نشریه نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی
سال هجدهم شماره 27 (پاییز و زمستان 1400)

This study examines the process of transcendental movement of the existential subject in the novel “The coin that Suleiman found” based on the existential semiotics approach Eero Tarasti and Shaieri. In existential semiotics, the subject is an actor who is constantly passing between Dasein and Transcendence. This movement continues until it is equipped with the Modal of "knowing" and reaches transcendental Dasein by passing through different Dasein.The main purpose of this study is to see how the ontic subject follows the path of transcendental movement in different Daseins and what force causes it to be thrown from one Dasein to another Dasein. The subject exists in the "realm of nothingness"; in this area, turbulent movement is formed on the axis of "Negation". A system of risk-taking is formed that forces the subject to take the first step to get out of the initial state to reach perfection.The hypothesis of the research is the state of "nothingness" by the intervention of different forces puts the ontic subject on the path of transcendence and transgression and forces him to rebel against his current state and enter the first Dasein. Then, the subject breaks the barrier of several Daseins and reaches perfection by passing through them. Suleiman as the protagonist of this novel goes through the three stages of existential semiotics operation. In the first negative transcendental movement, he enters the Dasein state from the pre-sign. Then, by going through Act-sign, he reaches the post-sign which is the realm of perfection

Defining female subjectivity has always been a challenge, from its modern conception by Sigmund Freud to its most recent analysis by contemporary feminist critics. Basing female subjectivity on an inherent lack in the psychology of Freud and later Jacques Lacan, promoted feminist critics like Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler to reinstate the concept in their theories. For Irigaray, females have their own unique subjectivity that is manifested in the difference of their bodies and language from those of males. She contends that this difference should be revealed not bridged or concealed. Judith Butler, believes that it is only through resistance and agency that a true subjectivity is revealed. The present article is a feminist study of women subjectivity in speculative literature. Feminist speculative literature has its primary goal in altering women’s debilitating self-image so that they can act upon such changes and make ideal societies based upon their new self-conceptions. Octavia E. Butler, writer of Dawn and Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, renders a resistant picture of females who go beyond their immediate male dominated environment and perform something that is near to Irigaray and Judith Butler’s conception of female subjectivity.

The present study is based on the interaction between aesthetics and ethics and by focusing on the rhetorical narrative theory and the ethical philosophy it aims to investigate the aesthetic representation of ethics in On Beauty by Zadie Smith. On this account, this study relies primarily on James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narratology and Charles Taylor's philosophy of ethics. According to Phelan, the study of narrative aesthetics deals with the analysis of the narrative techniques, employed by the author and the narrator. Free indirect discourse and narrative voice are two techniques that contribute to the aesthetic dimension of the narrative. Through free indirect discourse, the readers are given a chance to enter inside the characters' unconscious mind which is integrated within the narrative flow, while narrative voice is defined by Phelan as the synthesis of style, tone, and ethics. Furthermore, the ethical world of the story is analyzed concerning the characters' various attitudes towards the concept of beauty, and their tendency towards human connection and altruism as ethical goods. Smith’s characters search for their authentic selfhood within the pluralistic context of the globalized world while practicing concern for others. This article aims at exploring the ethical values embedded in the choice of using certain narrative frameworks in Smith’s novel, and their relation to the contemporary tendency in literature towards rejecting postmodern fragmented narrative world.

Thanks to migration and mass media such as television and cyberspace, we live in a transnational and transcultural world where cultural and identity signifiers constantly come into contact and are interwoven. The offshoot is the formation of a new culture and identity no longer rooted in one land and nation; rather they have been redefined and hybridized so that their survival and growth are secured in the contemporary world. Influenced by this transnational world, the literature narrates the life story of deterritorialized people who have migrated in search of a better life. Dany Laferrière’s The Enigma of the Return (2009) and Keivan Arzaghi’s The Gloppy Land (2011) richly illustrate the outcomes of accepting and rejecting this hybridity. Drawing on Homi Baba's postcolonial theory and Jacques Lacan's theory of alienation, we undertake a comparative study of these two novels. The analysis exhibits how migrants such as Dany and Arash's father struggle and experience alienation due to their reluctance to accept the laws governing the host country and its cultural signifiers, in addition to the rejection of the existing reality or grief over separation from their homeland. On the other hand, characters like Dany and Sanam embrace hybridity and consider migration a means for attaining success [in their life]. Thus, Dany realizes his driving ambition to be a famous writer, whereby he not only becomes a member of the host country, but also uses it to fight and return to his native land.

