نشریه پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
سال بیست و هشتم شماره 1 (پیاپی 88، بهار و تابستان 1402)

In order to reach the field of comparative literature in the modern era as an emerging phenomenon in the field of humanities research, it is necessary to apply the knowledge that plays a role in the field of linguistics and rhetoric. Rhetorical techniques, after the knowledge of linguistics, in understanding the mechanisms of literary text creation and stylistic analysis of each work, are one of the keys to cross-cultural research. In this article we intend to explore one of the most fundamental arrays of rhetorical technique, like, simile, in Persian literature and the literature of Romance culture, to better show the role of one of the tools of imagination in two different fields of language creation. Therefore, it is tried to adapt the norms and practical foundations of the simile array, which is more developed in Persian literature than the culture of romance, to the European view of this concept.

Myth, as the first human intellectual system, is part of the mental experiences of nations, and poetry has been a continuation of that because imagination in myth is cognate with the imagery in poetry. Adonis and Bekas, with assimilative and abstract mindsets and breaking down classical forms have brought great innovations and by adopting and recreating mythological symbols have appropriated them to express their themes. This research, using content analysis and a comparative approach based on the American school, examines the application of myth in modern Arabic and Kurdish poetry, with an emphasis on the poems of Adonis and Sherko Bekas, to explain the fundamental aspects of the mythological symbols in their poetry. Myth is used in all the major themes of Adonis and Sherko Bekas’ poetry, yet implicit connotations of mythological concepts are more than the explicit ones. Phoenix, Jesus, Mary, Scheherazade, Cain and Abel, Mahyar and Hallaj, Sisyphus, Noah and Sindbad are among the common myths in their poetry. Sherko Bekas is more inclined towards Eastern and Iranian myths, while Adonis often leans towards Greek and Roman myths. Expanding the semantic strategies, utilizing conceptualization capacity, exerting the fluidity of mythological themes, and combining them with historical knowledge are factors that have helped both poets succeed in applying myth in their poetry. They have added to the richness of the meaning of their poetry by combining concepts, masking mythical characters, strengthening structural and conceptual functions of language, explaining the mental and physical dimensions of time and place, and hinting at narratives and characters.

Colonial Politics and the way freedom and equality are addressed have long been the subject of scrutiny by postcolonial critics. This study undertakes a literary analysis of the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in relation to Americans in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, it examines Ala Al Aswani’s novels, namely Chicago and The Republic of False Truths, through the lens of Chantal Mouffe’s theories on agonistic identity and pluralistic democracy. The objective is to explore the dynamics between Arabs and Americans, as well as the influence of American ideology, in order to ascertain whether genuine equality and freedom are universally realized or if such claims merely serve as veils for new forms of colonialism. Consequently, this article argues that following the September attacks in America, certain neo-colonial policies have come into play, engendering the construction of agonistic identities. By fostering this antagonism, animosity towards individuals of different cultures and religions remains concealed, thereby enabling more effective control over perceived adversaries. The post-9/11 era has witnessed a resurgence of animosity towards others who are viewed as potential sources of threats and fear. Such animosity can be discerned and analyzed within the selected novels, shedding light on the covert reality that Americans harbor neocolonial tendencies of marginalization towards individuals of different races or religions. However, this enmity remains obscured, serving as a means of enhanced control.

The present article opens, by way of introduction, with presenting the Frankfurt School of critical theory, of which Erich Fromm was an active member until his break from it the late 1930s. Fromm has been relegated to oblivion both in the West and in Iranian academic circles, where his views are seldom taught at universities and applied to works of literature. Fromm’s strong belief in the existence of a human essence proves to be unpopular nowadays among post-structuralist thinkers, and the eclectic nature of his work is similarly problematic in today’s specialized world. To fill this void, this article first elucidates key Frommian concepts such as the social unconscious, the social character and sheds light on non-productive character structures such as the hoarding orientation, the exploitative orientation, the marketing orientation, the necrophilous-destructive orientation as well as the productive character orientation. It then applies these concepts to Anne Landsman’s debut, postmodern South African novel The Devil’s Chimney (1997) which remains relatively untouched by scholarship. This article focuses furthermore on the Jacobs family and Miss Beatrice who embody the marketing orientation. September, by contrast, is posited as the epitome of the productive orientation who deeply loves people as well as animals and, as an artist, engages in creative activity.

Jean Cohen has attempted a thorough study of the figures of speech founded on contradiction from a logical and semantic point of view in a long and difficult article titled “Theory of Figures”.  His views on figures of contradiction can be fruitfully applied to Persian poetry with its plentiful and rich contradictory expressions inherited from mystical literature and culture. In the current study, and in the first step, the main core of Cohen’s theory is explained and then the definitions of figures are compared precisely with their Persian counterparts and examples drawn from Persian poetry and especially those of Hafez. The findings of the research not only confirm the general appropriateness of Cohen’s theory to study the contradictional figures in Persian poetry but also it shows that the unknown dimensions of these figures require to be restudied in detail by developing a comprehensive and appropriate model.

