. One of them is James McKusick who reads Blake`s Golgonooza as an “Ecotopia” of “human scale technology”; he advises the interested reader to read Jerusalem plates 18 and 19 as a caution against one of the most important ecological problems of the current era, the pollution (McKusick 102-05). There have also been some Blakean supporters who have tried to enter Blake into the ecological discussions of the present era and have attempted to raise Blake`s ecological concerns against those vast conventions that simply recognize him as a poet who sacrifices nature in favor of systematic imagination. Imagining Nature by Kevin Hutchings is an astonishing example which hopefully strives “to delineate an alternative, distinctively Blakean view of the relationship between humanity and nature” (Hutchings 3). Based on the aforementioned points, an Eco Critical reading of Blake’s selected poems has been done in this article considering Swedenborg`s “Correspondence” and “Influx”. Selected poems include The Hymn Jerusalem, parts of Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion and parts of Milton.

The art practitioner in the Romantic realm wishes to design all surrounding phenomena to pass through whole. It is widely believed that nature possesses its own self-governing language and all its features function regularly and it also has got a symbolic value, which makes it closer to the structures and peculiarities of unwritten language.  Swedenborg`s two conceptions of 'Influx' and 'Correspondence' have been believed to generate an accord between the surrounding natural world and the Man and he thought that there must be a genuine action of mind on our brain. The idea of ‘Correspondence’ seems to have a long history and it becomes an essential means to comprehend the cosmos and the essence of Man`s creation in Swedenborg`s thought. The reason that they are called correspondences is that they are entirely reactive and represent what they portray. There is an independent language spoken by natural elements and this conveys a symbolic asset which makes Man keep a closer contact to the structures and peculiarities of their surrounding environment. As was mentioned before ‘Correspondence’ acts as a universal principle and it is definitely dynamic so it involves causality. The true indication of this causal relation is named as ‘Influx’.

The author of this article concludes that the traditional eco-friendly metaphysics affirms the spiritual experience of plants and animals in nature after the environmental critical reading of selected parts of Blake's poems and suggests that it is possible to use nature itself to restore the consciousness of humans in the face of nature and all creatures and as a result, it is applicable to explore the deep ecological thought in Swedenborg's ancient concepts as well as Blake`s selected poetry.

Colonial Politics and the way freedom and equality are addressed have long been the subject of scrutiny by postcolonial critics. This study undertakes a literary analysis of the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in relation to Americans in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, it examines Ala Al Aswani’s novels, namely Chicago and The Republic of False Truths, through the lens of Chantal Mouffe’s theories on agonistic identity and pluralistic democracy. The objective is to explore the dynamics between Arabs and Americans, as well as the influence of American ideology, in order to ascertain whether genuine equality and freedom are universally realized or if such claims merely serve as veils for new forms of colonialism. Consequently, this article argues that following the September attacks in America, certain neo-colonial policies have come into play, engendering the construction of agonistic identities. By fostering this antagonism, animosity towards individuals of different cultures and religions remains concealed, thereby enabling more effective control over perceived adversaries. The post-9/11 era has witnessed a resurgence of animosity towards others who are viewed as potential sources of threats and fear. Such animosity can be discerned and analyzed within the selected novels, shedding light on the covert reality that Americans harbor neocolonial tendencies of marginalization towards individuals of different races or religions. However, this enmity remains obscured, serving as a means of enhanced control.

The present study with a cognitive critical approach and with the aim of informing and relying on theoretical frameworks tries to deal with the existence of a large and neglected gap in the field of English for Academic Purpose (EAP), which is the lack of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach or more precisely, the lack of communicative activities in EAP books. Therefore, this research has investigated and compared the types of activities in three Iranian EAP textbooks and their three international counterparts. Also, the perceptions of Iranian EAP instructors have been investigated through interviews. The findings of the research showed that there are no communicative activities in most Iranian EAP textbooks. On the other hand, in their international counterparts, communicative activities were abundant and highly varied. In addition, the implicit results of the study showed that the international EAP books contained communicative activities in the field of extending skills or soft skills. All interviewees agreed with the findings of the first phase of this study. They also pointed out the obstacles in designing communicative activities and providing suitable solutions. The suggestion of this article is that designing activities in EAP books that stimulate communication can be very helpful in improving students' communication in EAP. It is hoped that these results as a cognitive tool will increase the awareness of authors, professors and students in EAP.

