پژوهشنامه نقد ادبی و بلاغت
سال هشتم شماره 2 (پیاپی 16، پاییز و زمستان 1398)

In Persian and Arabic poetry, both classical and modern, the use of rhetoric to communicate the concepts and meanings applied by the poet is very tangible, because what makes a text literary and poetic is its rhetorical aspects. Nima Yooshij and Nazik al-Malaika, as the founders of free-verse poetry in Persian and Arabic literature, used the elements of rhetoric to highlight the themes of their poems and make them more influential. These two poets occasionally gave sermons and advice in their poetry. This article investigates the use of semantics in creating the theme of sermon and advice in the poetry of these two poets. Among the most important elements of rhetoric employed to give sermons, one may point to semantic elements. Drawing comparisons between these two poets, the article demonstrates that both poets highlight the predicate to express their purpose through sermon and advice. Regarding the audience, what is most desirable for them is the expression of the predicative statement that the reader must recognize, not the choice of the type of audience or address. There are, of course, differences in the application of rhetorical elements between these two poets. For instance, Yooshij expands his poems through repeating the concepts of sentences and by using allegories and metaphors, but Malaika does so by the repetition of the imperative sentences.

Sadegh Hedayat wrote The Pilgrim (1945) based on and shortly after the historical and political events of the final years of Reza Shah’s government and early years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. The article adopts the method of critical discourse analysis, as formulated by Ruth Wodak, James Paul Gee, and Norman Fairclough, to study the novel and analyze its author’s views on the political discourses of the aforementioned period in order to determine which political discourse or discourses influenced the novel. It is possible to consider the novel politically as a meta-discursive, non-discursive or non-ideological work in which political discourses, such as kingdom, nationalism, fascism, modernism, Westernization, secularism, traditionalism and religiosity, leftism (Marxism and communism), liberalism, democracy, and constitutionalism are criticized by the author. Political ideologies are utilized to secure the interests of their advocates and propagandists. Hedayat experienced many historical and political changes from the Constitutional Revolution to the period of Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah and saw the instability politicians, rulers, and profiteers. He mixed up these events with a furious satire and created a political novel. We cannot fully comprehend the novel without having knowledge of the political events and currents of the writer’s period and his political tendencies.