فاطمه عزیزمحمدی

The highlighted purpose of the present study lies on the traces of Hermeticism in John Donne’s celebrated poem, An Anatomy of the World. Since Donne was one of the seventeenth-century poets and a highly significant poet in the metaphysical school of poetry, his poems explore the realms of philosophy, theology, popular science, and also the idea of Platonic love in his love poetry. Hermeticism is an ancient idea which focuses on spiritual, philosophical, and magical tradition. This school of thought concentrates on the path of spiritual growth. It believes that human beings return to a state of unity by the spiritual journey. With reference to this idea, this study explores the elements of Hermeticism in the lines of An Anatomy of the World in order to grasp the idea of spiritual journey and unification in that Donne in this poem centers on a profound quest and spiritual journey of the soul that goes to heaven.

The present study aims to study "Alienation" in “The Comfort of Strangers” a novel by Ian Mc-Ewan. It attempts to work out the negative and destructive aftermath of alienation in the protagonists of the novel. The research on the mentioned term is fulfilled as per the theories of Melvin Seaman. Ian Russell Mc-Ewan is one of the many examples, who depicted the mentioned element masterfully in his works, specifically in this novel. He goes beyond man’s expectations to show his readers the smashing consequences of human estrangement from the self and society in intelligence and function. Alienation is a venerable concept, with its roots going back to Roman law, where it was a legal term used to denote the act of transferring property. After World War II, when societal complexity started its increasingly accelerated rate of change, and the first signals of post-modernity were perceived by the intellectual elite, alienation slowly became part of the intellectual scene. Melvin Seaman (1918), a theorist which made a momentous modern and post-modern points of the view regarding "Alienation" after Marx and Hegel, was one of the first in the 1960s to develop an alienation scale to measure degrees and varieties of alienation

The aim of the present study is to show how language and narration function in the selected works by Lydia Davis based on Blanchot’s theory. Lydia Davis is an American writer known for her idiosyncratic and extremely short stories often characterized by clear observations of mostly material and daily events. One aspect that Blanchot points out is the spacing among a literary text. This spacing or distance refers to how a literary text resists interpretation and reaching the singular truth by the reader. The more, the reader attempts to understand the text, the further the meaning slips. As a result, a relation between the text and the reader is created. The present essay shows how Davis experiences death or becoming through her writings. The author shows her sacrifice and becoming the other in her short stories; in Meat, My Husband, Davis becomes no one and every one at the same time; she becomes the wife, the cook, and the meal but she is not any of them as well. In Jack in the Country, Davis reflects the field where no transcendental being is detected. Davis’s stories manifest Blanchot’s theory of language and narration in which the author is engaged with dying process, yet ironically neither he dies nor she is reborn. The aim of the present research is to show how Davis experiences the dying process and becoming the other.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate the role of becoming through political and social factors among the main character’s changing identity in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. The researcher intends to depict the effects of political factors on the re-territorialization and territorialization of the main character through the framework of Deleuze’s theory. The current essay focuses on No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe to discover how becoming and transformation of identity take place throughout the novel and how the main character of the novel is going through constant change and becoming which are the result of different forces. Moreover, the researcher intends to investigate the character’s desires that result in the becoming process of identity deriving from social and capitalist factors in society. Since Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctive definition of literature investigates how minor literature is produced in the dominant narratives of major literature, it can critically assist the present research to discuss that Achebe prepares the ground for indigenous, anticolonial voices in his novel No Longer at Ease. It can be concluded that the main character of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease is in flux due to different forces, and his identity goes through constant becoming.

The present study aims to investigate speech acts in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles based on John Austin’s theory. In the present research, the researcher attempts to investigate female characters’ speech acts in the selected novel at three levels of locutionary act, illocutionary act, perlocutionary act. Austin theories have been published in the book titled How to Do Things with Words which introduces speech acts. The philosophers believes that language is used to display the world. In other words, it shows what exists and what does not exist. The same mechanism can be traced and studied in Tess’s speech acts. It might be claimed that for Tess, the language is not the means of transferring meanings. It is a tool through which their psyche, identity, and the course of their life can be constructed. Using linguistic theories in analyzing the selected work can both depict new aspects of the novel and give insights to the linguists. It can be concluded that the speech acts are the reason why Tess fails in the society and have tragic destiny and the link between the characters’ language and psyche would be detected.

