نشریه نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی
سال هجدهم شماره 26 (بهار و تابستان 1400)

By acquiring a new language, people can not only come to respect differences, but also realize that they live in a small world. Although there are many positive aspects regarding acquiring a new language, not every person who attempts to learn a new language succeeds in obtaining the ability to effectively communicate for several reasons such as losing motivation and confidence towards learning, lack- ing an effective learning environments, and so forth. There is no doubt that teachers play a significant role in producing successful language communicators. Teachers are able to maintain and control students’ motivation towards studying both inside and outside the classroom, which certainly produces students’ confidence in their communication skills. In addition to the significant role of the teacher in the language learning process, students must also make an extensive effort to acquire a target language on their own. After careful consideration of the role of the instructor and learner in language development, we can come to the conclusion that effective lan- guage learning requires fruitful teaching and learner autonomy.

Martin Amis’s novels, Time’s Arrow (1991), and London Fields (1989) have many layers of interpretations including historical study by which scientific study may be distilled. Annealing, as a method in metallurgy science, can be taken into consideration for understanding one of the aspects of the novels’ interpretation. The trend of life after passing the social, cultural and historical circulations based on Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault and their notions of knowledge, power and time is taken back to its original condition and culminates in recreation.Background StudiesSacido about Martin Amis’s works writes that he condensed tahe spirit of the times while looking back to authors of the canonical tradition in the form of inter-textual games (235). Johnson mentions that we can describe the mysteries of love as the result of strong annealing process while under the influence of some patterns can trigger high energy states (3).

This paper is an attempt to reveal Martin Amis’s selected novels as the process of a dynamic trend by which the original condition is recreated as a result of being stuck in the social circulation. The character circulates in the process of society and achieves new acquired being.

The main characters of the both novels have a return from death to life or form the synthesized identity to the original identity through the process of annealing as a result of resonance.

Meaning-making in the Deleuze-Guattari semantic region is a revolutionary and artistic schizophrenia, contrary to the conventional process of semantics of conventional reason. Revolutionary means minor literature, and artistic means poetic. The poetics of meaning in poetry is held silently as an event similar to the poetic thought event in Heidegger's philosophy of art. Poetry's vow of silence is the creating place of recurring and different meanings that appear in the successive turns and intensities of body without organs. In this way, poetry uses meaning and truth as an event out of habit and as a dignity of existence. Hence, the eventfulness of poetry coincides with its meaning. Surprisingly, Archibald MacLeish builds beingness of poetry in ‘Ars Poetica’ by arranging the paradigms of silence, stillness, and wordlessness on familiar meaning-making. In this way, poetry does not tolerate the conventional meaning because it is concerned with different and intensified eventful meanings as being in the world. The present study is a Deleuzian-Heideggerian reading of MacLeish’s poetic art in the light of the above concepts and considers poetry as an event focused on pure and unfamiliar meaning and truth.

The main objective of this study is to understand how novel can be read against psychological reality. As a case study, this paper addresses the Novel of the Stranger by Camus. Embedded in Kundera’s reading on the linkage between psychology on novel and psychology, the main question here is that how this novel can be read as what acts against psychology. Psychological novels are framed in a psychological cause i.e. making linkages among those unrelated or discrete events. A plot coherence is not possible without acknowledging such causal relationship. Rather, the novel of the Stranger addresses “ out- of -law”and “ off-topics” issues . Meursault is a stranger as he does not follow up the rhythmic tone of plot. In existentialism era, novel made a fundamental change in its “form” and “content”. As an existentialist philosopher, Camus puts an emphasis on the existing situation/placement rather than analyzing the characters in the novel. Unlike psychology which tries to make a clarity and distinction, Camus tries to talk about ambiguities and irrational reality. A dynamic and flexible rather than monolithic and fixed identity is obvious in his work. Novel in his reading is a domain for unpredictable events. Psychology, rather, attempts to disclose meanings and rational motivations in randomly occurred events. Besides the political function, one consequence of avoiding reducing the concept of novel to psychology in literary criticism is to refer the text into out of context elements like author’s biography.

