نشریه نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی
سال شانزدهم شماره 23 (پاییز و زمستان 1398)

Walter Benjamin is a thinker standing on the edge of the frontier of the tradition and modernity, and attempts to interpret the modern dimensions of human existence in the traditional statement. By using literary techniques, he mixes metaphysical justification with objective facts, and creates an unusual language that is not easy to understand. We believe that one of Benjamin's key concepts that has been neglected so far, is the intention; and this has led us to fail to grasp the understanding of his ideas on language and literature. This term generally refers to the agency and subjectivity, and so words and texts cannot have intention. According to him, the denotation of “brot” (in German language) and “pain” (in French language) is “bread”, but their intentions is different. For this reason, they cannot be equivalent. In a wider perspective, the intentions of all the words of each language is different from that of the other language. This article tries to get a clearer understanding of this concept using authentic sources, and show that the correct perception of this concept can bring together his disconnected ideas around a single axis.
For this purpose, we will use several sources in Persian, English and French. We first see how Benjamin describes the language; then we look at his definition of poetry; finally, we examine his conception of translation. Based on the interpretation given in this article, we can understand the key concepts of Benjamin, namely, language, poetry and translation only if the intention is recognized. We will present the results in the conclusion section.

As a prominent American novelist, James A. Michener wrote twenty-six novels and won several literary prizes, including the Pulitzers Prize for Fiction in 1948. Michener was preoccupied with the reflection of the European colonialism of North America and its detrimental environmental and ecological consequences, including deforestation and massive slaughter of wild animals, in his novels. Likewise, he exhibits the deleterious consequences of European settlement on the natural world in Chesapeake (1978). The white explorers and colonists who settle in the New World relentlessly burn forestlands to prepare vast lands for the cultivation of tobacco that was indeed a “cash crop” in North America. Euro-American anthropologists and researchers, including Shepard Krech III, have referred to indigenous North Americans as savage and uncivilized subjects with a cultural background that has always endorsed the devastation of nature and its inhabitants. Distorting the real cause of environmental damages, Krech asserts that Native Americans deliberately burned ancient forests, fell myriads of trees, and slaughtered countless numbers of buffaloes prior to the commencement of European settlement. He contends that the depredations of indigenes had induced the depletion of natural resources. Nevertheless, an examination of several novels of the Native American Renaissance, including Chesapeake, that mirror the adverse environmental and ecological outcomes of the European colonization of the New World, indicates that these allegations debunks these allegations. The present study seeks to challenge the claims raised by certain Euro-Americans concerning the injurious interventions of Native Americans through an ecocritical exegesis of Chesapeake. It shall be indicated that the prevalence of anthropocentrism among the European settlers induces environmental catastrophes in the New World. Moreover, this research shall exhibit that the Native Americans live in harmony with the natural world in that they believe in biocentrism rather than anthropocentrism.