The present article surveys Don DeLillo’s Falling Man so as to attest to the political resistance against the narrative of horror effected by the mass media in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. The researchers are inclined to read DeLillo’s novel in the light of the mind-sets of the illustrious contemporary thinker Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard emphasizes that we gain our access to events through the mass media, particularly television. Nonetheless, argues Baudrillard, what we see in real time is not the event as it actually takes place. On the contrary, it is little more than “the spectacle of the degradation of the event and its spectral evocation” which is far more magnified than the actual life ([Persian] Gulf War 48). Consequently, the truth begins to shrink and “the closer we approach the live and real time, the further we will go in this direction” (48-9). In other words, once an event is mediatized, it loses its significance and singularity for the commentary, modeling and packaging of the event become more important than the event itself. Baudrillard stresses that the public media privilege such matters as how to show the event to the viewers or who should interpret the event to what has actually taken place. The questions the article poses are that how the public media are terroristic in capitalist societies and whether the artist can display political resistance and counter-narrative against the terroristic narrative triggered by the 9/11 attacks. Background Studies: The novels which target the terrorist act of September 11 and its aftermath focus on such issues as pre-9/11 American society, terrorism, and traumatic experiences and living in the aftermath, and the War on Terrorism. Considering DeLillo’s Falling Man, a number of critics contend that Falling Man as a work of art cannot proffer political resistance in the post-9/11 climate. For example, Anne Longmuir argues that “DeLilloʼs treatment of Morandi indicates his rejection of the reclusive artist paradigm as politically bankrupt” (54). She acknowledges a kind of political resistance in Janiakʼs performance; however, she deems his work of art “defeated by larger cultural forces” (43).  Jonathan Yardley writes in a Washington Post article that in Falling Man, “DeLillo is merely piggybacking on Sept.11, counting on those vivid images cemented in our memories to give the novel the force heʼs unable to instill in it himself”. More radically, Kristiaan Versluys emphasizes that DeLilloʼs novel is “the most devastatingly pessimistic novel among all the 9/11 narratives” which not only fails to submit a resolution to heal the collective trauma in the post 9/11 New York Community but disperses the trauma “like a contagious disease” (14, 30). Versluys concludes that the “endless re-enactment of trauma presented in Falling Man allows for no accommodation or resolution” owing to the fact that September 11, 2001 culminates with “the collapse of everything that is familiar” (20, 21). Methodology and Argument: The researchers are inclined to read DeLillo’s novel in the light of the mind-sets of the illustrious contemporary thinker Jean Baudrillard. In Fatal Strategies and In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Baudrillard emphasizes that we reside in a transpolitical epoch whose salient characteristic is the pervasiveness of politics. In this era, according to Baudrillard, such terms as ideology, class, or state have been superseded by terrorism. Baudrillard insists that the mass media are tantamount to terrorism, and terrorism without the espousal of the public media is a nonentity. In this regard, claims Baudrillard, the media are terroristic for they target the masses. To be more precise, the public media are after people by means of simultaneously dispensing terror and galvanizing people into engaging in the intrigue of violence. The media propagate violence in the society. Hence, according to Baudrillard, the masses are the media’s confederate on the grounds that they are consumers of this terrorizing wide appeal. To him, “[t]he media are terrorists in their own fashion, working continually to produce (good) sense, but, at the same time, violently defeating it by arousing everywhere a fascination without scruples, that is to say, a paralysis of meaning, to the profit of a single scenario” (In the Shadow 113-14).Baudrillard gives particular prominence to the part the media play in proliferating terrorism. He emphasizes that the capitalist system sets out to perceive and interpret the terroristic event for its own benefits so as to motivate counter-terroristic attempts which, in turn, provide the state with a golden opportunity to overstep its jurisdiction. Thus, the capitalist society enjoys this prerogative authority and boosts its police forces and military programs. In addition to the capitalist state, Baudrillard states that the masses are also accomplice in this process due to the fact that they are enthralled with consuming fear. While terror is dispensed by the media in the system, the masses welcome and consume it in deep fascination, or as Baudrillard argues, the masses, then, enjoy the spectacle.Findings and The researchers render a Baudrillardian reading of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and contend that the artist’s unmediated performance can proffer a counter-narrative against the oppressive and selective narrative of the media by entering into the collective political unconscious of the audience, bringing to the fore the repressed memory of the victims, and reiterating what took place on 9/11. Not only does the artist resist actively against the media hype which surrounds the post-9/11 world, but he fills the rift between the artist and the audience through his unmediated work of art. Hence, the artist proves capable of healing the post-9/11 traumatic injuries of American citizens by making them re-visit their traumatic memory.

A Dance of the Forests (1960) and Death and the King's Horseman (1975) are two plays by the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka who has gained a large amount of reputation for his idiosyncratic expression of abhorrence towards Western colonialism through depicting native people's life situations and their conflicts with the Western colonizers. He also repudiates nostalgic view of the past and in A Dance of the Forests revealed his premonition of the forthcoming internal colonialism which was a consequence of exalting the past in a prejudicial manner. Frantz Fanon, the influential French psychiatrist and political philosopher, put colonialism under scrutiny in his writing and analysed its various political forms and psychological consequences. This article gives the two aforementioned plays of Soyinka a close reading through the eye borrowed from Fanon to detect in the relation of these two texts and the existing post-colonial conflicts and ambivalences in them.

The present article endeavors to compare and contrast two conflicting theories about the concept of the end, i.e. Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of history and Jean Baudrillard's concept of the end. According to the neo-conservative American theorist Fukuyama, history has reached its ultimate end of Hegelianuniversal freedom. Therefore, the West is reaching the end of history corollary to modern natural science and his simplistic interpretation of Hegel's concept of freedom as a “struggle for recognition”.Baudrillard's stance on the concept of the end, on the other hand, is in stark difference with Fukuyama's reflections of the Promised Land manifest in liberal democracy.Contrary to Francis Fukuyama, Baudrillard proclaims that as a consequence of the velocity engendered by advances in modern science and technologies, the event becomes less important than the contest for its digital broadcast or interpretation.Indeed, he avers that the construction of the non-event is a major objective of the global world order. He claims that this non-occurrence of events precipitates the end of history.