نشریه مطالعات نظریه و انواع ادبی
پیاپی 1 (تابستان 1394)

Time is one of the significant elements of narration. One of the pioneer researchers focusing on time is Gerard Genette. He classified times into three components: order, continuation and frequency, each of which is divided into smaller components. The present study investigates the concept of time in Nizami’s Story of Layla and Majnun. Owing to the fact that Nizami is one of the greatest storytellers in Persian literature and his verse anthologies have witnessed many imitators, a need was felt to introduce his employment of the concept of time to show the greatness of his poetry. The findings of this study illustrates that Nizami has frequently tried to use the elements of time shift and continuation (to lengthen the time span of his stories). Time shift (flashbacks to the past and the future) are narrative (internal) in nature which serves to lengthen the time of the stories. The narration in the anthology alternates between dialogue and dramatic expression and the abbreviations and frequency in the dramatic expression shows the high control of the narrator in how to narrate the story.

Seti Nameh forms part of Old Persian poetry which was heavily influenced by Indian literature. Burning and Melting by Nau’i Khabushani is one of the verse anthologies that focuses on this issue. A close look at the structure of this work of art shows that the author has used special techniques in narrative the story which, stated otherwise, would lose much of its appeal. In the narrative analysis of Burning and Melting, the present study draws on the theory proposed by Zheplint Volt, the French critic. The critical analysis of the work showed that, looking at the plot of the story from this perspective, the only shortcoming is the absence of an organize force in the story which, of course, does not damage the overall structure of the story. Looking at the text from a narrative genres perspective, it was found that Burning and Melting is a disordered and text-based work which uses an omniscient point of view. Hence, it adopts an all-knowing stance that gives the reader the chance to see all the internal and external actions of the characters. Given the peculiar narrative structure of the text, the lyrical aspect of the work reaches its height  in the event of the burning of the bride and groom.

The present study investigates the reasons that gave birth to the text of Dorreh Nadereh. We believe that this book is the product of a historical trend in the mind and language of Iranians. This study delineates the aforementioned trend from the perspectives of various human sciences such as the philosophy of language, Plotunian philosophy, Foucaultian sociology, Sussurian linguistics and different literary criticism theories. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of peculiar language in Persian literature. Peculiar language is a complicated and symbolic language which produced a variety of problems in the development of thinking when it was used in non-literary Persian writings. The researchers believe that the historical trend in the mind of language of Iranians assisted with a special type of wisdom known and approved by Iranian people gives birth to this unusual language. This type of wisdom was extensively analyzed through the theoretical writings of Foucault. Another factor that led to the emergence of this peculiar language was the theory of Unity of Being which produced a special type of writing which is called steam of lexis in this study. Unity of Being, in the sense in which it is used here, has many manifestations including connecting to the single Truth through appealing to undeniable musical beauty as well as wonderful power of language. The reason that we called this language steam of lexis is that it is compared to the western concept of stream of consciousness to find the similarities and differences between the two concepts. In the end, the exemplar evidence offered from the text of Dorreh Nadereh illustrates that the main technique used by Mirza Mehdi Khan in writing Dorreh Nadereh is not the well-known circumlocution, but is the use of an interesting combination of disturbing brevity amidst wearisome circumlocution.

Pragmatics is one of the theories which have played a role in the revival and reconfiguration of the science of Rhetoric in the 1950s and 1960s. The main objective of pragmatics is the study of the relationship between language forms and their users. Pragmatics studies linguistic phenomena from the perspective of linguistic units and aims at findings the meaning intended by language users. A close look at the nature of the two fields of studies of pragmatics and rhetoric reveals their similarities. The focus on the applied nature of language or the linguistic realizations of language structure is on such similarity. The difference between the two results from their specific orientations to the issue of language. Rhetoric was originally developed in a religious concept and its prime and original goal was to portray the miraculous language of Quran while pragmatics is part of the new science of linguistics which gives priority to the descriptive rather than prescriptive analysis of language. The present study extensively reviews the similarities and differences between these two sciences and strives to how the blending of these two approaches to language can open new ways to the study of literary linguistics.

