نشریه پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
سال نوزدهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 70، بهار و تابستان1393)

Undoubtedly Alamut by Bartol can be considered as one of the masterpieces of Slovenia and Europe which has been exposed to different readings for decades. One of its naive readings is regarding the novel as a literally narration of the events of Iran in the 11th century, the time that Esmailis with Hasan Sabbah as the leader ruled over Alamut Castel. This article tries to analyze that although Bartol had a lot of information about the Middle East of that time but he looks at his own nation and the miserable events of his own country through his own perspective of Hasan Sabbah. This article respects Alamut as a sublime literary work embodying the profound social and nationalistic sufferings of the writer made immortal through his work.

This article is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the role of humanities in the sustainable development of the society and the role of literature as the preserver of cultural identity. The second part deals with the historical background of English literature and its role in the colonies of British Empire. After the political independence of ex-colonies, cultural imperialism resumed its role in eliminating the native culture and replacing it with the European culture. The third part is a critical study of the English literature curriculum in Iran. It will be demonstrated that this curriculum has not been successful in achieving its primary goals in practice. At the end, the researcher makes some strategic recommendations including the establishment of interdisciplinary departments such as Comparative Literature which can assist us in introducing our own literature and culture to others and have a better and critical understanding of the other as well.

Using statistical methods has many benefits in the accuracy and precision of stylistic research. One of these methods is Johnson "vocabulary variety" which is based on core vocabulary. This article has analyzed the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, Farzaneh Khojandi (Tajikistan)and Khaledeh Forough (from Afghanistan) from the perspective of this theory. By examining three thousand words from each poet, the overall proportion of variation of the words in the poetry of Farzaneh Khojandi is more than the other two. In addition Forough Farrokhzad and Khaledeh Forough have the same level of diversity. The next stages of calculations showed diversity in the poems of Forough is more than Khaledeh and Farzaneh. That means her mastery of the language of poetry in the second period of her career is more than two other. Also despite the fact that the three poets have used the same words, it is how they have used the words which has made the differences, resulting from the difference between the poetic style and attitudes and living condition of each poet.

Turandot is the title of a warlike woman in The Narrations of One Thousand and One Days which has become the source of creativity for many Iranian classic poets and world dramatist up to now, but the study of this drama has been neglected in Iran. Berthold Brecht is one of the diligent playwrights and narrative theatre practitioners and theorists of the 20th century. He has made many wonderful achievements and innovations in Turandot. Brecht wanted to portray the sunset of reason and rationality in his time. The main plot of this ten-act drama was written in 1921 but its final product was presented in 1954. Despite the many researches that have been done on Brecht's prose and verse yet no independant research has been carried out on understanding Turandot. This paper has considered this dearth of research and has therefore referred to the historical origin of Turandot and Brecht's innovation in the use of the motif of love. By describing this drama, Brecht's innovations and features of Turandot has been analyzed.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, due to various reasons, Iranian fiction was influenced by the works of the world's great writers. In this process, Russian writers had the major contribution. Among Russian writers, Chekhov's works received the major attention and were translated into Persian. Many studies have been conducted to assess how this famous writer has influenced some of the great contemporary Iranian novelists. Mansour Yaghouti is among the writers who seems to have been influenced by Chekhov while writing one of his fictions entitled "Unique flower". Seemingly, he followed and modeled the structure and content of some short stories by Chekhov entitled "Sorrow", "The Lament", and "The Gloom" which have been translated into Persian and published several times in Iran. The numerous similarities between these two stories in terms of structure and content brings this question into mind that, had Yaghouti been under the influence of Chekhov when writing his fiction? This study aims to answer this question through comparing and analysing the similarities between the two stories from various aspects.

