نشریه پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان
سال هفدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 66، تابستان 1391)

During the past two decades, the detective genre has experienced an unprecedented boom in Latin America. Many of the writers writing in this regard have highlighted the role of women in detective frames.This paper examines a series of detective novels to examine broadly the evolution of the female figure in contemporary detective novels of Argentina, Chile and Mexico. Here, we show how the woman detective starts imitating and parodying the figure of male detective, but, over time, come to develop her own style of being and feeling, reaching a defined personality that allows us to report, in some cases, the difficult social reality that surrounds her.

Feminism is a belief that women and men are equally worthwhile creatures, but most communities define a degree of superiority for the male group. In modern ages, some social movements have struggled to achieve equality between women and men and restore women’s ignored rights. Presence of women themselves and their activities are significant and require more scholarly studies. Women novelists have created memorable writings through these movements. Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf’s great contribution to feminism is indisputable and Simin Daneshvar’s writings and lectures, a source of inspiration to many writers in Iran, reveal her inclinations towards feminism. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Daneshvar’s The Wandering Island and The Wandering Cameleer in the light of feminism. The approach of this paper is explanation and clarification of feminists’ idea that women are first human beings, and are independent creatures with different biologial, cultural and psychological characteristics. Following close reading of the texts of the novels and utilizing feminist views, the novels were compared and many similarities were observed in them. Among many other issues, the focus of the paper is on female characters of the novels, both traditional and modern, who have shared wishes, fears, concerns, and sufferings. The patriarchy power applies similar strategies to oppress women, although they are located in different regions of the world.

Gabriel García Márquez is one of the most outstanding cultural, political and social figures in Latin America. Apparently Iranian writers have been greatly influenced by him and we can perceive the reflection of his words, his style, or in general, his voice in the works of many Persians writers. In this research we have done an intertextual-comparative-study on the reflection of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Mahta’s Balloon written by Jafar Modares Sadeghi. In this study we have taken advantage of Gérard Genette’s theories of transtextuality by elaborating on intertextual and hypertext approaches. The transtextual relations between the two texts are shown and classified by studying the similarities and differences between the characters and events of these literary works.

Mikhail Bakhtin presented "dialogism" and "polyphony" as remarkable components of modern literary novels. Since then, many literary critics including Kristeva and Genette began to expand, and offer a variety of presentations and configurations of these notions. Today, we can consider "intertextuality" as a common ground between the different interpretations of the theories of Bakhtine, Kristeva and Genette. Also, we can represent an inherent and holistic explanation of the concepts of "dialogism" and "polyphony" in a literary text. In contemporary Persian literature, the works of Simin Daneshvar is envisaged among the few literary creations that contain dialogism and its corollaries. Hence, in this paper, first, we aim to offer a detailed explanation of what dialogism is, and second, we will try to show how we can consider Daneshvar's Wandering Island as a dialogic literary text.

"Literature of migration" has emerged in the last decades in Italy through a diverse range of migrant writers who were passionate to establish a connection with their host society and receive recognition in the respective context. This literature is consolidated by its own narration from faraway lands, immigration related dissonances and discords, and duality of self; devoting to introduce the reconstructed and retrieved identities of these immigrants. This research will focus on four works by famous women writers and the selection criteria of these works was based on their preoccupation with the phenomenon of pregnancy and motherhood. In addition to the representation of autobiographic significances, the study will emphasize the instrumental role of literature in portraying the phenomena and social changes, and reveal new images portrayed about the future and their surroundings in the heroine's mind. As to mention some of the core issues in this study, we can refer to subjects like the reactions of female protagonists in undesirable situations as unwanted pregnancy, their conscious or unconscious efforts to regain their own rights and the acquisition of a favorable position. As it was expectd, the feminine-oriented thoughts of the selected writers, undoubtedly, originates the anti chauvinism notions in the mind of the protagonists of the mentioned works who are more responsible and skilful than men, and who try to overthrow the inhuman tradition of male supremacy. They are aware of male dominance that has oppressed them for centuries, and struggle to obtain a more pivotal role in the context of their own existence.

Nazim Hikmet (1901-1963), Turkish poet and a true believer of Marxism, spent 12 years of his life in prison and nearly 20 years in exile, an experience that profoundly changed his perception of space and influenced the horizon structure of his literary work. As Michel Collot explains, horizon structure considers the phenomenological idea of “existence-in the world” and seeks the life character or subject matter in the literary work; the character as an existent which is always placed (positioned) in a certain location, from where it evokes the world. This method assumes that each statement is built from three components: World, Language and Me. With regards to Nazim Hikmet and his horizon structure, we will see how the break in the perception of the prisoner from space is visible in his poetry. This study will examine the traces of this rupture in the structure of the poetry of Hikmet. How does its spatial descriptions differ from others in the literature in which his poems are rooted? And how does he reconcile this terminology of space with Marxist tendencies as a universal human being? These are the questions we will try to answer. Next we will try to draw the structure of horizon in the poetry of this poet.

One of the largest and most mysterious events of life is death, which has continued to preoccupy the mind of man. In cotemporary literature, many authors are trying to escape death. But the approach of Eric Emmanuel Schmitt, contemporary French writer, given the large number of his works with this theme, seems to be specific. In his work, death does not have a horrible face. Through belief in God and the benefts of life, he tries to accept death as a reality of life. His outstanding work Oscar and the lady in pink is the story of a sick child who is on the brink of death, yet the writer, who is aware of the impact of imagination on the child’s psyche and the depth of human spirit, creates an imaginary world for him. Thus not only is death not ugly and horrendous but it becomes acceptable to the child. In this paper, we study the psychological aspects of this story, to find a response for this question: which elements are efficient in the acceptance of death? We shall study the characters using a psychological approach in ftheir encounter with death. By classifying people into two groups: those who “accept the death” and those who”escape of death”, Schmitt presents a notion of death as a reality palpable and comprehensible.

Popular novels are among recent phenomena in literary trends with a large number of audience and high sale rates. This paper is an attempt to analyze the degree and reasons for reading popular novels by students of University of Isfahan. We studied popular novels in three different dimensions: appearance, content and literary qualities. Variables such as gender, level of education, socio-economic status and field of study are considered as possible independent variables that may influence tendency towards popular novels. Research sample includes 301 cases who were able to fill out our questionnaire from a total sample of 384 individuals. The result of the study indicates that mean of tendency towards popular novels is above the average (3/52).There is a meaningful but reverse relationship between socio-economic status and tendency towards popular novels in the sense that the higher the level of social-economic statue, the less tendency toward popular novels. Likewise, there is a meaningful and reverse relationship between level of education and tendency towards popular novels. However, with the other two independent variables, namely, gender and field of study, we did not find any meaningful relationship.