Interdisciplinary studies in human sciences forms a new perspective and has produced valuable results in its short life since it has developed the frontiers of human sciences. The present study has tried to analyze the characters in the novels of Simin Daneshvar through the application of Conformity Theory of Eliott Aronson, a contemporary social psychologist. A second look at the characters in her novels reveals that they have appealed to telling lies to conform to others. This study, using a descriptive-analytic approach, searched for the instances of the three components of conformity (compliance, identification and internalization) in the novels. The effects of three influential factors in the conformity of the story characters, that is, the sender, the message and the receiver, are identified. The main text under study is Souvashoon. However, sometimes the two other novels, The Island of Wandering and The Wanderer Cameleer have been used for further analysis. Owing to the fact that the majority of the characters in the novels are women and the stories have been narrated from their viewpoint, the reasons for telling lies by female characters in the novels of Simin Daneshvar are discussed.  This research project was conducted through the use of library research and note taking.

Literary criticism in its modern sense originates from the culture of the western world. However, it does not mean that Persian literary history has been without literary criticism. With respect to literary criticism and critical analysis of poetry, the Safavid era is one of the greatest periods in the history of Persian literary criticism. The most significant aspect of literary criticism practices of the era is striving to search for meaning and attempts at arriving at new themes but the issues of the reciprocal relationships between the poets and conformity to facts are two dominant themes of the literary criticism of the period. Coffee houses, as the most important and the greatest literary circle in Iran at the time, play a significant role in the literary arena. The researchers have tried to discuss the proposition put forward by scholars, “Literary criticism of this era is taste-oriented.” The present study strives to shed light on the literary criticism practices of this era which have not been investigated in detail. The analysis of the anthologies of Sfavid era and the content analysis of narrated stories of Coffee house literary criticism of this period in these anthologies reveals that literary criticism in coffee houses, following the tradition of literary orientations of the period, is meaning-oriented and the approach to criticism is based on literary tastes. Literary criticism as practiced in coffee house affects the poetry of the time in two ways: One is that, owing to the presence of the common people and their eagerness of listening to poetic recitations in coffee houses, many laymen have been led to poetry and as a result of accompaniment with the poets have tried to compose poems. The second strand of influence comes from the fact that mutual relationship between the poets and the audience in coffee houses partly determined the literary taste of the period and led to the type of poetry that had the audience in mind.

The componential analysis of a story is one of the most modern approaches to literary studies which have drawn the attention of many literary scholars. The emergence of formalistic approach to literary criticism that resulted in the introduction of structuralism influenced the studies of literary researchers. Structuralists believe that each story could be broken down into its narrative structures. The most important researcher of formalism was Vladimir Propp. Propp analyzed one hundred fairy tales and divided each fairy tale into its smallest structural units and then tried to relate them to the whole story. Given the fact that has fairy tales are of a narrative and folklore nature, Propp could discern a final narrative structure for them. One of the best approaches to the analysis of the stories of Shahnameh is morphological approach. This study attempts to show the relationship between structuralism, narratology and morphology and then embark on the morphological analysis of the story of Zahak in Shahnameh according to Propp’s theory. The analysis of the story of Zahak which is a single story resulted in the identification of thirty one primary and secondary structural units which are of conflict-victory diagrammatic type. The four moves derived from these diagrammatic types conform to the first and second moves in Propp’s theory which shows the conformity of this story to Propp’s theory.

The present study discusses the narrative components including noun, adjective and verb (person, characteristics and action) of stories of One Thousand One Nights based on the narrative theory of Todorov. The characters in the stories of One Thousand One Nights are classified according to the traditional Persian grammar into mass nouns, proper nouns and unknown nouns. In each case, the actions and properties of the characters in the story are explained and the method of meaning making in the text is explained in the form of a basic narrative grammar. In this taxonomy, mass nouns refer to those characters that are typical and despite the different roles that they have in the story are always introduced by a specific trait. Proper nouns refer to famous historical or story characters who are introduced by their proper names and readers know them by their traits and characteristics and their names are associated by a specific trait in the mind of the readers. Unknown nouns refer to those characters that are unknown to the readers and are typical characters embodying a moral or psychological trait. These characters are named in the stories according to their prominent traits which identify them such as the foolish teacher, the pious woman and the generous youth.