نقدنامه زبان های خارجی
پیاپی 2 (دی 1397)

Particularly in the hasty ages appeares the problematicity of the History. Whatever are the visible effects of this haste, its constant consequence is an accelerated metamorphosis of answers into questions that leads to the confusion of questions and answers, and ultimately leads to the establishment of a general confusion. According to these observations, Michel Meyer proposes a rational and philosophical approach to History, whose rationality is based on the ability to recognize question from answer, and its philosophical nature depends on the struggle to arrange questions and give them some meaning. In the book What Is History? this problematological approach takes a stand against two current perceptions of historical narrative: first the positivist perception that focuses on the materiality of past events and neglects their problematicity; second, an eschatological perception that seeks the meaning of History in its end.

William Marx in an inquiry about the literature, called Farewell to Literature discusses the lack of credibility and death of literary and literary research in contemporary times. To show his correct judgment and passing the era of farewell to literature to the era of literature of farewell, he divided the literature history after eighteen century into three eras. Then he is trying to look for the effect of death of literature and breaking the links between literature, reality and society in literature. He believes that the origin of literature devaluation should be looked in the emergence and discussion about notions such as the sublime, language transitivity and language intransitivity and finally confinement in form. This paper is an effort to identify and analyze the historical study of Marx view to what he calls as “Literature”.

Knowing the image created by others from their culture allows the people of a country to look at themselves. The book Oh la la! These French people! Written by Marie Treps, a French linguist, has been written about the image of the French people among the people of various nations. The book simultaneously looks at the negative point of views of the world's people about French behavior and culture and its positive aspects. The author refers to French words that have come into many European languages ​​and show the aspects of French culture in terms of stereotypes. The main drawback of this effect is not to refer to the people of the regions of the "South" and "East" of the world in relation to France, which goes back to the former French colonies and the writer has suffered from Europe and North America.

In her works, Marguerite Duras has presented new methods to the field of fiction  and has enriched French prose. With conciseness and poetic ambiguity and a deconstructive approach in expression Duras’ prose makes the reader staggered. Based on stream of consciousness narrative technique, From sentence to word, Duras rearranges predetermined and fixed grammatical rules and structures. This essay is allocated to the critical reading of one of the most influential references in literary criticism on Duras Works. Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language is a comprehensive handbook in literary criticism which through a discursive approach and notions like genre, texture, intertextuality and style has scrutinized the unrevealed aspects of meaning in the fictional universe of Marguerite Duras.

This article presents and reviews the book titled L’Autotraduction littéraire: Perspectives théoriques. It includes 10 articles presented in an international seminar by the same name, which took place at the Udine University in Italy in 2012. Auto-translation is defined as “The translation that an author presents of his own work in another language”. This book is divided into two parts that address the different aspects of auto-translation by considering external factors (historical, cultural and social contexts) and internal factors (which treats the text and the author as the focus of the studies).

The Epic and Sedition: The case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh by Dick Davis is a scholarly book on Shahnameh-scholarship. It consists of a long prologue, a brief introduction, and four chapters. As it is known from the prologue, the book has been written for the Western reader. The primarily aim of the book is to adjust the popular perception of what the great Persian epic is about. The second purpose is to correct the negative judgment, i.e. Edward Browne’s dislike of the work. According to Davis, it is the prime cause for the Western reluctance to grant the work the status of a major literary classic work. In addition, Davis tries to reject Grunebaum’s idea that says the poem is a product of a rather naïve and primitive talent. The last chapter is about the story of Bizhan and Manizheh under Western eyes.

Magical realism, very much like transplantation or localization, is still to be defined. In recent years, transplantation of literary theories in Iran has been a major concern and at the same time many writers and theoreticians have tried to produce, define and explicate magical realism. The book, Transplanting Magical Realism in Iran by Mohammad and Mohsen Hanif is a significant endeavor to redefine magical realism from the most recent critical perspectives opened up to it and at the same time it tries to use this trajectory to provide practical examples of transplantation of this literary theory in Iran. In this article, the writer intends to evaluate the strength of arguments in this book, and to see whether the writers have been successful in providing a practical specimen of literary transplantation or not.

The purpose of this article was to review the English course book (student book and workbook) developed for 9thgraders with intellectual disabilities. The method applied was descriptive –analytic. Regarding the proposed criteria by the Council for Reviewing Books and Texts on Humanities, areas of strength and weak points in terms of form and content were presented. Furthermore, series of suggestions were proposed to ameliorate both the quality and the content of the book in terms of the students’ capabilities. The strong point of this book could be pointed out as the use of imperative forms to teach different concepts apart from presenting language functions and social routines. The weaknesses included stopping teaching numbers, and not allocating a specific section to recap what students have learned in 7thand 8thgrades.