The present study aims at revealing Rhetoric in Persian and English language and literature and discussing its major classifications by rhetoricians, while emphasizing “Prologue” in Shahnameh and “Invocation” in Paradise Lost. To do this, some of the most significant contemporary books on Persian and English Rhetoric and literary devices are analyzed, and simultaneously those approximate literary devices such as Prologue, Invocation, Foreshadowing, Prolepsis and Apostrophe are compared and contrasted. The results of this research indicate that Persian and English literary devices are not always identical while sometimes seem to be incompatible. This incongruity refers to the nature of their languages and literary text along with poets’ methods of utterances and expositions. Further, the vague equivalents and lexicographers’ negligence aggravated such incongruity. The method employed in this research is descriptive and analytical. Besides, the American School of comparative studies in which direct influences are not insisted, are followed in order to reveal Prologue and Invocation in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and John Milton’s Paradise Lost and to identify their approximate literary devices.

Learning a foreign language such as French always faces various challenges, including overcoming the grammatical problems of learners. Given that grammatical exercises can functionally play an important role in learning the grammar of a foreign language, in this study we aim to look for a relationship between memory and types of grammatical exercises. In other words, in this study we seek to find an answer to the question of how linguistic data and information are stored and classified in the human brain and memory? What is the difference between grammar knowledge and grammar skills, and how can French teachers turn grammar knowledge or mental data into grammar skills through grammar exercises? Using a questionnaire, we asked a question about teachers' knowledge of psychological issues of language, including memory and its relationship with grammar exercises. The research method in this research is analytical and descriptive statistics are presented. The results of this study clearly show that French language teachers are not sufficiently aware of the psychological issues of language and the effective role that this knowledge plays in their teaching skills in choosing different types of grammatical exercises. The results of this study on the types of grammatical exercises also show that conceptual exercises and exercises that deal with the textual, spoken and written productions of learners as well as task-based exercises that are done in groups have the greatest role in the development of procedural memory (which is directly related to Acquisition of language skills is related).

This article focuses on the notions of panopticism and post-panopticism in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) through the perspective of left thinkers. Using Foucault’s and Lyon’s views, the writer tries to discuss how the exit of the migrants from the panoptic, disciplinary communities of theirs to the so-called democratic West can prove a failure. Focusing on an unknown, Islamic country as well as the western cradles of civilization—Greece, Britain, and America—Hamid, in fact, tries to clarify how the disciplinary community of the orient has much in common with the post-global West. The only difference is a shift from a panoptican discourse to that of a post-panoptican one. To this end, the notions of “camp,” “sorting paradigm” and “bio-politics” are to be discussed. It is argued that despite the blurring of the borders through the post-global capitalism, the West seems to have restored the old imperialist ethos in the form of the anti-racist racism through the practice of “geofencing” and “geoslavery.” However, the hybridity that migration results in can pave the way for the emergence of a space of heterogeneity, herterotopeia, in the West which is in constant process of “becoming.” As a result a new sense of belonging and, thus, identity on the part of the ethnic other is formed and the notion of nativeness and the concept of the home are challenged so much so that the imigrant would be able to “make a home” wherever he is regardless of his roots

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the merging boundaries of “Self” in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, a novel written in 1972. Atwood explores the inner conflict of the protagonist and pursues the gender roles and discriminations towards women. The narrator is suppressed in the wilderness, and during her journey, she is looking for her past. The novel shows that the fractured sense of self such as interpersonal relationship, self-image, and identity begins from childhood. More specifically, the novel attempts to search for the identity and survival of the self in a postmodern society. The main objective of this study is to identify the mental, psychological, and spiritual boundaries of self in this society. Moreover, the research takes a feminist approach to explore the ways the narrator utilizes to build and preserve the boundaries of self, which resulted in the self-realization at the end of the novel. These practices include turning in to the feelings and emotions, seeking support from others, considering the past and childhood life, and improving self-awareness and self-care. Moreover, we categorized and elaborated the boundaries of self in three separate categories: female subjectivity, fake identities and ideology, and landscape, nature, and cultural aspects. Atwood illustrates the subjugation of nature and women by the Western culture throughout a journey to the past and to the forgotten territories of the protagonist’s psyche paralleling them with the remote Canadian forest areas and taking advantage of narrative strategies that contribute to the psychoanalytical theme of the novel.

