نشریه پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
پیاپی 45 (تابستان 1387)

On the basis of Andre Martinet's Functional theory, "subject" is not a universal concept. However we can show the function of subject in many languages, since the probable existence of subject and its properties can be studied and investigated. In Italian language, the shortest sentence contains both subject and predicate. Therefore existence of both is necessary for constructing a sentence. The most important function of subject is actualization of predicate. For this reason, subject should not be omitted. In Italian, position of obligatory subject is fixed and appears in many sentences as verb endings. So it can not be separated from the predicate. In addition to this subject, another element often appears too. This new element agrees with the obligatory subject in number, person, and sometimes in gender. But its principal specification is to be arbitrary. This arbitrary subject is omitable and has no fix position in a sentence.

This paper examines Edward Said’s views on music and its connection with key concepts such as orientalism and worldliness in his writings. It is suggested that to see the importance of classical Western music as a key component of Western culture in Said’s work, one has to take into account the centrality of culture in his critical views and the stress he puts on its complicity with Western imperialism and colonialism. The article reviews Said’s analysis of the socio-cultural moorings of Western classical music as an art which both reflected and affected society. Central to the paper is also Said’s account of the paradoxical character of music in its private/public dialectic.

Since more than half a century, much has been written and spoken about André Gide, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Perhaps, it seems that nothing new remains to be said about Gide, the winner of the Nobel Prize. However, effort will be made to demonstrate the effect of Gide's private experiences on his works by using the analytic-expressive method and structural theories in literacy criticism, also effort will be made to offer an exact definition for immoral and unethical words, in order to erase his negative reputation of being an immoral person. After traveling to North-Africa for curing his tuberculosis disease and there meeting Oscar Wild, Gide started to teach passion to Natanael in Fruits of the Earth and encourage her to be ready to experience new joys and anxieties, more than before. He shows these two themes again in Strait is the Gate, whose base is in the Christian religion which Gide knows completely because of his orthodox upbringing. Gide's life and his works show the contrast between darkness and light. He introduces himself as hell compared to his angel-like wife, Madeleine. Freedom and moral limitations are the source of contradiction in his mind.While narrating childhood memories, he describes his intrinsic inclinations in If it die…: An Autobiography. He introduces his theory of "Action without Reason", which is an important issue against God and the regulation of the world in The Vatican Cellars.

The connection between philosophy and literature goes back at least to Plato, who has a well reputed fame in philosophy as well as literature. Schopenhauer, Russell, Bergson and … are the other philosophers whose philosophical works, according to critics, are comparable to the best literary works. In order to express their philosophical viewpoints they have had access to an appropriate language. But as for the existentialists, and their attitude to literature and genre this is not the case; their phenomenological approach, lyric, and sentimental thought and their viewpoint of man as 'Being-in-world', are the main reason why their philosophical thought was colored with literature. The priority of Existence to Essence and the determining role of human situations, connect this philosophy (for French existentialist) with the novel, fable and drama. And believing in the ability of poetry to the disclosure of Being (for German existentialist and especially for Heidegger) was the medium connecting poetry with existentialist philosophy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's art of writing marks a specific point in the history of American Literature. The revolution brought with it libertine outcomes from adherence to strict Puritanical creeds of life. A little later, Romanticism intensified this break even further by glorifying the individuality of the author and his role in creating a novel American voice. Writing within such context, one can find the translation of such religious and political activities into the literary sphere of Hawthorne's fiction as he attempts to break former rigid perspectives, replacing them with a stance which is in no haste to confine meaning and cause of events, introducing a different perspective from which to see the world and its inhabitants. As a writer who is self-conscious of his art, intervening at points in the event of story-telling, Hawthorne leaves his texts open to various interpretations as he hints at alternatives to the stories and sequence of events. While heavily influenced by the history of his country, he is simultaneously attempting to emancipate from its confining restrictions.

This study examines the efficiency of pedagogical intervention in raising L2 pragmatic awareness of the Iranian EFL learners. More specifically, it seeks to investigate the difference between explicit and implicit instructions in improving pragmatic appropriateness of the English refusals by adult Persian native speakers in an EFL classroom context. Fifty-four participants, with approximately the same level of linguistic proficiency, were randomly divided into three groups of Control, Explicit, and Implicit. As the Control group was provided with activities irrelevant to the objectives of the study, the two Experimental groups received two different instructional treatments. While the Explicit group was presented with metapragmatic explanations, direct feedback, and explicit awareness-raising instruction on pragmatic features of English refusals, the participants in Implicit group were provided with indirect instruction and implicit awareness-raising activities. All three groups took a multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) as a pre and post test, before and after the six-session instructional period. The results revealed that instruction improves pragmatic appropriateness of the EFL learner's refusals. Explicit pedagogical approach, in particular, was proved to be more efficient in raising L2 pragmatic awareness of the Iranian English learners. The findings of this study may have helpful implications for material developers and teachers in EFL classrooms.

The purpose of educational technology is to facilitate, develop, and strengthen teaching-learning processes. Computer-assisted language education technology is developed as a result of introducing information and communication technology in humanities. This technology has a multidisciplinary nature and is based on investigations carried out in theoretical and practical principles of applied linguistics, computational linguistics, and computer sciences. The present article attempts to study the role of information and communication technology in language education. Theoretical principals and practical outlooks of different models of language teaching, classroom management, instructor's responsibility, teaching and learning resources, and material production are investigated. The result of the study reveals that there are a number of common grounds between language teaching models and the models of computer assisted language learning. Due to the introduction of information and communication technology and language education, the traditional approach in classroom management is radically changed and has attained a research-based and student-centered orientation. The instructors responsibility is not the transfer of information but that he should develop multi-skilling characteristics. The closed, limited, and centralized nature of teaching-learning resources is replaced by an open, decentralized, time and place free model. Technologically based materials have a multifaceted and kinetic nature and material producers assume a process oriented approach.