This study of Firoozeh Duma's Funny in Farsi seeks to demonstrate the memoirist's critique of orientalism and memoiristic images of Iran. In Funny in Farsi,which like most of the post-9/11 diasporic memoirs by Iranian women has been written in English, the author has tried to answer the unprecedented curiosity of western readers about Iranian-Islamic culture, especially the issue of Iranian women. One significant aspect of Duma's memoir is its recourse to satire, which differentiates it from the bulk of Iranian women's diasporic memoirs with their characteristically tragic story of loss and frustration. In this satiric memoir, Dumas has challenged western reader's unreal images of Iran and their expectation of "Iranian woman's diasporic memoir" as a genre. She has satirized the stereotypical images of Iran in Iranian women's diasporic memoirs which are mostly rooted in orientalist's works and the western media, and has replaced them with more objective and historical images. Through this alternative approach to the representation of Iran's cultural and social complexities, Dumas has extended the generic boundaries of the so-called "Iranian woman's diasporic memoir" and has demonstrated the orientalist and feminist-orientalist ingredients of this contemporary genre.

Greimas was a semiotic structuralist who continued Prop's researches in narrative science. In this paper, we will discuss Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Master and Margarita based on his Actantial Model. The purposes of this paper is to achieve the narrative methods of the novel Based on Greimas's view (Greimas 1), evaluation of compliance, and identifing the author's techniques in the narrative charm. The main question of the paper is:Is the novel in the style of socialist realism in accordance with Greimas's theory?What about the narrative theory of prop? Which elements have entered the process of meaning? This novel includes three categories: "Master and Margarita and Satan's presence in Moscow", "Pontius Pilate and Crucifixion of Jesus" and "Confluence of these two narratives". This novel as a Contractual Structure by Bulgakov, how Jesus's fighting the oppressors. In fact a review of Bulgakov's novel corroborated Greimas's theories.

Natalia Ginsburg (1916-1991) is one of the most famous Italian writers of the 20th century. In most of her works, she has pointed to the political and social problems of Italy during World War II. The War and its outcomes have effected her world life which has appeared in her works. Worldlife is one of Jurgen Habermas's technical terms in his glossaries of Sociology. He is one of the notable contemporary philosophers and social theorists. World life includes the values, beliefs and common beliefs of a nation. The main goal of this article is to describe Ginsburg's world life according to her works. Ginsburg has described an Italian Society which does not have a favorable world life. System dominates over world life in her community and characters. In this study, the infrastructure of world life is examined in Natalia Ginsburg works and also agents that threat the world life of the author. In this article, the research methodology is content analysis. In this study, three novels of "ABC Family", "our yesterdays" and "night whispers" have been analysed.

In this paper, using Aristotle's theories on tragedy, we will clarify the significance of "discovery" and "reversal" in Parvin's three poems entitled "Gereh Goshay", "Do Mahzar", and "Goftar va Kerdar". Parvin Etesami, as one of the greatest Iranian poets, is mainly known for her depiction of social problems in her poetry, but one of the most important aspects of her poetry is the amalgamation of classic poetry with the modern ones and its being under the influence of Western literature. However, no research so far has directly pointed to the influence of Aristotle on Parvin. The present research attempts to answer the question whether or not we can find the Aristotelian elements of discovery and reversal in Parvin's poems, and if so, how she uses them in some of her poems. The findings of this research show that Parvin has used the concurrent type of discovery and reversal in them. This research has been conducted through comparison, adaptation, and analysis.

Marguerite Yourcenar turns to self-making in all her works and regards it as the result of an evolutionary process. Marguerite Yourcenar designs the basis of this self-making by creating the characters in her novels so that the process of an independent viewpoint about self-making combines with the expression for individual identity. She has analyzed human identity in the effects taken from historical contents and myths. According to such viewpoint, the human's interpretation about their essence and the relationship with their environment is reflected in myths. From this viewpoint, explaining myths in literature and the author's historical ideas are expressed with a close relationship between the author and her artistic work as a model in self-making. This article tries to study analogically Marguerite Yourcenar's route in drawing individual identity and understanding self-making through the layout of characters in her novels.