Scientific Journals Management System

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Structural analysis is one of the methods for analyzing literary texts. A branch of interest to structuralists is narratology. Greimas, the Lithuanian semiotician, explains the structure of the narrative and the characters of the story using the dual contrasts and the actantial model. The aim of the current study is to investigate the structures of a story from Marzbān-nāma entitled “Irajasteh and Khosrow” and another story from Haft Peykar entitled “Fitnah and Bahram” using a structuralist approach. The characters and actors in the stories and the similarities and differences of the two stories and the type of actions are evaluated. The result shows that while the two stories have a common deep structure, they are not homogeneous in terms of their surface structure. The subject actor in the story of “Irajasteh and Khosrow” plays an important role in the plot of the story, while in the story of “Fitnah and Bahram” as an active actor, encourages the subject or the hero to act.

 

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Vis and Rāmin, by Fakhruddin As'ad Gorgani, is one of the first love poems in Persian literature that has been morally rejected in the history of Persian literature as it is the first story of marital infidelity in both ancient and Islamic Iran. Regardless of the poem’s content, one cannot deny its literary, social, and cultural values as well as its unique status among the ancient works of Persian literature. Although the poem has immoral content, there are reasons behind the immoral actions of the characters in the story that need due attention to some points for the analysis of the poem from a moral criticism perspective. They comprise knowledge about the poet and the society, religious beliefs affecting the actions of the characters, and the four main themes of the poem: “pleasure”, “fatalism”, “conflict between seniority and youth” and “love”. Vis and Rāmin can be considered as a literary example of art for art’s sake doctrine and morally as an example of the moral relativity of the characters in the story.      
 

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Literary criticism has been one of the most controversial issues in the study of literature in Iran. Some have considered it an entirely Western area of study and therefore imported to the country, while others have traced its history back to pre-Islamic Iran. By distinguishing between the two terms of rhetoric as a premodern subject and literary criticism as a modern area, this paper examines the evolution of literary criticism in Iran from the years of the Constitutional Revolution to the early 2010s. These developments have been studied in four historical periods: from the beginning to 1941, from 1942 to 1978, from the Islamic Revolution to the late 1990s, and from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. The results show that despite the dominance of the discourse of literary criticism in literary studies and its successful examples in the recent decades, the application of this area to reading texts still has a long way to achieve greater success. Meanwhile, the emergence and the prevalence of interdisciplinary and problem-oriented studies in reading texts in the global academic environment have added to the complexity of the situation. 
 

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There are so many similarities between some cultures and civilizations as to say that the principle of Communicating Vessels is common among them. Therefore, Sufism in Iran has the status of philosophy in Greece, especially the Sufism of the first period – before the sixth century – which has been interpreted as Sufism of the intuition in contrast to the Sufism of later centuries, i.e. Sufism of the rhetoric and of the deception. The ideas and concepts in the Sufism of the first period as well as the words and deeds of some famous Sufis, especially the Sufis of Khorasan, confirm this proposition. For example, manifestations of Greek rationality, crystallized in the behavior and speech of Socrates of Athens, can be found in the behavior and speech of Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr of Mihana. In this paper, using the analytical-descriptive method and the comparative approach, we have determined the commonalities in the words and deeds of Socrates and Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr, and have tried to prove the principle that “water stands at the same level in all communicating vessels”.
 

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Authoritarianism is the psychological mechanism of man to escape from the negative aspects of freedom in the society. Fromm believes that man surrenders to a superior power to escape the suffering of decision-making. Consequently, through authoritarianism man suffers from three opposing feelings: either one surrenders with a sense of powerlessness to a superior power (masochism), or one has arrogance and a sense of domination over others (sadism), and sometimes one communicates with the society through a masochistic-sadistic coexistence which leads to the loss of individual freedom and independence. In Behbahani’s poems, these mechanisms are manifested in the community around Simin with two approaches of submission and domination in their mild forms. Using an analytical-descriptive method, this paper examines the psychological mechanisms for escaping from the negative aspects of freedom in Behbahani’s poems from Eric Fromm’s perspective. The findings show that in Simin Behbahani’s poems – as Fromm asserts – she surrenders to a powerful whole that is sometimes the sacred love and sometimes destiny (fatalism) and sometimes the earthly love of Simin whom she cannot resist. Furthermore, occasionally in her poems, Simin goes so far as to dominate her beloved by asking God to be able to inflict endless psychological suffering on him through absolute domination.      
 

