episteme

Hooshang Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab, as a very influential novel in the Iranian history of novel writing, has drawn attentions from plethora of critics with different approaches and attitudes. The present article draws on the ideas and concepts introduced by deconstructive theoreticians to investigate the nuances and delicate contradictions the novel offers about the nature of power relations. The article mainly centers around the opposition between the binary of author/reader, how it is reversed or subverted in the novel, and the way it is extended to the novels’ involvement with power relations which may be representative of the general social and power structure of particular historical era in Iran. To avoid the major critique against deconstruction's abstract armchair theorizing, the present article would also draw upon some of the well-known ideas and concepts used by famous writers in power relation namely Louis Althusser and Foucault to move the analysis beyond the text to the social sphere.

Extensive interest in the field of comparative literary studies emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century with the main focus of comparing similarities in perspectives and variations in beliefs which congregate or rupture world views, representing human thought. It is the objective of the present study to analyze and compare the components which yield to the New Historical analysis of two literary pieces to discover the existing nuances related to the artists’ socio-cultural milieu and to illustrate how this mirrors personality development in their poetry. For this means, two poems have been chosen: “I Am a Black Woman” from Mari Evans, a contemporary African-American poetess, and “Farewell” from Forough Farrokhzad, the influential, modernist Iranian artist. Results will indicate how the views of the two poets differ from one another in regard to the relationship between identity formation and the role that episteme plays in this process. Inevitably, there will be concern about the influence of zeitgeist in imagery production since literary work is the doings of historical-socio-cultural discourses as much as creative imagination.