From philosophy and politics to literary criticism, György Lukács paved the ground for the notion of "class consciousness."In the realm of comprehending the idea of "consciousness," there are genuine and false genres, making it impossible to grasp it precisely. However, the literature gives a more accurate knowledge of this category by offering objective instances based on lived experience. To explain this subject, two tales were chosen. In these stories, one may find indications of class consciousness in the lives of the main characters in a metaphorical sense. The stories analyzed in this paper are two revolutionary stories in which the main characters clearly show the emergence of class consciousness with numerous components. The research approach is formal and comparative, with a dialectical conceptual framework. The findings demonstrate that "Barat" in the Moghan Conquest and "Bartleby" in "A Wall Street Story" are not only socially engaged individuals, but also participate in the process of becoming conscious. The protagonist of Golshiri's story is in the process of both generating and destroying consciousness, whereas Melville's topic is in the process of establishing a unique consciousness from a fresh perspective. "Barat" views the birth of awareness as a political revolution, but this consciousness stays in the unproductive realm, which "Bartleby" views as the basis for the relations of capitalist production. The similarity between the two lies in the belief that the consciousness of the individual extends to the collective.

Judith Butler efforts to highlight the significant role of the cultural heterosexism in the construction of female gender identity and roles by referring to repetitive acts through abjection, continuity among sex, gender, and sexual desire, interpellation, and exclusion of female gender . Tennessee Williams in his masterpieces depicts the method of gender constructedness years before Butler and beyond her theory. This research intends to study the nominated plays by Williams and Butler’s theory of female gender construction to reveal a better understanding of female characters and a more genuine understanding of the manner of cultural heteronormativity in such constructedness. Butler argues that parodic acts terminate in the binaries of man/woman, male/female, and masculine/feminine which reassures the bipolarity of the heterosexist cultures. In the plays, the concept of abjection can be traced, for both heterosexual and homosexual female gender identity and roles. According to Butler, the male gender subject is the only accountable case that are not the constituent part of cultural constituent in defining the inferior female gender identity. The situation of female subjects in these plays demonstrates that female gender individual has a share in the construction of heteronormativity. Some female identities receiving and doing the reiterative cultural acts, take the function of the hegemony of heterosexism and behave other female gender identities as the minor personalities who should be defined as the lower-rate gender identity and roles; besides, the identical female individual represents heteronormativity and restricts herself in the binaries to construct her own gender identity and roles.

Metamorphosis, the most prominent work of Kafka (1833 – 1924), is one of the most controversial contemporary stories in 20th century Europe. After its publication in 1915, the story was the subject of debate for critics, and it was discussed from many perspectives. It narrates an imaginary event occurring in social realities of the time, and it shows an industrial society as a result of political and social changes in Europe. An industrial society, besides its advantages, willy-nilly brought with it unpleasant consequences. The study, explores the social and economic condition of Europe in the early 20th century and explains Gunter Andres theory, attempts to show that huge insect in the story is a metaphor that on the one hand appeared in the story in its common sense and has all the characteristics of an insect. On the other hand, based on the textual evidence, it represents one of the issues of modern and recently industrialized society. It compares the metamorphosis of a human to an insect to the human condition in bourgeoisie society.

The importance of words in speech and writing is so much so that in the absence of words, it would be impossible to talk, converse or communicate with others. At the same time, not every word will create or maintain a connection. Improper and misleading use of words may even lead to a loss of verbal or written communication with misunderstanding.Since so far most of the researches have been done on how to practice vocabulary, due to the importance of using the right vocabulary and lexical combinations in conveying and communicating with the audience and in order to improve and upgrade the educational level of German language teaching institutions, this article examines the errors of Iranian language learners in grade B from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).The criterion for this study is a field study conducted at the beginning of 2019 in one of the German educational institutions. This study shows the type and amount of mistakes of Iranian adult language learners in using German language

