فصلنامه متن پژوهی ادبی
پیاپی 58 (زمستان 1392)

Using the Quran verses and the hadiths by the Prophet in the prose texts was a common practice after Islam. This was done to maintain the words of God and the Prophet. In addition, the texts were adorned and arranged in numerous manners. Using Quran verses and hadiths accounts for the fundamental basis of mystical texts. These have been frequently used in simple and technical prose of this type of texts. The book Sharh-e Shatahiat by Ruzbahan Baqli is among the mystic prose texts written in technical prose (12th century AD), in which Quran verses and hadiths have been used more than 1,000 times in numerous ways. After a thorough and precise study of the book Sharh-e Shatahiat, this article attempts to first provide comprehensive statistics on the number of verses and hadiths used in the text, and then after showing the highly used cases, it investigates and analyzes the applications of the numerous verses and hadiths from the three viewpoints of grammar, expression, and meaning. In the grammar part, grammatical roles of the verses and hadiths, including subject, object, etc. as well as the way they are arranged in the sentence are studied. In the expression part, metaphors made of the verses and hadiths, the poetic images resulting from them, and the motivation and purpose of Ruzbahan about his creation of these images are analyzed and investigated. In the semantic part, the secondary purpose of the applications of verses and hadiths are explored on the basis of the viewpoints by Hossein Khatibi.

Combining myth and story in modernist and post-modernist narration is among the techniques that make the narration to incline towards metaphors and being multi-layer. This way, in order to understand the story better, the reader is left with no choice but to find the mythical deep structure of the story hidden in the underlying layers of the text and put together the narration parts based on the said structure. In this paper, using Jacobson’s theory about the metaphor and metonymy as the poles of the language, the mythical deep structure of several short stories by Shahriar Mandanipour are analyzed and explained. It is shown that in these stories, a mythical character is sometimes the substitute for a fictional one, and sometimes the mythical time replaces the fictional one. This means that the past in a character’s mind in the story takes place in a qualitative time, and the time passes between the past, the present and the future, while the author replaces the times constantly. In some cases, one story replaces a mythical fiction in general, and in some other cases, a mythical narration substitutes the story’s general narration. In the present study, Mandanipour’s stories are analyzed at five levels of description and creation of character, dealing with time, description of the setting, the plot and the narration at macrolevel based on the structural features of a mythical narration. It is revealed that most of the replacements have taken place at the level of language.

Female writers in the field of fictions resist to social division into male and female; they deal with the problem of identity and the status of Iranian woman in a social change and combine the criticism of patriarchic society with the women’s effort to find themselves. However, the type of this resistance needs to be explained. Every writer uses a specific narration method, design, sign to express his/her thoughts and concepts. Fariba Vafi is a hard-working story-writer in the contemporary time, whose main concern is the issue of women. My Bird is her first novel, which seriously deals with women’s issues with a specific method. In this paper, the connection between deep structure and the method of narration in this novel is explained. Using the first person narrative, the writer represents the story from the viewpoint of a woman, so that she could express women’s objection to their status. Sometimes, the narrator’s objections about women’s situation are reflected in form of description of the current status quo in an obvious manner. However, many concepts and deep structure of the story are presented as implicit information. By drawing the unpleasant situation of woman in society and family, the narrator informs the reader of this situation, which leads to improvement in the conditions. The frequency of quotations about the situation and the descriptions in comparison with actions indicate that the woman is constantly at home and in the kitchen and has no other time but to quote out of the kitchen window, to think and ponder or to write letter about the issues she always deals with.

In order to express the secondary meanings, semantics needs methods, which inform the audience of the existence of these implicit meanings in the text. Besides following the requirements of the form or violating them, the addresser may use two grammar-specific methods to express his purpose. These two factors can be called dislocation and foregrounding (by ellipsis or expression, definiteness or indefiniteness, limiting, restricting and clipping). In addition to using context, the speaker applies these grammatical factors to draw the reader’s attention to the secondary meanings. The eloquence of the story largely depends on linguistic applications (application of grammatical factors and rules) and on the power and art of the writer in using of these factors to imply implicit meanings. Thus, in this paper, the final part of the “Narrating the Hanging of Hasanak, the Vizier” is selected from the History of Beyhaqi to show how the writer used these linguistic and grammatical factors to maintain and create coherence in the text and affect the reader. The results show that the effect of Beyhaqi’s writing mainly goes back to the way he uses these grammatical factors in implying concepts indirectly. In fact, with the help of these factors, Beyhaqi cause cohesion and coherence in the text.

