نامه فرهنگستان
سال سیزدهم شماره 1 (بهار و تابستان1392)

Adaptation studies finds its way as an authorized discipline in the realm of comparative literature. This paper scrutinizes Tavakoli’s reading of Glass Menagerie in the course of adaptation. Though adaptation is a literal reading of an already existing text, it’s a new cultural product rather than a byproduct. Through the lens of interdisciplinarity, comparative literature and adaptation studies break the boundaries of literature and cinema, written and multimedia texts, the canons and the popular literature. Thus, not only the text but also the context is of great importance. Hence, the adaptation of Glass Menagerie (Williams, 1945) as Here without Me (dir. Tavakoli, 2011) is not evaluated according to its fidelity to Williams’s text. This paper studies Tavakoli’s creative interpretation of Glass Menagerie, adapted as a film in Iran of the early 2010s.

The relation of literature with other arts is very old; however, comparatists have become interested in interdisciplinary studies specially since the last decades of the 20th century. In this article, the author has chosen a literary opus and a painting artwork to reveal the commonalities between them. For this purpose, there is a discussion from the viewpoint of French theorists between a naturalistic novel of the19th century, Assommoir by Zola, and a painting of the same time, "Women Ironing", by the impressionist artist, Edgar Degas.

Translation has always played a significant role in literary and cultural influences and exchanges among various nations. However, as compared with the original, it has been considered inferior, and the translator as the the slave of the author. In this paper, Bassnett, having defined translation as the transference of texts written in one language into another — endevours to show that transtlation, far from being a copy of, and thus inferior to the original, is a creative activity and plays a crucial role in reclaiming and re-evalutiong a peopleʼs language and literature. In conclusion, she emphasizes the fact that translation, far from being a marginal activity, is crucial to our understanding of the world we inhabit.

There are lots of works which have dealt with the contemporary Persian literature; however, Shafiee Kadkaniʼs Ba Cheraq-o Ayeneh (With the Lamp and the Mirror) is more significant due to the reputation of its author and its new hypothesis. In this book, the author claims that all the evolutions of Modern Persian poetry have been influenced by the translation of European poetry into Persian, This work, though it is a scholarly book, can be criticized for a few points: lack of coherent relations between its chapters, lack of definition of theoretical concepts and contextualization and too much emphasis on the role of translation in the emergence of Persian modern poetry. More than translation, it was the rejection of traditional literary discourse which opened the way for the formation of modern Persian poetry. At this stage, translation was a facilitator rather than the ultimate factor.

Since 1970, comparative literature which was traditionally concerned with the literatures of different languages turned to interdisciplinary studies, specially to the analysis of relations between literature and the other arts like cinema. In fact, cinema has always used story as a base for film but the most important point is the common terms like character, time, space, point of view, images presented by the two media. The mutual influence of the two arts is significant as well. This article tries to explore the similarities of characterization in film and the novel and will demonstrate how a certain theme appears in written and visual texts regardless of the boundaries we usually draw between the two.

Metamorphosis is one of the important literary elements especially in mythological and epic literature. One of these forms is initiative metamorphosis which is highlighted differently in Shahnama. The story of “King Fereydoon putting his sons on trial” is a distinguished example of this kind in which Fereydoon is transformed into a dragon. The current paper analyzes this story from a comparative literature perspective, i.e. poetic conjunction and painting. Illustration of metamorphosis initiation is one of the outstanding examples of creative design based on Shahnama. In order to analyze the selected figurative content, after focusing on the verbal narrative text and the reason why Fereydoon is temporarily transformed into a dragon, the paper examines the visual contexts of morphological analysis in different schools of painting as well as the interference of painters in transferring the verbal context into visual ones. This essay deals with the paintings through a trans-semiotic approach, and the methodology is based on descriptive-analytic and comparative approaches as well as data collected from libraries. The result indicates that the metamorphosis in the proposed paintings have a trial effect to reach the status of kingship, chivalry, and marriage. They are reflected in the theme of dragon-killing as a representation of initiation ritual which is illustrated by the symbols of imaginary dragon as well as the ritual itself. However, the metamorphosis is understood by verbal pre-texts alone.

Film adaptation is considered a controversial topic in comparative literature and cinema studies. Dudley Andrew (1945) has verified this subject in his various writings and has examined the possible relations between literary and cinematographic texts. He has also represented different categories about the nature and cause of film adaptation. In this paper, we rely on the theories of Dudley Andrew for enumerating various categories of film adaptation and we suggest a maximal approach for film adaptation which is related to concepts like intertextuality. Afterward, we apply this comparative approach to the literary and cinematographic texts of Mom's Guestm written by Moradi Kermani and directed by Mehrjui. According to Andrew's theories, the film adaptation of Mehrjui is based on "intersection" and could be considered a kind of intertextual adaptation which engenders advantages and acceptable performances. In fact, this successful adaptation is the representation of several separate texts. Therefore, the director, through expanding and modifying some parts of the source text, has been able to enrich the film adaptation version.