Although a number of theorists, critics, and philosophers have acknowledged the recent ethical turn in the novel and literary criticism since the last two decades, the quiddity of illustrated morality remains vague and needs further research. Thus, the present article endeavors to evaluate the new moral matrix in Heroes of the Frontier (2016) by Dave Eggers, indicating the end of postmodern era. Indeed, this novel demonstrates a world in which people face plights of postmodernism caused by egoism and consumerism. However, in the rest of the novel, a wondrous ethical turn occurs which has never been detected before and needs to be examined in detail. Since this is a situational, experimental, and posteriori morality, the researchers aim to study the aforementioned novel under the light of John Dewey’s pragmatic ethics based on “moral inquiry”, “experience”, “imagination”, “situation”, and “meliorism”. This research also demonstrates that moral imagination could solve the individual and social problems in postmodern society, which can lead to moral evolution, growth, self-correction, reconstruction and advent of hope.

This part is to investigate Anne Enright's novel The Gathering in the light of postmemory. I argue that The Gathering is a post-mnemonic text in which not only postmemory is used by the narrator to preserve the past but also to reveal the post-mnemonic truth or untruth and this apocalyptic revelation is also a way of coming to terms or reconciling with one's past and finally the acceptance of death as an omnipresent fact. To analyze the text, Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory is used to shed light on the mechanism and strategies that postmemory applies in the many different generations in a family and the beyond, that is, to develop familial and affiliative connections among generations. Thus postmemory in the familial level is the Hagarty family and its three generations, and in the affiliative level postmemory can include the Irish society in general in the Celtic Tiger era and the subsequent post-Celtic era which reveals the truths and untruths about the optimism of the Celtic Tiger economic boom and its underlying corruption and sex scandal of the Catholic Church and the very gendered society of which the main character in order to cope with it has recourse to not only drinking alcohol but also to the post-mnemonic narrative to reconcile with the past, the present and the forthcoming future for the next generations.

Le présent article est le résultat d'une étude du roman de Romain Gary, Les racines du ciel (1956), qui vise à fournir une critique psychologique de la simultanéité de la Métamorphose et de la Modernité du point de vue de Carl Gustav Jung. La Métamorphose de l'homme moderne s'opère derrière l'oubli de sa véritable identité. Romain Gary essaie d'expliquer les problèmes individuels des gens face à la modernité brutale de la vie quotidienne avec des métaphores et des métamorphoses. En fait, il cherche son identité perdue à travers les lignes de ses œuvres. Il vit dans différents pays avec des noms différents. De son enfance jusqu'à sa mort, il a connu différentes vies, dont l'une a suffi à faire d'un être humain ordinaire un écrivain unique. Dans cet article, l'analyse de l'intensité des sentiments face à la modernité et la crise d'identité qui en résulte dans les sociétés d'aujourd'hui et une meilleure compréhension des raisons profondes et inconscientes de la métamorphose des héros de Romain Gary et de leur processus mental sont envisagées. L'un des moyens efficaces de sortir de la crise de désintégration de la personnalité dans les sociétés modernes est la connaissance de soi à travers la lecture jungienne des œuvres de grands écrivains tels que Romain Gary, l'analyse et l'étude de la profondeur des sentiments de leurs héros et la reconnaissance des facteurs qui ont conduit à ce phénomène omniprésent. Ici reconnaître la crise d'identité du point de vue de Jung est examiné dans ce roman important.

The present study tries to investigate "femininity" and its relation to "death" in The Balcony by Jean Genet, with the help of Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot’s views. These two concepts have always been abjected as "other" in the history of Western phallogocentrique thought. According to Hélène Cixous, the root cause of this abjection of women resides in language, the one which is based on binary oppositions. According to the researcher, the reason of death abjection should also be sought in language; Blanchot mentions this gap in his article "La Littérature et le Droit à la Mort" and considers the task of literature to give the reader the experience of death, and thus to fill this gap. In the play Balcon, Jean Genet, by crossing the boundaries of symbolic order, deconstructing the binary-based language, and relying on the semiotic mode of signification rather than symbolic mode, creates a new language that can be called "feminine" by Cixous and Kristeva’s criteria. With the help of the motherly features of its language and narrative, this work has been able to instill the experience of death as one of its main elements, and has fulfilled the task of literature, according to Blanchot, in granting the experience of death to the reader.