درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper examines Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot by the five semiotic codes of the French literary critic Roland Barthes introduced in his renowned work S/Z, to show that the novel is a ‘writerly’ rather than a ‘readerly’ text. The paper defines what Barthes means by the text of the writerly and then attempts to see if the selected novel yields to this sort of interpretation. Since the novel has been categorized as both modernist and postmodernist by prominent literary critics, it can be a proper case to be examined as a writerly text. The paper shows that the codes of semantic, symbolic and cultural which produce the writerly text are at work in this novel whereas the codes of the hermeneutic and proairetic which are concerned with the conventional realist novels are marginalized or even absent. The article examines the writerly text makers of the author role, the theme of biography, the notion of literary criticism and the narration of the novel, referring to the codes creating the writerly text. The paper finally concludes that the semiotic sophistication and innovations in the narrative act of the novel stem from the categories discussed in the essay, ending in the construction of a highly sophisticated writerly text.

This article sketches the application of Wendy B. Faris’s primary features of narrative techniques in magical realist fiction in the selected novels The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990) by the British novelist Louis de Bernières and I Stared at the Night of the City (2008) by Kurdish novelist Bakhtiyar Ali, while keeping an eye on Chanady’s and Hegerfeldt’s perspectives where relevant. The focus is on the authors' use of Faris's features; namely the phenomenal world, unsettling doubts, merging-realms, irreducible elements and disruptions of time, space and identity, to depict their war-torn communities. These novelists have manipulated these characteristics from their diverse viewpoints. Despite their different cultural backgrounds and intellectual perspectives, both novelists attempt to convey a sense of reality by exploring the enigmatic nature of human behaviour and psychology, politics, and life in general. In this study, the researchers aim to elucidate the significance of these features in the selected novels to demonstrate the dilemma of war-stricken communities. Essentially, the researchers seek to unravel how these literary elements help in representing the complex and multifaceted nature of societies grappling with the impacts of conflict. The authors' manipulation of Faris's features becomes a lens through which they examine and articulate the intricate realities of war-stricken communities in their respective works.

This paper’s aim is to present a comparative study of the poetry of the American James Arlington Wright and the Persian Sohrab Sepehri in order to examine the main ground of convergence in their poetry, which is epiphany or sudden revelation of truth. This revelation is mostly informed by intuitive, as opposed to logical, thinking and a mystical union with nature and natural elements. The poetic art of both Sepehri and Wright precisely consists in reminding the readers of the necessity of redefining and reconstructing the self through an awakening based on spiritual moments. In both Sepehri and Wright, the magic moments are presented through epiphany whose mission is to alert the soul to the absence/presence of what matters, and to the ways of dealing with the problem.

Positive psychology constitutes an approach to the study of human behavior that examines the extent to which individuals’ affective factors are likely to ameliorate their life conditions and their performance in diverse academic and occupational settings. The present study strived to determine the degree to which university learners’ psychological well-being, as their main positive psychology factor, was influenced by their grit, emotion regulation, and academic engagement. To this end, the researchers used convenience sampling to select 221 English Language and Literature learners and 178 Persian Language and Literature learners from among the learners of a university in Tabriz (Iran) as the participants. Second, they administered the English and Persian versions of the psychological well-being scale, grit scale, emotion regulation scale, and academic engagement scale of the study to the learners of English and Persian respectively. Finally, the researchers utilized SPSS 25 and Amos 24 to analyze the obtained data. Based on the results, while English learners’ grit, emotion, regulation, and academic engagement significantly predicted their psychological well-being, Persian learners’ grit, and academic engagement constituted significant predictors of their psychological well-being in their academic setting. Moreover, English learners’ psychological well-being was significantly higher than that of Persian learners. The results may have certain implications for professor educators, syllabus designers, and professors in the context of Iran.