The present article endeavors to examine Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist so as to attest to the political resistance effected by its formal aspects. The researchers are inclined to survey Hamid’s novel in the light of the mind-sets of the illustrious contemporary philosopher and literary critic Fredric Jameson. According to Jameson, it is a falsehood to think that the form of a work of art should be considered to be less important than its content owing to the fact that the formal aspects of art embody resisting possibilities and are prone to galvanize the reader into subversive activity. The question the article poses is that whether the novel’s development of dramatic monologue can provide the reader with a unique opportunity for political resistance. In this regard, the formal aspects of the novel can silence the American citizen in order to enable the reader to perceive the world through the eyes of the novel’s Third-World speaker.

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith imparts a realistic and profound commentary on contemporary multicultural London environment, highlighting not only the challenging realities about British multiethnic society, but also about the human condition in such a situation. A key aspect of her novel is an authorial interrogation of the individual subject's position and identity formation, especially that of the first and second-generation immigrants facing the intensified interconnections and interdependencies of live worlds with social diversity in current globalization. In White Teeth, Smith concentrates on diversity of cultural contexts and the implication of divergent historical routes to illustrate how identity and self-authenticity cannot be perceived and maintained simply in terms of the importation of a single national model, global uniformity or in terms of a retreat into individualistic orientations. Different factors such as ethnicity, personal histories, interfamilial relationships, and cultural belonging are discussed in assessing Smith's treatment of the concept of self-authenticity. Studying these dimensions of the novel, this essay brings to the fore different dynamics within Gerard Delanty’s concept of critical cosmopolitanism as a particularly appropriate medium to explore the ways in which history and interpersonal relationships with diversity act and influence the construction of self-authenticity.

The environment is an active element in environmental literature, serving as a reminder of ancient patterns and human historical memory. Unlike ecocritical criticism, which is a specialized field in literature, ecopoetic criticism has been integrated with such sciences as linguistics, zoology, sociology, anthropology, etc., and has opened up new dimensions in literary studies. The study of the relationship between humans and the environment has led to much attention to the role of humans in increasing or decreasing environmental damage. This reflection resulted in the emergence of new discourses in literature aimed at preserving the environment. Sub-branches of ecocritical criticism, such as environmental linguistics, have focused on language as a social behavior with cultural, identity, social class, and gender factors. They have expanded social discourse and changed human attitudes and behaviors towards the environment. The zoopoetics discourse has focused on animal imagery in literary texts and human/animal interactions. The ecocriticism discourse has repeatedly revealed new meanings in eco-centered discourses by expressing the role of technology in environmental destruction and revival. Egloff in L'Étourdissement uses images related to pollution and animal slaughter to refer to the role of humans and modernity in environmental destruction. This paper examines the function of eco-centered discourses in reflecting the ideology of the society by relying on ecocritical criticism and critical discourse analysis. Results show the generation of risk discourses against the weakness of environmental protection discourses. L'Étourdissement provides a space for the formation of new discourses aimed at promoting environmental culture.

The formation of the idea of a school called Imagism in the early 20th century in Hulme, after studying Bergson, and Pound, after getting to know Fenollosa and studying Japanese poetry, created a leap in European poetry and paved the way for a new kind of poetry that after Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire drew careful attention to the specifity of images and language. Imagism focuses on a specific object or image as the main subject of the poem with clear and concise language. This school is a subset of modernism that focuses on the skillful presentation of objective images, does not waste time talking about the subjects behind the images, and lets the image speak for itself. Examining the imagistic solutions of Hulme, as the father of Imagism provides a suitable opportunity for researchers of modern poetry. Bijan Elahi, a contemporary Iranian poet, due to his translations of modern European and American poems, was able to reflect the features of this school in his poems. The simultaneous analysis of the artistry of these two poets in their poetic style leads to the clarification of their intellectual, philosophical, and cultural backgrounds. Elahi and Hulme were successful poets in Imagism, and the difference between these two poets, in addition to their cultural context and mental background, was that Hulme, as the pioneer of this school, adhered more to the framework of its ideas, but Elahi, having passed through She’r-e-no and Moj-e-no, was faithful to the tenets of the school only partially and in certain periods of his development. Hulme’s mental background was philosophy, old laws, and a new point of view towards the world, whereas Elahi was more influenced by eastern mysticism.

Despite great criticisms addressed to Hergé, the author of The Adventures of Tintin, regarding racial and ethnic biases, his works have maintained their popularity, even with groups that were directly or indirectly the subject of these biases.  The way that readers encounter The Adventures of Tintin is placed within the framework that in postcolonial theory is defined as the relationship between the subordinate and the superior. In this research, we assess different models that Hergé used to define the identity of subordinate groups. On the same basis, it is established that with making changes in the concepts of the subordinate and superior, and contrary to the expectations of the superior, subordinate groups are not merely the consumers of the cultural products of the powerful people. Consequently, by using the tools that have been produced by them, the subordinate influence the dominant groups and thus cause changes in their dialogues and perspectives.