Chesapeake has not been sufficiently dealt with in critical articles and books to date. Marilyn S. Severson (1996) focuses on the exploration of human tolerance that he considers an essential value in Chesapeake. She maintains that Michener is critical of various sorts of discriminations imposed on both black and white individuals in his seminal novel. Race and religion are the two significant sources of discrimination in Chesapeake. Racism is a powerful impetus instigating the white colonizers to commit genocide following the dispossession of Native Americans. African slaves are the second group of wretched individuals brutally tortured in Chesapeake. According to Severson, “the black slaves are considered a possession similar to a ship or a wagon” (100). The slightest insubordination among the miserable slaves leads to horrible forms of torture. Nonetheless, discrimination does not affect merely Native Americans and African slaves. Severson remarks that since Michener was preoccupied with the tolerance of different religious groups in most of his novels, he focuses on this issue in one of the chapters of Chesapeake. Stuart G. Leyden (1979) examines, in his article, the depiction of religious tolerance in Chesapeake. Referring to Michener as a “preachy moralistic writer,” Leyden contends that Christian morality was a significant concern for Michener. He compares Pentaquod, a fugitive Native American who abandons his hostile tribe to join a peaceful group of Native Americans, with the Quakers who are persistently persecuted by authorities in Michener’s novel. Pentaquod and the Quakers, Leyden argues, are both outcasts among their people. Ironically, these outcasts are peaceful individuals. They are coerced and beaten due to religious or political dissidence. Apart from religious tolerance, Leyden maintains, the struggle for women’s rights is also highlighted in Chesapeake. He argues that Rosalind Steed and Ruth Brinton exert themselves to end the brutal whipping of women for misconduct in that they firmly believe in human dignity and equality of men and women. Glenn Uminowicz’s article, published in a magazine title Tidewater Times (2008), compares Michener’s concern for animals in Chesapeake with the endeavors of Thornton Waldo Burgess (1874 –1965), a conservationist and an author of children’s stories, to raise the public awareness concerning the necessity of preserving non-human species. Uminowicz contends that Michener was inspired by Burgess who utilized anthropomorphism in his short stories. Similarly, he maintains, Michener uses animal characters in Chesapeake to teach his readers about the life of animals in Maryland. Hence, he argues that Michener plays the role of Burgess for adults. As Burgess wrote about a duck, named Mrs. Quack, which exerted to save her family from the guns of hunters, Michener focuses, in the eighth chapter of Chesapeake, on the perils awaiting ducks in Maryland during autumn when they arrive from Canada. According to Uminowicz, Michener portrays a family of geese headed by Onk-or to depict the complex strategies animals undertake to escape the terrible guns of white hunters.

The present study could be categorized as a qualitative literature-based research whose accomplishment required extensive academic and library research. Since this article is classified as a research project in the humanities, its critical argument rests upon a specific theoretical framework. Rather than statistical analysis, a particular approach to literary criticism was utilized to interpret the selected novel. Likewise, a variety of scholarly writings addressing ecocriticism, anthropocentrism and biocentrism were scheduled to be scrutinized prior to the commencement of writing the manuscript. Moreover, as a research work categorized under the field of applied research, this study sought to present a detailed survey of the sample. Hence, the critical investigation of the selected novel was carried out through the application of the critical concepts of anthropocentrism and biocentrism. As a qualitative research, the present study began with theoretical assumptions and subsequently focused on the representations of the critical concepts in the selected novel.

The world portrayed by Michener in Chesapeake drastically undergoes adverse alterations following the onset of European settlement. The prevalence of anthropocentrism among the European settlers induces detrimental environmental consequences in the New World. Comparing and contrasting the treatment of the natural world by the Euro-Americans and Indigenous North Americans, the present study indicates that the Natives do not make any effort to damage the environment. This research reveals that contrary to the false accusations raised by Shepard Krech III and other white researchers against Native Americans, the Indigenes in Michener’s novel prove to be preoccupied by the preservation of natural resources. The benign treatment of animals by the Natives, and their agitation upon the burning of trees by Edmund and Simon, indicates that in contrast with the European immigrants they firmly believe in biocentrism.

Eliot’s The Waste Land, enjoying mythopoeia as a modern literary-artistic gnre, contains both ancient and modern myths and archetypes. However, the difference of this mythmaking with other works is that the poet, using the ancient and historical mythical themes, has created the modern myths of his age. In other words, he has modernized the archetypes. The mythic themes analyzed in this reseach have been divided into some groups: the ancient myths, historical-literary myths, modern myths, and the apocalyptic or salvation myth. Through merging these mythical themes, the poet could depict a “waste land” that lies on a bed of 20th century history and culture. The motif of the work is in contemporary environmental disastors and the lack of spirituality that made human life tragic and changed the world as a non-exhistable rocky land where as though the livings are dead. The poet opposes with anti-nature deeds depicting modern chaos. Myths and archetypes discussed in the poem are: Cybele, Tiresias, Hyacinthus, Philomela and Cupidon; historical-literary myths of Carthage, Phlebas the Phoenician, Tristan and Isolde; modern myths such as the waste land, rocky land, Madam Sosostris, the Hanged Man; and the Indian eschatological myth.

