درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The purpose of the present study is to discuss Girard’s imitative desire in Pinter’s Betrayal, and Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. René Noël Théophile Girard (1923-2015), a French literary critic and philosopher, has elaborated on the idea of imitative desire. He discusses that our desires are not autonomous, but we borrow our desires from others. Since human beings think their drives do belong to them, the object of desire or the desired love becomes an issue of rivalry among the rivals. If such a dissention is not resolved, chaos will result. To solve it, an object, namely a human being is to be sacrificed to restore the unity of a nation. Since women characters are marginalized in patriarchal societies, they are mostly sacrificed in the selected plays. Sometimes, double mediation occurs for those who imitate others’ desires. That is, their desires are copied by others at the same time. In other words, man sacrifices out of his imitative desire to engender power and attraction. Therefore, the male characters in the selected plays covet objects/other human beings belonging to others. This act might cost other people’s lives and metamorphosing female characters to mere objects prone to sacrifice and commodification.

Justin Kurzel’s film, Macbeth (2015) demonstrates a large number of Christian symbols and images. This comparative study seeks the relation between the Protestantism discourse of the Elizabethan era, and the religious visualizations and images used in Kurzel’s movie including the Cross, paintings, costumes and mise-en-scene. By applying Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation to exploring the film, the meaning of these images can be found through contextualization. How Kurzel creates a new way to visualize the main socio-historical ideas of the original text will be examined. Stam’s model of intertextual dialogism helps a better understanding of how these images relate to the original setting. While Kurzel features an authentic medieval Scottish setting, he employs new visual ways to convey the socio-cultura context of the Shakespearean Macbeth. Concerning Macbeth (2015), it could be argued that there are still similar examples of the justification of violence and war in our contemporary era. By voicing the marginalized Macbeths, Justin Kurzel relates to similar unjust conditions in the contemporary time and place.

The present research aims at investigating the social and local relevance of the process of self-authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW. The novel imagines a complex network of relationships ranging from individual association with occupation to friendships and families, and to participation in local and public oriented interactions, all bring individuals to experience  multiplicity of identifications with others in yet more complex ways.With regard to density and complexity of overlapping social relations this essay  indicates how self-authenticity is a social process determined by confirmation with and from other’s as well as one’s own experiment as means and results of social interactions while, also, acting as a local process operating in practice and in relation to local relevance.The study interrogates to what extent locality acts as a firm framework of reference in construction and maintenance of self-authenticity and identity formation in the current context of increasing global dynamics. It follows the concept of critical cosmopolitanism that assumes individual’s capacity for self-reflexivity as integral to formation of self-authenticity  and necessitates the emergence of a cosmopolitan consciousness that views self-authenticity as dependent on situationally-relevant conditions of time and place rather than on pre-give social patterns viewed as  absolute entities of specific authority and autonomy.

The present study, through considering Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory and scaffolding strategy, investigates the use of scaffolding strategy in a language institute and explores the effectiveness of this method on EFL learners' reading achievement of short stories. The researchers adopted a quasi-experimental research design, and the sample of the study consisted of 60 EFL learners.  Including 30 students, the experimental group benefited an implementation of scaffolding strategy and related techniques. The control group (including 30 students) benefited from no implementation of scaffolding strategy and related techniques. An interactive communicative language method of teaching was used for the control group. Moreover, a related questionnaire was used to explore the EFL learners' attitude of the experimental group on the mentioned strategy.  The reading achievement was measured using a pre-test and a post-test for both the experimental and control groups. The obtained results were analyzed descriptively, the statistical manifestation of which is presented in figures. Items are elaborated separately through tables, and two independent sample t-tests were carried out for the revelation of the result.  The data were analyzed using t-test, eta square, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). This study concluded that the employment of scaffolding teaching strategy had a significant impact on the improvement of Iranian EFL learners’ reading achievement of short stories and the students' attitude towards the mentioned strategy was completely positive. Also, the findings revealed that there was not a significant difference between the male and female students' performance.