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Mir Kermani was one of the contemporary poets of Khwaju Kermani, whose complete collection of poems were published based on a manuscript copy belonging to Saeed Nafisi. His poems, despite being rich and full of meaning, have remained unknown for some reason. In this library research article, using the descriptive-analytical method, the Kermani poet was introduced, and his lyrics were studied from phonetic, linguistic, intellectual, and literary perspectives. Investigating the different aspects of Mir’s lyrics indicated that his lyrics lacking monorhymes were more compared to his contemporary poets, but the nominal monorhymes were considerable in his lyrics. Various types of literal arrays such as pun and balance were abundant in his poetry. The lyric poems had a fluent language, but occasional over-attention to figures of speech and the aesthetics of the words made his verses artificial. The motif of Mir’s lyrics was romantic, and the poet mostly used lovely descriptions of the beloved. Among the forms of imagery, simile was abundantly used in his poetry, while metaphors could rarely be seen and the share of novel metaphors in his lyrics was very small. Allusion and metaphor, the devices of brevity were rarely seen in Mir’s lyrics. Generally, the poet mostly focused on thematic concepts.   
 

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Attention to the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the characters of the story using psychological theories has always been one of the methods of literary researchers to analyze the characters and show the capability and skill of the creators of the works as accurately as possible. In this descriptive and analytical research, using the “Choice Theory” of the contemporary psychologist, William Glasser, an attempt has been made to study the personality of Vis in “Vis and Rāmin” collection of poetry of Fakhruddin As’ad Gurgani. According to the choice theory, the root of all behaviors of a person emanates from one’s within and to satisfy one’s five fundamental needs (the need for love, survival, power, fun, and freedom). Thus, the main question of the research is that under the influence of which of the fundamental needs did Vis make bold choices? In other words, which of Vis’s fundamental needs were stronger than the other needs that led him to engage in such behavior? The findings showed that among the fundamental needs, the need for survival, the need for love and belonging, and the need for freedom were stronger in him than the other needs, respectively. Next after these needs are the need for power and the need for fun.
 

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Time is one of the elements that gives the fictional text its identity and distinguishes a story and a narrative. In addition, time takes on different functions in the fictional text and contributes to the progression of the story in various ways. The present research investigated the element of time in the novel “Chess with the Doomsday Machine” based on Gérard Genette’s theory. Considering the memory-like structure of the novel, anachronism has a high frequency in the text and calendar time is not of much significance. The interest of the author in writing the story based on his mental images has obviated the need to record the precise dates of the events. Drawing on the technique of breaking the time in the narrative, the author has created suspense in the story and resolved some of the ambiguities existing in the text. Frequent descriptions and attention to details have stopped the time of the narrative in most of the scenes of the story. In this novel, the frequency of the narrative of events is of singular type and, drawing on such a method, the author has tried to increase the pace and advancement of the story. The author of the novel “Chess with the Doomsday Machine” has utilized various time-related techniques and methods to narrate the transformation of the perspective of the protagonist of the story from a dogmatic to a relatively tolerant attitude and has wielded time techniques to cast doubt on many learned beliefs of the narrator. 
 

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Plants have an important place in Rumi’s meaningful mind, and the narratives developed using plant knowledge in Masnavi incorporate a new educational strategy that Rumi adopted to cultivate himself and his audience. In this research, which was carried out using the descriptive-analytical method, plant topics and knowledge were extracted from all six books of Masnavi and then the data was divided into two parts: physical (material) and metaphysical (immaterial): Rumi’s approach to plants in these two parts is descriptive, sometimes material and formal, and corresponds to the current agricultural science and sometimes a tool at the service of spiritual teachings. This research shows, on the one hand, Rumi’s mystical discourse on plants as a manifestation of God, and on the other hand, it shows the poet’s taste for using the literary devices to embellish and articulate speech. Rumi’s knowledge of the name and morphology of plants and their medicinal and therapeutic properties; various types of fruits, cereals, vegetables, and legumes; horticultural terms and gardening methods; the cultivation and fertilization practices increase the notion that he had access and probably read encyclopedic books such as Bundahishn, Alabniyah an Haqaeq alAdwiyah, etc. Among the factors that can be considered as deep structure to the abundance of these terms are Rumi’s naturalism and the geographic location of his residence and the influence of his father Bahaedin’s spiritual teachings.
 

