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The English narrative of "the adventure of Hajji Baba of Ispahan"[1] seems to be one of the controversial literal texts for the Iranian readership with social criticism interest. This paper intends, not to refute or redeem the validity claims of this historical actualized reading or to offer an alternative, but, to put it into perspective of a spectrum of possibilities and to show how and under what contingencies, the text can actualize some other rival and salient interpretations that reverberate our contemporary horizons of social reality. Using the Ricoeurian theories of literature by applying his theory of "surplus of meaning" on the text we suggest how "The World of Text " has the potential to have different readings and in the next step, by analyzing "The World of Reader" and its dialectical relations with the world of text, we exhibit the important role of "reading" as the act of Self Reflection.

The non-linear order of revelations is often considered by many scholars to signify lack of coherence, disunity, and fragmentariness. It seems that 'coherence' and the related terms have veiled a significant linguistic feature of the Qur’an, namely, the non-linear nature of revelations, which might be used to make a distinction between ordinary and Quranic discourse. We will argue that to unveil the non-linearity, we should consider revelations in relation to God who reveals Himself in language not as an ordinary speaker whose speech is limited to a certain context, with a beginning and an end. We should not expect God to speak like a man. The Qur’an, thus, is seen here as a non-temporal, non-linear text that reflects its divine origin, by systematically destructing the spacio-temporal context and the linear order of language.

The present article aims to investigate the appropriateness of the concepts introduced by modern sciences of the sign, particularly by structural and poststructural approaches, to studying God-man communication in the Quran. Such a conception of communication can be described in terms of two models, namely, communication as sending and communication as reading. These two concepts which represent an uncompromising dualism in the modern approaches to the sign, come to a compromise in the religious discourse, leading us not merely to conceiving a powerful God but also to a powerful man.

This paper introduces ‘translational narratology’ (TN) as an eclectic conceptual model for studying translated narrative texts. As a source-based theory, TN investigates the status of three planes of the original narratology in translation: ‘story’, ‘text’, and ‘narration’. In fact, as an eclectic model, TN aims to set a theoretical foundation for both the original narrative texts and their corresponding texts in translation. However, the process for the original writer and the translator is a little bit different: the writer usually begins with the elements of the ‘story’ plane, and then comes to the elements of ‘narration’ and ‘text’ planes, simultaneously; the translator, as a reader, begins with the ‘text/narration’, and then comes to the ‘story’ plane. The former is bottom-up; the latter is top-down. The translator may have nothing to do with the ‘story’ plane; however, he/she may deal with this plane in the process of reading, understanding, and, preferably, translating. Some theorists postulate that the original narrative models have made no room for the presence of the translator as the main agent of the translated narrative fiction. This paper sets the theoretical scene for the translator’s discursive presence in the translated narrative texts.