Eden Chambers' theory of the reader within the text, as one of the most prominent theories in the field of children's and adolescent literary criticism, seeks to examine the level of effort and success of the author in each work. In recognition of children and teenagers as readers and between the pages of the book, and in order to understand the reader hidden in the text and his characteristics, Chambers considers it necessary to pay attention to each work and analyze it based on four components: style, point of view, favoritism, and ex-pressive gaps. One of the most prominent children's story book series in recent years, which has been translated and published many times, is the collection of stories Little Nicholas written by the French writer René Gossini. The present study, with a descriptive-analytical approach and by presenting examples from the French text, examines three volumes of this collection of stories: " Little Nicolas and Friends ", "Little Nicolas and the Break Time" and " Little Nicolas Gets into Trouble", which consist of 45 stories. Consequently, among the four processes of the mentioned theory, two elements of "favorism" and "style", due to the unique power of the author in humor, the technique of concrete characterization, favoring the world of childhood, and benefiting from simple words, are respectively more colorful. As a result, the first person "point of view", which leads to the production of the same language and vocabulary structures and stability in tone and integrity throughout the stories, in addition to the element of "narrative gaps", which makes the audience follow the texts by raising questions in their minds,  induce consistency in the engagement with the story and discovering answers.

The Waves dramatizes the tension between sequence and non-sequence. The actual waves in the novel are utilized as a metaphor for narrative and will-to-identity in terms of their continuous, incessant and sequential movement, where one wave follows another to form a pattern. Virginia Woolf uses waves as an extended metaphor which stands for sequence because of their sequential movements. The individual identity of characters which stems from their language is formed through narrative and therefore, identity becomes an element of sequence and narrative since it entails the general rule of sequence in the past-present-future order. Bernard who is infatuated by his art of story-telling believes that sequence is everywhere and this sequence is metaphorised by the relentless movement of the waves. He openly links identity to the chain-like structure of sequential language. He claims that without this narrative pattern, he is “nothing,” i.e., he has no identity. The sequential pattern of the waves dissolves and dies out on the shore in complete silence. When waves rise and form a definite shape, they stand for self-constitution and when they crash into shapelessness and nothingness on the shore they stand for the dissipation and dissolution of identity. The present article through using descriptive-analytical method aimed to unfold woolf's charged metaphor of "wave" which presupposes Woolf’s concept of self-formation, identity and narrative and also signifies and creates a natural language based on music and rhythm

Myth is one of the most prominent concepts which leads to innovation and recreation in literary works. As one of the most efficient types of contemporary literature, novel is also associated with myth. The atmosphere of some of the contemporary Iranian novels has the potential to indicate magical and transcendental myths and concepts which have made them rich and similar to the magical realism novels in South America, where the belief in the existence of mythical and magical atmosphere is reflected in the works of its authors. Considering the influence of mythical concepts and actions on the novels of these two regions, the present study deals with the mythological analysis of the novelsThe House of Edrisis by Ghazaleh Alizadeh and The House of Ghosts by Isabel Allende with acomparative-analytical method and clarifies that the two authors' attention toward recreating the mythical place and time and the myths of creation is similar, except that magical aspects, transcendental, and mythologicalcharacters are more evident in Allende's novel while the attention to the woman-earth archetype and heroism are more prominent in The House of the Edrisis.

Since Pinter in A Slight Ache narrates the events and interactions of the characters in the background of garden and nature, this article argues that the juxtaposition of man and nature is significant and its analysis contributes to a better understanding of the play. Because characterization plays a major role in A Slight Ache, the main question of this article is based on the possibilities that the relationship between man and nature give to Pinter in characterization. To this end, the theories of ecocriticism, primarily Annette Kolodny’s ecofeminism, as well as the concepts of “manifest content” and “latent content” by Sigmund Freud are applied to the play. The combination of these two readings is done in order to analyze the concerns and psychological complexities of the male character of the play. The argument of this article is that the general content of this work is related to his fantasy. Since the male character of the play is in a struggle to face the reality of his disability due to old age, “manifest content”, i.e. what happens in the garden space, has symbolic meanings, the “latent content” of which is the anxiety that results from entering into the old age. Thus, the present article argues that, like a dream or fantasy, the content of the play needs to be interpreted, an interpretation that is derived from the comparison of “manifest content” and “latent content.”

The purpose of this article is to examine the transformation of two generations in accepting or rejecting change. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's definitions of "becoming", this study aims to explore the difference between the characters in the novel Things Fall Apart, written by Chinua Achebe,  in their susceptibility to change and the adaptation of generations in the face of fundamental individual and identity changes. Achebe’s novel has researched the entire campaign of conflict and confrontation between two generations in accepting or rejecting change, and why and how the change is possible in a highly traditional and colonized land.  Gilles Deleuze is one of the most important contemporary post-structuralist philosophers whose ideas represent the removal of any structure and centrality. Deleuze considers "becoming" as a revolution that leads man to a new life and new way of thinking. Therefore, according to the nature of the novel and the atmosphere of confrontation and conflict that governs its characters, as well as Deleuze's reading of it, the two approaches of no change or individualism are in conflict with the acceptance of change or deterritorialization. The approach of individuality destroys any kind of hierarchy and does not accept the existence of any supreme principle to explain existence. In contrast, deterritorialization considers existence as an unknown structure that needs to be discovered.