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A researcher, lyricist, and a modernist, Wasef Bakhtari is regarded as one of the leading figures of contemporary Persian literature in Afghanistan. He is more known as a poet who writes difficult-to-understand poems, and his language is full of ambiguity and complexity. Therefore, in the present study, based on the semiotic theory of “Michael Riffaterre” and using qualitative content analysis and the retroactive reading approach, the ungrammaticalities, accumulations, descriptive systems, semantic transformations, and minimal semantic units in the poem “... And I Had Cried” by Bakhtari were determined and the elements that were the external signified of the signifiers inside the poem were introduced. The matrix scattered throughout the whole poem was obtained and its semantic structure was clarified. Riffaterre’s semiotic theory seeks to help the reader – by transcending imitative and exploratory reading and resorting to retroactive reading – go beyond the imitative layer of the text and enter the world of its signs, pursuant to which the structure of meaning in symbolic and ambiguous poems can be identified. The findings of the study show that the language of Bakhtari’s poetry is more complex than that of his contemporaries, but through various theories, including Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, it is possible to well penetrate the inner layers of meaning in his poetry and understand its semantic structure.
 

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Systemic functional linguistics of Halliday is one of semantic approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literary texts as opposed to structural linguistics. In the present study, we have examined the applicability of this theory at the level of ideational metafunction to reread the style of the text of two travelogues of the Qajar era and to differentiate between language functions in both feminine and masculine styles through how they are represented in verb processes. The main question of this research is how to represent the experiences and observations of two authors during the journey through the transient structure formed in the processes that have depicted the experimental world of the two travelogues. By selecting similar parts in each travelogue, we examined five hundred process samples. After determining the type of each process and its statistics, we compared the frequency of the function of each of the six processes (material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioral, and existential) at the level of ideational metafunction. The results showed the higher frequency of the mental process in the Qajar lady’s travelogue, and the higher frequency of the relational process in the unknown man travelogue, respectively, indicating the greater attention of the Qajar lady to the inner world, and the greater importance of discovering relationships in the world around and evaluation of these relations in the mind and language of the male author. Through our examining the use of marginal additions in the two travelogues, it became clear that Sakineh Sultan used these additions 27% more than the unknown man in the text, which shows her paying more attention to recording details during the trip. In terms of the use of various marginal additions, the addition of place and accompaniment in the male author’s travelogue and the addition of degree, quality, intention, and cause in the female author’s travelogue are more frequent. This shows style differences in the two writings regarding the formation and depiction of outside world experiences in the mind and their representation manner in the language of these two authors. In terms of transitive structure in these two travelogues, wherever the writers are preparing the ground for expressing the main point, the sentences are less transient and wherever an important event and speech is presented, the degree of transientness of the sentences is higher. This means that verb processes in the foreground of the speech have more participants, are voluntary and positive, have real face, with high agency and ultimate appearance, and individuality is object and the degree of the object’s being influenced is more than the sentences in the background of the speech.
 

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Foucault’s discourse theory implies that man is not the origin of a discourse since he is not considered to be a creature of will and decision, but a mere "subject" whose identity, profession and position in the society are formed by different discourses and the power relations and rules of those discourses. In Edward Said’s view, Orientalism is a discourse with colonizing imperatives under the dictates of which and in accordance with its rules, power relations and colonizing purpose, orientalists present a superficial, stereotypical and distorted picture of the Orient. Edward Brown and George Nathaniel Curzon are contemporaneous orientalists who have common grounds in some important aspects of life. Hence, it is expected that both be under the influence of the dominant imperialist discourse of the Victorian age and write in line with its colonizing purpose. However, this expectation is not realized about Brown. He is diametrically opposed to Curzon and criticizes his bestial policies toward Iran. Rare orientalists like Brown, who live in the heart of the dominant discourse but are not affected by it and even go against it, pose a big challenge to the definition of Orientalism as merely a discourse. The present study is an attempt to evaluate Said’s reliance on Foucault’s discourse theory and its efficacy in his definition and analysis of Orientalism as a discourse by presenting the biographies of these two Iranologists and the reasons why they took completely different approaches to Iran in their travelogues and other writings. This evaluation shows that it is impossible to analyze the activities and writings of those orientalists like Brown, who defend Iranians' rights humanistically and benevolently, based on Foucault's discourse theory which belongs to Nietzsche's anti-humanistic tradition.
 

