مجله مطالعات و تحقیقات ادبی
سال دوم شماره 1 (بهار و تابستان 1384)

'Beauty and Heart' (Per. Hosn O Del) or Directions for Lovers (Per. Dastour Ol Oshaq) is a versified Persian allegory by Fattahi Neyshabouri (Death: 825 A.H. /1446 A.D). This allegory has attracted many oriental scholars and has been translated into several languages. Also, it has been imitated eight times in Persian and ten times in Turkish. Mystical and loving themes, great number of symbols and variation in themes have made the allegory an interesting book for further study. The poet tries to employ body organs and lyric metaphors to encode his ideas in the narrative style. The overriding theme of Beauty and Heart is the clash between reason and love as a recurrent topic of Persian Suffism. The poet portrays the victory of love in this clash along with the lover's sufferings. This paper provides a critical summary report of the story and a biographical account of Fattahi so that more light is shed on this mystical allegory and, in so doing; more avenues of research are opened up.

In this article, attempts are made to examine Moulana's views concerning the relation between text, the author, the audience and other texts against the contemporary hermeneutics theories. Further, after interpreting the modern theories and matching them with Moulana's poetry in his six versified books, the author presents an account of Moulana's innovations regarding the relation between text and audience. Although this article takes a deconstructive approach to analyzing Moulana's theoretical issues, it does not deal with Moulana's ideas concerning hermeneutics deconstructively. The article, as its immediate implication of the findings, implies the possibility of uncovering many hermeneutic theories in Mathnawi.

This article attempts to present a comprehensive scheme for the analysis of poetic language. To this end, first, the classical theory of poetic language is examined. Then, the positions of early and contemporary researchers concerning poetic language are critically reviewed. It is argued that, so far,  despite the invaluable research findings, no exhaustive model for the analysis of all aspects of poetic language has been provided. Finally the author introduces his own model consisting of three layers along with some distinctive criteria for establishing the artistic value of each layer.

Unlike general linguistics which, practically speaking, prefers spoken language to written language, in studying the standard language and standardization, priority goes to written language. The logic behind this phenomenon must be found in social, cultural, and technical bases as well as the unique functional and structural characteristics of the written mode. Whereas features of written language contribute to its tendency for standardization, the nature of the spoken language has proved it more standard-resistant, so that some scholars, even, push the argument further denying the existence of any standard spoken language. Nevertheless, the sociolinguists have identified a standard variety for the spoken language but they have hardly suggested any precise definition for it yet. Although, standard spoken language should, by nature, have its own norms and criteria, in practice, the norms and criteria of written language dominate it and the written language functions as a prototype model. It is argued that the narrower the gap between the written and spoken modes in a given language, the higher the standard value of that language would be. The gap between written and spoken language has, at times, resulted in language death.

The similarities between Moulana's (Roumi) poetic style and Surrealism have been widely studied for many years. After reviewing the relevant literature, this paper revisits the topic more intensively and cites some supporting arguments to that claim. To this end, the similarities between the above styles are discussed from two perspectives. First, the similarities between Moulana's views concerning poetry are compared against those of the manifesto of surrealism. In the second part, the distinctive features of surrealist imagery in Moulana's poetry are portrayed. Then, it can be convincingly argued that what Andre Brereton and his contemporaries (1924 -1930) presented about madness and self-directed writing, marvelous phenomenon, the spark nature of poetic discourse, etc. in their poetic manifesto in Paris had indeed been experienced and realized in poetry by the great Persian Poet Moulana Jalal Ol Deen Mohammad Moulavi (604 – 672 A.H.) as early as eight centuries ago.