Translation of Islamic, particularly Shiite, texts from major oriental languages into English is of paramount significance in dissemination of Islamic teachings in the world. It follows that training translators of Shiite texts is a career in which it is expected only of universities to prove their academic competence and scholarly performance. In contrast, Shiite seminaries have long assumed other tasks, not much related to training translators. The critical appraisal of certain Shiite texts in English translation reveals that not all of them have been successful, hence inappreciable, for several reasons. The present paper tries to highlight some problem areas and certain aspects that might improve the current translation trends and situations.

The textbooks are the center of syllabus and curriculum in classrooms, and they have an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT), but they rarely provide the required materials to acquire pragmatic competence. Findings indicate that teachers' manuals do not contain enough authentic information; thus, they should provide explicit input for language learners to promote their pragmatic information. However, teachers do not tend to use outside materials to teach pragmatics. A kind of pragmatic information which has a vital role in foreign language acquisition is speech act with various kinds in communicative parts of textbooks. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze three ELT textbooks namely American Headway 2 (Soars & Soars, 1996), Interchange 2 (Hull, Proctor, & Richards, 2013), and Four Corners 2 (Bohlke & Richards, 2012), related to the teaching of functions to find out the frequency and types of speech acts. The present study was a descriptive study based on Vellenga's (2004) framework to illustrate pragmatic information included in ESL and EFL textbooks. It focused on the analysis of metalanguage usage, explicit treatment of speech acts and metapragmatic information. The findings showed that American Headway 2 with 37% included the most pragmatic information, and Interchange 2 with 25% was the poorest among the analyzed textbooks in this study. As a whole, the results revealed that pragmatic input of language learners is not considerable in the textbooks, and textbook metapragmatic plays an important role in speech act realization. Therefore, it seems that one implication of this study is that the EFL/ESL textbooks are poor in metapragmatic information such as speech acts in their communicative parts. Analysis of interactive parts based on cultural and interlanguage pragmatics can help textbook development so that the upcoming textbooks would be designed based on variety of linguistic forms and contextually rich opportunities for students of foreign language.

The book of Practical Course of Persian language Translation, written by Sevil Talybova, published by the Publication of the Moscow State Linguistic University “Rema” in 2010. It has 96 pages that conforms to the syllabus of the Moscow State Linguistic University. It is designed for the course “Verbal Translation 1”. It is also designed as a reference or text book for oral and written translation courses for junior and senior students at the Faculty of Translation of the Moscow State Linguistic University.

The Chernobyl accident is one of the most painful events of our time, which was not much discussed at that time due to political issues. The book of Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich is a documentary interview with the survivors of the incident, who describe this story. After gaining the Nobel Prize, the book became world famous and was translated into many languages. The present article introduces the book and its translation in Persian Language, which describes the story of Chernobyl.

Dr. Tehseen Faraqi, director of the “Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab” in Lahore, has done a valuable research in introducing, explaining and celebrating the works of Allama Iqbal. Iqbal's book has 207 pages and it is about explaining Allama Iqbal's thoughts and ideas, which was published in "Bassam Iqbal, Lahore" for the first time in 1993 and its second edition in 2016. The book has 9 papers, most of them were published periodically between 1983 and 1993 in journals of India and Pakistan, which are major articles on Iqbalogy.

The book Tareekh Adab Urdu (Literary History of Urdu) by Nurul Hasan Naqvi in 1997 was published at Educational Book House, Aligarh. This book includes a lot of general information on Urdu literature, which examines the formation of the Urdu language as well as the brief presentation of various genres of poetry and prose and the introduction of the poets and writers of Urdu language. It, also, contains a collection of essential information on the history of Urdu literature, which can be regarded as an effective and useful reference for Urdu language volunteers and readers in terms of efficiency and educational content.

The book Iqbal Mujaddid-e-Asr (Iqbal the reformer of the time) by Dr. Suhel Bukhari  contains 226 pages. This book was published for the first time in 1976 and after revision by the author, was published for the second time through by Iqbal Academy, Lahore Pakistan in 1990. The author tries to present Iqbal’s poetry along with opinions of critics and researchers to prove that Iqbal was the prophet of his time who worked hard for improving Muslim nation.