It could be argued that myths always have a salient role in the human’s life, in a sense that all the human’s intentions, motives, deeds, and judgments have their roots in myths. Seemingly, the death of myths causes the annihilation of the world. This research aims to divulge the portrait of myths and the hero’s journey in the technological world of William Gibson’s novels in order to reveal if the metamorphosis of the human to the post-human in the technological world could be considered as the adventure of the hero. On the other hand, the present study is based on the hypothesis that the traces of myths could be found in all times and in all places even in the technological world. William Gibson, who is a significant author of cyberpunk fictions, recreates the old myths through technological features. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to critically investigate the mythical elements, including the hero and the hero’s journey and examining them in William Gibson’s novels, Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) to delineate that Gibson portrays a novel picture of myths and indicates that myths underlie all the stories and narratives. Gibson’s view has its roots in Campbell’s ideas regarding the existence of myths in all places and all times. In his The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Campbell argues that the permanent presence of myths in human history demonstrates that “man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth” (3). Since, according to Campbell, all myths follow the same patterns, the individual can find himself and his status in regard to the myths of the world. He also claims that all the stories, narratives, and works of literature could be more comprehensible through scrutinizing ‘monomyth’ and ‘the adventure of the hero’ which are variously represented.

The present paper reports on the development and validation of an inventory measure of the schemata notion for reading comprehension. The process of instrument development and validation is described, along with a review of the literature germane to the schema theory. Following Dörnyei and Taguchi’s (2009) recommendations, we performed a thorough browsing of the literature which culminated in 34 initial elicited items; the items were then content-analyzed by the experts in the field of second language reading. The experts deemed some items inappropriate. They approved the remaining 28 items to be field-tested and factor analyzed. The remaining items were then piloted and checked for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequently confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The exploratory factor analysis revealed a robust 2-factor structure: formal schema and culture schema. Next, the confirmatory factor analysis was run which solidified the results gleaned from the EFA. The implications, limitations and further research paths are discussed.

The interest in individual differences has raised over a few past decades. Individual differences refer to enduring personal features that deal with stable and systematic features as stated by Dornyei (2006). There have been plenty of studies that have examined the aptitude and the role it plays in learners’ academic success to date. There have been few, if none, studies to examine the learners’ aptitude employing LLAMA aptitude test in an Iranian context though. Background study: LLAMA aptitude test put forward by Meara (2005) first. One of the great advantages of the LLAMA aptitude test is that it measures the aptitude construct independently of learners’ English language knowledge. It consists of four sub scales: LLAMA B dealing with the vocabulary learning task, LLAMA D measuring phonetic memory, LLAMA E, assessing sound symbol correspondence and LLAMA F, examining grammatical inferencing. Gender as another variable moderating variable in the study has been also addressed in various studies. The results in this realm are quite contradictory though. Some scholars showed gender has a positive impact on learners’ academic success, while others believe that gender has a slight effect on learners’ success. The outcomes of different research showed that each of the above mentioned variables influences the learners’ success under different circumstances. The researchers of this study sought to answer the question if aptitude with the moderating role of gender would lead to learners’ academic success. They wanted to know if there would be any significant relationship between aptitude and its subscales and Iranian EFL learners’ vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension scores.

to meet the objectives of the study, 366 EFL learners (148 females and 218 males( at pre intermediate level with the age range of 18-25, studying in IAU East Tehran Branch participated in this study. They were majoring in engineering, architecture, basic sciences, and human sciences. They took the LLAMA aptitude test. Their vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension scores were also obtained based on their final exam at the end of the semester. The researchers of the study selected the expectation maximization )EM( method addressing the missing data. First, two measurement models were drawn through version 22 of the IBM AMOS statistical program to investigate the impact of independent variables of the study, that is, aptitude and gender on dependent variables, that is, participants’ vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension scores separately. Data analyzed employing structural equation modeling )SEM( through confirmatory factor analysis )CFA( approach. The complete structural model for investigating the simultaneous impact of the independent variables of the study on the dependent variables was drawn at the next step. The full structural model fit well with the data.