The aim of this research paper is to study the notion of power and other related concepts devised by Foucault in the novel of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Foucault's theory of power suggests that power is omnipresent, that is, power can be found in all social interactions. In fact, that power is interwoven in all social relations. Moreover, a discourse is made by the government in which identity of characters does not remain fixed and autonomous; truth, as a metaphysical concept, which is supposed to exist as a definite reality becomes a mere game by power relations. The most important aspect that can be seen in this novel is the role of discourse and power in society. Since the novel is set in Jazz age and it coincides with rise of new ideology called American dream, it could be concluded that the characters are influenced by the discourse in which they are living. In fact, the ideology of American dream controls their lifestyle – particularly, the main character – Jay – who has changed himself from a proletarian into a member of bourgeoisie society. Therefore, the identity of the characters is not a fixed concept since how they have gone through process of changing influenced by power relationship which can be seen within them. Moreover, the concept of truth is distorted and unstable in this novel.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the concept of culture in the collection of short stories entitled as Lovely,Deep, Dark and I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates through Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodern culture.The portraits of women,men,and children show Oates's compassion for the human life in the modern society.According to Jameson,postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense,as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture,death, and terror.Lovely,Deep,Dark and I Am No One You Know represent the spot of postmodern man’s struggle with his background and real culture.The stories are associated with an avant-garde movement in which nature is gone and this feature can be seen in all collections of the stories.They create a deconstructed condition in which there is no direct relation between social beings.The setting of the stories reminds the postmodern society which is the metaphor for the current American society with a revolutionized culture.The place that the authors have created in the stories is devoid of natural life and happiness.It is a fabricated place in which the people are programmed like robots.Throughout the stories,the authors represent technological pessimism which refers to the sense of disappointment,anxiety,and menace in subjects due to technological issues.The researcher contributes to identify the main cause of Oates’s attack to her characters in these collections.The main purpose of research paper finds the cause of Oates’s message in postmodern world

Alienation is a significant phenomenon that forms the subject of many psychological, sociological, literary, philosophical, and even physiological studies. Alienation is among the most critical justifications bringing about the internal and external pains and sufferings in life. Emerging as a result of war, persecution, famine, and ruin, alienation terminates unfortunately in suffering, isolation, and sometimes critical disasters. In literature, the alienated protagonist is usually a frequent figure in much of the ancient and contemporary fiction. The main issue of alienation refers to a destructive consequence of getting, or feeling of getting separated from people that one is living with them. It refers to become useless, or to feel becoming useless in the field of social relations and interactions. It is the outcome of becoming alienated, so that one thinks that no longer anyone needs him / her, and / or his / her services. Aiming to review the theme of alienation, and focusing on Melvin Seaman’s concepts of alienation in general, the present paper, in particular, will review the manifestation of the term alienation in “The Child in Time,” and “The Comfort of Strangers,” that are both the well-known novels written by Ian Russell McEwan, one of the greatest British novelists and screenwriters of the twentieth century. By describing the disastrous aftermath of the alienation, this article tries to alarm the man regarding the catastrophic and destructive consequences of the alienation in the life of the existing societies.

In the present essay, the researchers aim at studying two famous novels "The Crossing" and "The Road" in the light of Deleuzian geocritical concepts such as: nomad, rhizome, smooth space, and war machine. Studying space and place in American literature is a new trend. Space and landscape, considered as smooth space and striated space in Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, are significantly highlighted in American literature. By drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's view of rhizome, which does not follow any plans or structures, the novel can be regarded as a rhizomatic structure in which the characters with nomadic existence move freely in a smooth space- a space without an explicit beginning and a clear destination. Portraying American space and landscape is a dominant theme in Cormac McCarthy's novels, including "The Crossing" and "The Road", in which the characters move from a rooted life to a nomadic life. Through examining these two novels, this paper is going to investigate the movement of nomadic characters in the smooth space of the postmodern world. Moreover, through exploring the relationship between literature, space, and identity, drawing on the philosophical ideas of Deleuz and Guatari, this paper is going to expose in what extent the representation of spaces in literature can reflect and shape cultural and national identities.

The aim of the present study is to investigate McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses which revolves around the relationship between John and nature with a focus on the horses. Different aspects of the novel including social, cultural, and spiritual ecology are studied. In ecocriticism, the otherness of nature is one of the main themes that signifies the gap between humanity and nature that eventually results in the destruction of the environment and nature. This study also shows how the main characters, John and Alejandra, are linked in the novel which turns the present study to an ecofeminist research. The novel mostly depicts the image of John wandering in nature and searching for his identity, to be punished. Therefore, the researcher scrutinizes the link between John, nature and Alejandra and tries to examine how the novel shows similar attitudes towards both women and nature in All the Pretty Horses.