فصلنامه نقد ادبی
پیاپی 16 (زمستان 1390)

Debate is one of the literary prose types prevalent in Persian. In prose debates, two or more characters are presented in dialogue writing with each other and ultimately the authorsummarizestheir language and reaches a conclusion. The structure of these debates is mostly based on dialoguewriting. During the Constitutional era of Iran, these kinds of debates were regarded as ‘objectwriting’ or ‘theatrical writing.’ With respect to their formal structure and particularstyle of dialogue writing, it can be asked whether they can be read from a dramatic point of view. The dramatic tone and language, dialogue-based dramatic action, conflict, time and place are some of the identifiable aspects that are studied in this paper. The aim of this paper is to introduce a dialogue-based model for the study of the dramatic aspects of these debates. This model is proposed on the basis of a comparative study of dialogue in prose and drama as well as identifying commonalities between these two types of literature.

This study investigates the origins of rural drama in Iran and presents a comparative study with pastoral drama. Pastoral drama is a sub-genre of rural drama. In Pastoral drama, the emphasis is on dramatic effects such as spectacle, music, and sentimental characters. The focus of rural drama is on the social and human aspects which often could be found in rural sociological studies. This kind of approach in western drama is very modern and new. Its origin goes back to 1850s with Turgenev’s A Month in Country; a movement which was followed by Chekhov’s Uncle Vaniya and three other plays, namely The Cherry Orchard, Three sisters, and The Seagull. All the events of these plays happen in Russian rural atmosphere depicting the change in the life and everyday experiences of rural people. Among the four plays of Chekhov Uncle Vaniya is a unique rural drama that later becomes a model for other playwrightsall around the world especially Iranian playwright, Akbar Radi. Radiunder the influence of Chekhov’s rural drama has written two rural Iranian plays, namely Marg dar payiz [death in autumn] and Dar meh bekhan [sing in fog]. These plays represent the most fascinating aspects of Iranian rural life. This experience also has influenced other branches ofart such as poetry, fiction, and cinema.The process resulted in the improvement of the Iranian humanistic drama.

Drawing on modernist techniques, the play Az poshte shisheha by Akbar Radi expresses an unrelenting challenge of the intellectual with the new-fangled, vulgar modern trends. In order to express his view, Radiemploys doubles in his characterization. He creates two female characters that stand in opposition to each other; one represents modernity without originality while the other is an ordinary woman with the same intellectual and psychological concerns. In a way, almost all characters of this play, especially the women, symbolically represent different social strata and ideologies. Considering the central role of women in this play, theanalysis of their characterscan reveal the author’s outlook towards the major conflict of the play.

The experience of time, like anything else in the world, can manifest itself in the text. Time is regarded as a structural element of the text. One characteristic of narrative is that time is considered as the main element of representation tool and the represented object. Therefore, time is described in the light of the chronological relationship between story and the representing text. By analyzing the time of the story and the time of the representing text, it can be concluded that in all the four plays of Naghmeh Samininarrative has two kinds of temporalities: the cyclic and the linear. The linear temporality gives a dramatic characteristic to the text, while the cyclic temporality gives an epic characteristic to the text. The cyclic temporality is always connected to a particular place and somehow reveals the feminine subjectivity governing the text. This study aims to show that when the linear temporality is dominant, the text is dramatic, and when the cyclic temporality is dominant, the text becomes narrative, while both temporalities exist in these four plays simultaneously.

This paper deals with the role of the Theatre of the Absurd in the evolution of the history of Iranian dramatic literature. In the modern art everyone in a way is involved in the question of modern technology. Mechanization has made its way into everyday life and has affected all its aspects.This effect is so immense that everyone is in way occupied with the same subject. One of the concepts evident in the works of European authors and playwrights is absurdity and inefficiency of the modern time and the people. This article investigates how the concept of the absurd is reflected in the plays of Gholam HosseinSaedi. It has been tried to present an analysis of how Theater of the Absurd and its pioneershave influenced Saedi’s plays.

This paper studies the concept of metafiction in Charmshir’s play Dastan-e door vaderaz-e safar-e sultan … be diyar-e farang (1998). Metafiction, as a result of an analytical perspective emerged first in modern novels, attempts to challenge the conventional frame of fictional reference to the reality of the external world as it is suggested in literary Realism. In this type of stories, narrative elements such as plot, character, time, and place are no longer representatives of imagined reality, but they in fact reflect a perpetual conflict between art and reality. However, it can be suggested that reality here is subordinated by the referents of the external world. Linguistically, metalanguage and poetic functions of drama would dominate its object language. The story then will be directed toward its narrative elements as well as its own process of creation. Adaptation and meta-historiographyare some of the other features of this style of writing stories which is associated with parody and irony. Charmshir’s play is not really a narrative of the king’s long journey to Europe;rather it is a challenge for the playwright to realize a metafictional probability in form of a postmodern drama. This play is an artwork about the process of building an alternative story and is a new exploration on narrative facts.The elements such as characters, structure, plot, the authority of the narrator, and the style of narrative are no longer the hidden parts of drama in the representation of the story and meaning;in fact, they are the story in itself. The foregrounding of language here is an ironic reference to literary and dramatic texts while it is a fictional device for fabricating history and manipulating data by which the reader expects to receive narrative information. This studyunravels new aspects of narrative structure in Iraniandrama using an analytic-descriptive approach.

This paper analyzes communicative style of dialogues in Akbar Radi’s Melody of Rainy City (1998), using Grice’s ‘cooperative principle.’ The word ‘Gilan’, the name of the main character of the Melody of Rainy City, refers to a female name and also a province in the northern Iran. The play reveals the contradictions which can be naturally seen in the gap between the traditional culture and the imposing elements of modernity. Examining the cultural differences of characters, this paper deals with their hesitation to defend or dispose their individual values. Gilan’s nervous instability symbolizes the cultural chaos the province is facing. She is the young girl of an old caretaker who works for an aristocratic family. Gilan is in love with a youngguy who has just completed his academic education and returned home from the West. The socio-political debates of family members during their daily talks and their quarrels over the legacy of father, basically, have made these cultural gaps to be largely explicit. By using a cultural approach for the analysis of the relationship between characters, this article reveals how these paradoxical behaviors have been especially prevalent among the middle class of Iranian society. This paper finally presents a stylistic reading of dramatic dialogues as the conversational behavior of social characters.