The findings showed that there was a significant  lationship between the aptitude and the EFL learners’ vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension scores. The gender had no significant relationship with the EFL learners’ aptitude and their academic success though. Among aptitude facets, the sound symbol association had the greatest impact and sound recognition had the lowest share on EFL learners’ vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension scores. These findings showed that aptitude can be used to predict students’ achievement scores to some degree. Thus taking care of this construct along with its facets can be led to students’ academic success in most cases. In the end, it is recommended that the academic institutions do their best to raise learners’ awareness of aptitude and its sub scales and try to teach them. Consciousness raising when coupled with practice and appropriate training can reinforce learning and thus lead to more academic success.re

The focus of the present study is on Postmodernism as one of the most controversial issues of the contemporary era. In a media-dominated society and with ever-increasing rate domination of technology, Postmodernism challenges man’s belief by establishing lots of controversies in almost every field of study. The French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard believes that in a media-dominated consumer society, postmodernism challenges reality perception and in this sense, he appropriates the terms hyperreality and simulation to describe the  lo’s White Noise as a highly acclaimed postmodern novel, this study attempts to offer a literary study in the light of Baudrillard’s  theory. new postmodern condition. Considering Don DeLil lo’s White Noise as a highly acclaimed postmodern novel, this study attempts to offer a literary study in the light of Baudrillard’s theory

 “Hyperreality” and “simulation” were coined by Jean Baudrillard in his philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation. Writing the most notable works on the subject of postmodernism, Baudrillard, as a prolific author, encourages numerous researchers to examine notions such as hyperreality and simulation in their studies. Considering the critical reading of White Noise, John Frow was probably the first critic to apply a Baudrillardian reading of the aforementioned novel. However, numerous other critics such as Leonard Wilcox, John Duvall, Thomas J. Ferraro, etc. draw some parallels between White Noise and Baudrillardian viewpoints. Although many other critics, for instance, Cornel Bonca and Anjeanette Wiese, just to name a few, examine the novel from different vantage points. For instance, in 1996, Cornel Bonca in his paper printed in College Literature entitled “Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species” analyzes the language of the novel. To cite another example, “Rethinking Postmodern Narrativity: Narrative Construction and Identity Formation in Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’” is a paper written by Anjeanette Wiese through which she focuses on the characters’ identity and narrative structures of the novel. It is also worth mentioning that Baudrillard’s books and theories have contributed to various fields of studies, namely, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies.

This research is a library and electronic-based research. Accordingly, the researchers aim at focusing on Baudrillard’s numerous books and papers and also various studies were done in light of his works. The discussion is based on Baudrillardian concepts of hyperreality and simulation. In this regard, the researcher endeavors to explore these terms application in DeLillo’s White Noise. Depicting contemporary America as a distinguished sample of Postmodern society, White Noise tells the story of an American family drowning in a media-dominated consumer society and facing a plethora of events  which lead them to believe they are living in a hyperreal world dominated by simulations.

The postmodern world of the given novel portrayed an American lifestyle drowned in the signs and images produced by mass media and consumerism. This study demonstrates the characters’ serious doubts about reality. It is a simulated reality or in Baudrillard’s word a hyperreality that takes the place of reality. Consequently, highly dominated by simulations, the postmodern world of the novel which is also highly influenced by mass media and consumerism moves toward a hyperreal condition which is a reality more real than real.

Translation is not just the transference of source text elements to the target text. In this process, the translator faces so many challenges, one of which is the pragmatic aspects of the text. This subject is not considered by many scholars and researchers. Translators sometimes focus solely on the vocabulary and textual structure of the text and overlook the hidden dimensions and layers of it. This problem is much more frequent in film translation because films are based upon dialogues and deal with these hidden dimensions. The present research tries to elaborate the categories that researchers have previously suggested for pragmatic aspects of the text and then showing their representations in dubbing translation by giving some examples. To this end, some samples from four English films which were dubbed into Persian were chosen. Then, the cases were analyzed and pragmatic representation become evident in dubbing translation. In these cases, it can be observed how translators changed these hidden aspects of the original films.