Rumi’s Masnavi has been the center of attention of other poets as one of the most famous mystical works. That is why there are many imitations of the book. One of the Masnavis which is similar to Rumi’s Masnavi in form and content is Masnavi Taqdis and is written by Molla Ahmad Naraqi. This paper compares these two Masnavis with a critical approach. As for formal factors, the comparison between these two works show that one of the important factors of association in Masnavi is the one based on similarity. This type of association too has branches in Rumi’s Masnavi such as association through the theme or based on the attributes of the characters, dialogues, synopsis, etc. The present paper attempts to show these similar cases in Masnavi Taqdis. The rhythm and form of the two Masnavis are among other similarities that can be discussed. In addition, both works start without any preparation and the first verse begins with the word “hear”. The ending in both Masnavis are also similar because both of them are unfinished. The this study shows that Masnavi Manavi is superior to Masnavi Taqdis in the common stories and the method of developing them. In terms of content, besides the fact that different mystical issues are mentioned in these two Masnavis, some stories are common in these two works. Molla Naraqi has adopted large number of verses from Masnavi Manavi.

The technical prose of Nafathat al-Masdoor was written by Shahab-Eddin Mohammad Khorandezi Zidari Nasavi in the first half of the 7th century on the Islamic lunar calendar. The main theme of the book is an autobiography of the writer during the period of the Mongols attacks; in addition, the book includes valuable historical information. The dual purpose of the writer, who wrote the book for both history and literature, has made researchers and Persian literature linguists express different opinions on the literary value of the book. Some consider the book as a technical prose written to reflect history; thus, questioning the literariness of the prose. Others, however, consider the book as one of the most valuable Persian literature prose works for its artistic utilization of language. Still, some others maintain that the lexical and semantic complexities of Nafathat al-Masdoor prove that the work belongs to only a certain period of time, which reduces its literary value. Using linguistic criticism, the present study explores the literary beauties and deficiencies of this work, and through this procedure, it answers the question as to why there are various opinions on the literary value of Nafathat al-Masdoor. At the end, it is explained that Nafathat al-Masdoor enjoys a well thought-out language in which many lexical and semantic symmetries have been implemented. However, the overall structure of Nafathat al-Masdoor is a reference to biography and history, which reduces the literary value of the work.

In contrast to his brother, Sultan Valad, who was similar to his father in terms of both acts and words and passed the stages of spiritual journey under his supervision, Alaeddin Mohammad, the eldest son of Rumi, took a different path from the very beginning. He joined the opposition camp, and encountered with Shams Tabrizi, such that he began to be the enemy of his father and his spiritual lover. It is even said that he was among the suspects of the possible murder of Shams. No matter what the truth is, one thing is certain, and that is the son did not play any positive role in the father's life, and after Rumi, his children and grandchildren were all expelled from the Ahfad dynasty and Rumi's relative descendants. It is obvious that the opposition chorus by Alaeddin against Molavi and Shams Tabrizi cost Rumi heavily, so that the behavior of the son created such a frustrating anxiety in the mind and heart of Rumi. Fearing that too many family secrets would not be revealed, which would stain the prestige and the scientific and spiritual credit of Rumi, he very probably suppressed many of these anxieties. Naturally, these suppressed complexes are revealed in a secret and hidden form from the unconscious of Rumi in his imaginary narrations of Masnavi. While we cannot see a trace of Sultan Valad in these narrations, the negative impacts of the behavior of Alaeddin Mohammad are reflected in some parts of the text. This study refers to the historical documents and the prose texts of Rumi, including Maktubat that has highly valuable information, and explores the hidden image of Alaeddin and the way Rumi viewed this "disowned" son.