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Modernist novel and short story have played a significant role in modern retouching of mythical narratives and in their recreation in the contemporary narrative literature. One of the major reasons for the particular attention of these novels and short stories to mythical roots is the necessity that the recent authors feel due to alterations in social conditions as well as the fundamental transformations in human’s intellect and attitude. The disorder in today’s chaotic world, the discourses of which are full of contradictions, irregularities, and rule aversion has intrigued today’s man in incoherent, nonlinear and discontinuous narratives abundant with temporal disorders, a characteristic which has a rich background in mythical narratives. A prominent writer in contemporary Persian literature is Shahriyar Mandanipour, the works of whom can resemble mythical narratives in terms of both the structure and the processing of some elements of story, specially the element of time. This study attempts to demonstrate that just like in some mythical narratives, in some of the stories by Mandanipour, 1- time is qualitative and mental not quantitative and objective; 2- time takes its validity from the narrated event or phenomenon; and 3- time is circular and cyclic not linear and straight. Of course, confirming these resemblances does not necessarily imply that Shahriar Mandanipour has consciously been influenced by mythical narratives

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Shab-e Hol is a novel which due to its time of publication in the midst of the Islamic Revolution was not well received has many structural and technical values ​​for readers, writers, and critics. Because of the much complexity of the narrative and the difficulty of its reading, there are disagreements about the identity of the narrator and the chronological order of the narratives in the few reviews published on the novel. This paper focuses on the time and narrative in this novel and explains the ambiguities of time and narrative and the arrangement of the characters in Shab-e Hol. It further shows that the author consciously intended to write a modern novel and create doubts in the minds of his readers in order to reflect his philosophical insights affected by life in the modern era.

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The novel Malekan-e- Azab is the latest published work by Abu Torab-e Khosravi. The significance which is always assumed by Khosravi for words and writing is conspicuously seen in this novel as well; however, the author’s attempt to develop novel atmosphere and techniques has added a new dimension of complexity. To fully appreciate this complication and to gain an understanding of the discourse, we will investigate the deep structure of the novel and its affinity with the author’s technique, drawing on non-narrative elements, the implication of the signs and the binary contrast involved in the process of signification. The theme of the novel is a battle against Time. The technique of narration is multi-dimensional which is compatible with its deep structure. Given the significance of the association between words and creativity, the author has endeavored to develop a close connection between words and creativity and writing. In doing so, the author provides a circular portrayal of the characters. The realization of the characters by words and literary elements has induced a vivid image of the narrator by exploiting new indexicals which are constituted by the characters. The author’s novel technique to battle against Time is metamorphosis; the characters are realized as narrative indexicals and lead their lively life throughout the narrative. The symbolic elements of the narrative are closely interweaved with the circular structure of the characters and are so formulated to develop the deep structure of the narrative within a transformational framework.

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Gérard Genette is a French structuralist theorist and critic. In this paper we have investigated the speed and time technique of narration in the story of Varqa and Golshah by Ayyuqi from the viewpoint of Genette. The result of the structural study of Varqa and Golshah indicates that for the normal progress of the story and to avoid any ambiguity the writer has chosen the present time as the base and main time. Internal retrospective anachronism in the context of the story is used to inform the audience or restating the memories, and anticipative anachronism is only used to express the ambitions of the characters of the story. The study of duration shows that the story has been narrated with negative acceleration. By using this element, the writer has built the desired form of his story and has been able to increase the epic aspect of the story more than its lyric aspect. The element of frequency has been investigated from the singular, repetition, and frequent aspects. The results show that these elements have caused the text to progress fast and have led to meaningful repetition of events and emphasis on them.

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The purpose of this study is to identify Gardizi’s main motivation for writing the history of Zayn-al-Akhbar.
As the historian’s aim of writing history is reflected in the structure of his text, and Gardizi’s narrative of historical events is a meaningful narration that forms a distinct result in the mind of the reader and promotes, confirms and documents a political thought, the present researchers sought to discover and decipher the meaning and political thought underlying the narrative structure of the history of Zayn-al-Akhbar. To achieve the purpose of the research, Gerard Genette's theory of narrative time was used in harmony with the atmosphere of Gardizi’s history. In this method, the highlighting elements of the narrative time were selected and finally, parts of the text, which were prominent in terms of time, were examined regarding the ideas. As a result, two vital elements of the narrative structure of Gardizi, namely “decline narrative poetics” and “narrative interface loops” were proposed and explained. The analysis of these two elements indicated that the main aim of Gardizi while writing Zina al-Akhbar was to motivate the Ghaznavids to regain control of Khorasan, and his motivation for writing a historiography was to discover the root causes of the decline of various governments to find a way to save the Ghaznavids’ reign from destruction and revive it to the height of Mahmoud Ghaznavi’s rule.