This research employs a comparative study design to analyze the political, sociological, and physiological impacts that Iraq-Iran and Iraq-America war had in shaping the literary approach that the Arab/Iraqi female war memoirists use. The Arab/Iraqi war memoirists including Haifa Zangana and Dunya Mikhail try to bring out the violent effects of the oppressive space as considered the concept of subjectivity, which they live. The Arab/Irqi war memoirists portray themselves as authoritative spears in the war whether they were acting as civilians or soldiers to overcome the aggression, where they take a transgressive move by attacking gender roles and taking up masculine roles such as leading activists’ groups. The current research is based on the premises that from a geopolitical point of views, Zangana and Mikhail are found to rewrite the scripts of war as a reflection of the gendered experiences, while they open up new approaches to the themes of war in literature and narrative.

Kelly Robin Adams in her doctoral dissertation “Literature Practices in Women’s Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement “(2012) carried out a research on the literate practice in women’s memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement, where the researcher highlights the participatory roles that women played in the movement including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. On the other hand, Johnson M. Alison in his book, Histories of War: Representations of Silence in Woman’s Vietnam/American War Narratives (2016) draws on the feminist rhetorical theories of silence, listening, and praxis to interrogate traditional psychoanalytic through thought by investing how America, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-American women who experienced the war provide a different model for narrating the war and coping with trauma. On her part, Amy Kathleen Sininger with The Truth in Comedy: Representations of Postfeminist Success and American Culture in Women’s Comedic Memoirs (2015) researched on the representations of postfeminist success and American culture in women’s comedic memoirs. The researcher carried out an in-depth analysis of how the increasing prominence of comedic is memoir is indicative of American cultural changes, particularly in relation to women and feminist, as women prove to dominate the genre. Consequently, Jenny Young Kijowski in Gender and Trauma from World War I to the War in Iraq: Narrative in the Aftermath of Loss (2015) analyzes the theme of gender ad trauma from World War I to the war in Iraq. The studies portrayed are correlated in some way because they provide the avenues with which the authors could express their experiences with the war while taking a transgressive move to portray themselves as agent of destruction of the symbolic order that privilege the masculine in literature.

The variations in the geopolitical orientations of the Arab/Irqi female war memoirists provides readers with the information about how the space they occupied influenced their selection of language and style of approaching about the war events in the Iraq-Iran and America-Iraq war. These geopolitical orientations form the foundation for the selection of the theoretical perspectives that can be used to read the Arab/Irqi female war memoirs. This research employs “Geocriticism” approaches by theorists like Bertrand Westphal, and Robert Tally, and philosophers like, Henri Lefebvre with his Production of Space to analyze the relation existing between the subjects and space in literary terms with critics such as Hélèn Cixous the concept of écriture feminine.

From a geocriticism approach, the Arab female war memoirists are found out to rewrite the scripts of the Iraq-Iran and the Iraq-American war as a reflection of the gendered experience, where they open up new approaches to the theme of war in the literary world. The audience of the studies can therefore track the foundation for creating knowledge in terms of how space, land, and spatiality within the jurisdiction of Arab female war memoirists influences their style of approach in portraying the events of the war.

September 11 attacks provided the American neo-Imperialism with the opportunity to disseminate the discourse of Islamophobia under the aegis of war against terrorism. The event influenced the world of literature, and many writers were prompted to find a response to the “Othering” of Muslims and Middle-Easterners in western narratives. One of these authors is the Pakistani Mohsen Hamid who, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, brings us face to face with the economic aspects of cultural and international injustice, and brings to light the deficiencies of the globalization discourse. This article studies the constitution of Changiz’s subjectivity as an alien and “other” in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel which impels the reader to think deeply about the lies hidden behind the universal and totalitarian categories such as “west/east” and “we/they.” Mohsen Hamid shows that the cultural map of the world needs a new design because national cultures are founded on the limitation of the alien, although they have their roots in people’s actions and behaviors, and do not possess an ontological and intrinsic value. This article explores the interconnectedness of identity and third space by studying Changiz’s character.