This paper depicts the lived experience of the black characters in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners with regard to the concepts of self, mind, and body. Reading Selvon in the light of Fanonian concept of epidermalization and Freudian notion of melancholia, the current research argues that the black immigrants suffer from a traumatic state of mind, which results in self-contempt, psychic disintegration, and physical disorientation. This article especially focuses on the black characters’ fascination with the white world and its cultural values to argue that the otherness assigned to the black people by the whites throughout history is strongly felt in the novel in a way that none of the black characters is able to truly manifest his/her black spirit. In its conversation with the current body of research on the topic, this paper foregrounds the black characters’ sense of lost in the metropolitan life of London to eventually argue that Selvon’s characterization moves in opposition to his empowering narrative techniques and linguistic strategies.

The decentered subjectivity which is studied by Paul Virilio is the result of modernity and humans' alienation from himself and the surrounding. The consequential detachment from the background human history by manifesting the unfolded and shattered human history, along with the humanistic spirit is studied. His revelation is studied here, through a discourse analysis in terms of two seemingly diverse, but essentially commingled and integrated discourse theories and subjectivity approaches including the dromological and panoptical discourses, based upon his theory of dromology and Foucault's theory of the panopticism, to investigate the relationship between identity formation and discourses, both of which are considered as the parts and parcels of modernism. Virilio argues the importance of technology in the life and destiny of human being as a cyborg and has challenged the power discourse through the combination of the two mentioned discourses, especially in international and war fields. The transition of panoptical discourse to dromological discourse is manifested in this study to emphasize on different elements at hand with speed acceleration to exert a supreme panoptical power over others.

Using paradoxical spatializations, Raymond Chandler challenges the conventional representation of the Southern California region. The coexistence of heterogeneous elements in Chandler’s novels depicts a particular kind of mid-twentieth-century noir genre. These literary spaces, under epistemological tensions, move toward heterotopic descriptions. Finally, this paper calls the literary other spaces produced by Chandler’s stories Noir Heterotopias, and concludes that Chandlerian descriptions seek to induce a sense of suspense in their spatializations.Acknowledging that heterotopia theory is consistent with Foucault’s method of analyzing the discourse, the examination of Chandler’s novels reveal that the heterotopic spaces are intertwined with the dark spaces of the noir fiction. Furthermore, in the stories, the paradoxes do not reach a climax, therefore, this study suggests that the resulting spaces to be called noir heterotopias. Finally, since the stories conclude with a sense of nonfulfillment, and their heterotopic tensions remain unsolved, it can be said that suspension is the key to the new social order that noir heterotopias seek in their descriptions of Southern California.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of digital image guide, a method of teaching in the field of visual literacy, on improving Iranian EFL learners’ intercultural communicative competence. This study employed quasi-experimental research design with pre-test/post-test control group. The participants were drawn from a pool of first semester students of Knowledge and Information Science major at Razi University of Kermanshah in the academic year 1399. The participants who were attending a mandatory general English course were selected via convenient sampling method. Twenty-two learners qualified to take part in the study, with 11 being assigned to the experimental group and 11 to the control group. The two groups were first pre-tested on their intercultural communicative competence, and then the experimental group received nine 30-minute training sessions which involved the use of digital image guide. The images used in this study were selected from Getty Images and Flickr sites The two groups were post-tested on their intercultural communicative competence at the end of the treatment period. The obtained data were statistically analyzed to determine the effect of the treatment, that is, the improvement in the learners’ intercultural communicative competence. Analysis of covariance showed a significant difference between experimental and control group concerning the mean scores on the pre- and post-test, meaning that using the digital images guide helped improve the learners’ intercultural communicative competence and its components.