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The speeches that have been made in The Maqalat-e Shams- are considered as valuable literary and mystical heritage. So far, they have been studied from various perspectives of literary criticism and theories, and research achievements have been obtained from them. In this research, with a new approach, the following topics such as the nature of linguistic sign (signifier and signified), discourses on non-linguistic signs, analysis of discourses from Shams based on the relationship between companionship and substitution in language, syntactic and lexical critique, and preference of essays on Shams , In the light of Saussure's linguistic views, is shown ,Reflecting on his speeches, one can see his linguistic and semiotic perception in the face of texts, traditions and phenomena of existence, which is surprising to today's readers and gives a contemporary dimension to his work. In the present study, the design and description of this important issue has been discussed.

 

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Due to the closeness of the two words "history" and "story" the debate between narrative and history has long been a multi-faceted issue: to what extent is "history" narrative, and to what extent can narrative be historical? Is narrative utterly devoid of truth, and does history have a direct relation to truth, so much so that if history is emptied of truth, it loses its validity. If the truth is not recorded in history, will it no longer be the truth? What is the difference between historical narrative and narrative history? What is the difference between a narrative and a non-fiction and, or historical narrative? All the discussion between narrative and history is but between fiction and non-fiction. From this perspective, what is the status of Beyhaqi's History? From White's point of view, Beyhaqi's History is neither a chronology nor a chronicle but contains Beyhaqi's epistemological and teleological selections from the history of this period of Iran, which ironically has both an ideological and a political burden. Beyhaqi has turned "the real" into "the fiction". This article shows firstly how the History of Beyhaqi, as the product of a particular political discourse, has been prevailed in the Ghaznavid era, and secondly how it reflects the characteristics of this discourse, both on and off the screen. The History of Beyhaqi is a transition from a mythical and epic narrative to a historical and worldly narrative.

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Different and sometimes contradictory definitions are mentioned in rhetorical books to explain the irony industry - which by examining and classifying them, two general concepts can be considered for this technique: in the first definition, which belongs to the pre-Jorjani period, The irony is "to cover the speech and leave the meaning". In this sense, irony is mixed with other rhetorical techniques (such as permissible, simile, metaphor, theory, etc.) and has no definite limits. In another sense, irony, which begins with Jorjani, is a structured and ironic industrial allusion to other techniques. In this definition, irony does not simply mean "covered with speech and leaving out the meaning", but has a specific framework and it is "necessary mention and necessary will". Therefore, if a word is mentioned even covertly, but the element of "necessary" is not observed in it, it is not considered an irony in post-Jorjani definitions. In the present study, by descriptive-analytical method and using library tools, while analyzing the two concepts of irony (before and after Jorjani), the recent literature (post-constitutional) perception of the concept of this industry in practice and its field of application Investigated. The results of this study show that most recent researchers in the discussion of irony have a tendency to a concept that was common before Jorjani.
 

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Since children's fiction is a good ground for achieving the goals of thinking education programs, it has been welcomed by education systems. Lippmann is considered to be the originator of philosophy for children. His innovation brought about a fundamental change in the way of education, which was very well received. For this reason, in this article, the content of the Iranian stories of the age group "D" (seventh, eighth and ninth periods) has been adapted to the skills and components of Lippmann's philosophical thought. The statistical population of the article includes Iranian story books that have been written for children and adolescents of Dal age group (seventh, eighth and ninth period) in the years 1986 to 2016 and have received publishing permission. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical. The results show that some of the components of Lippmann's philosophical thought have been studied in Iranian fiction books, such as One Thousand and One Nights, Fairy Tales, Wolf Parties, etc. Like searching for reasons in a given situation, research question design, causal explanation, inference and goal setting are most common. On the other hand, they are weak in some other skills, such as evaluating the reasons presented, liquidity, etc .; And components such as "term definition evaluation" and "error detection" were not found in them.
 

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The limits of some of the words in the texts of the ancients, in spite of the frequent use and effort of the lexicographers, have not been well defined. One of these words is "ambre gris", which the lexicographers have written only a little information about it, and its old features and uses remain unknown to the reader of ancient texts.
Ambre gris is commonly known for its fragrance and some of its decorative and medicinal uses, while a brief glance at Arabic and Persian poetry and prose texts shows that this material has been used in the lives of ancestors more than we can imagine and has been the subject of numerous poets and writers' themes.
In this article, by studying literary, commentary, historical, scientific, etc. books in Persian and Arabic poetry and prose as much as possible, the evidence for the use of this word has been collected and analyzed.
This article discusses ambre gris mines and how it is created and the various theories about it, the types of ambre gris and its best type, the forms and how to use the ambre gris, the various uses of the ambre gris, the use of the ambre gris in the names, as well as the jurisprudential rules of the ambre gris.