A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Don Dellilo’s Falling Man illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made trauma resulted by the cognitive manipulation of the 9/11 event. The way the narrator and characters in the selected novel cope with the 9/11 attack displays the cleft Festinger refers to as the cognitive dissonance as a distasteful condition led by the awareness of inconsistencies between beliefs, attitudes, or actions. However, People inherently aspire to the consistency, so they are impelled to reduce the dissonance between what actually occurred and what has been manipulated. While through the narrations, the narrators symbolically act as history-tellers reflecting the 9/11 era, the reliability or unreliability of what they narrate should be socio-culturally investigated. Based on Festinger’s theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and Elaine Auyoung’s idea on ‘huge cognitive leaps’, the cognition of a person changes and adapts itself to sociocultural settings and events. So any narration is prone to subjectivity and subsequently not necessarily reliable. Consequently what happens through the cognitive manipulation is meaning construction that makes narrations of cultural traumas unreliable. Thus, DeLillo’s aesthetic representation of the 9/11 trauma makes the reader encounter an unreliable version of a cultural trauma, connoting the fact that the borderline between fact and traumatic fabrications is hard to distinguish due to cognitive manipulations. Into the bargain, Delillo’s narrative scrutinizes the prospects of reoriginating individual identity and cognitive perception along with the propensity of individuals to create their identities through a group mentality or mediator groups as agents or carrier groups which are literary called unreliable narrators serve as compelling constituents in the trauma creation process since “cultural traumas are for most part historically made, not born” (Smelser “Psychological” 37). September 11, 2001 left America with a national trauma and poignant images for several upcoming years. Actually the terrorist attacks quivered the very established foundation of America. “Good weather [was] no longer synonymous with peace” (Beigbeder 198) and as a result it is just through 102 minutes that the symbol of progress distorted.

We have not exaggerated, if we claim that all the poetry of Rene Char is a challenge to the French poetry between the contradictory category of "openness" and "dependence." In fact, in his poetry, we always witness the exuberant desire of the subject to go, escape, and change permanently, and on the other hand, the tendency to return to the starting point where the departure had begun. The return is not for permanent stay, but for the subject to take advantage of this initial location as a launch pad, and the launch pad is nothing but an energy source for the subject which looks for openness to discover different possibilities only through relying on the source of energy of the initial locations. The subject of Char never tones to the deceptive charm of closed places where he can repose, but on the contrary, he sees himself continuously ready for permanent vivification. In other words, he would prefer the hazard of departure to indolence. So far, many studies have been done on poems and philosophical themes of Char, and critics have often criticized, studied and analyzed his works. Raychar explores the main themes of the Char's poetry and the dominance of his poetic language. In some part of this work, he analyzes Rambo's poetry in depth. By reading this section, the poet's influence on Char is clear. Char who has also been influenced by the Heraclite ideas, prefers the "permanent movement," "becoming," and "openness" to "the stagnation of rational and rational transparency." Char like Heraclite confirms the existence of a world in which everything, and even the world itself, is always in the midst of change. Therefore, every thought is rejected by the positivist certainty that is based on rational transparency. Char in Marto collection of poetry, quotes from Heraclite: "It should be remembered who forgets where the road ends" (cité par René Char, 1934: 11). This sentence emphasizes the denial of determination the proof that defines all the data beforehand. It can be argued that for Char what is essential is guaranteeing your presence at the moment, a moment that is full of anxiety and risk. The anxiety that comes from going to the unknown discovery that lies ahead of the subject. In fact, for Heraclite, like Char, "escaping from scientific certainty and giving up to the necessary and possible affair, while accepting the risk, is guaranteed to be present at the moment" (Fortier, 1996: 65). Char believes that in order to be present at the moment, we need an eternal death in the moment. In other words, the human being who is constantly witnessing his death at the moment and constantly living death is the living human being, because he is ready to accept new experiences at any moment. The main purpose of this paper is to answer the question that, basically, in the Char’s poetry which poetic images portray these two opposite tendencies, namely, the desire for departure and openness and return to consoling and supporting initiating places in a metaphorical manner.