Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, Arts and Humanities

Abstract In the early centuries(A.H), Persian Muslim thinkers were proceeding(Their Philosophy) through inauguration some sort of mysticism in order to grasp an appreciation a Persian perception from religious concepts, and in that respect Imam Mohammad Al Ghazali was one of the most influential among those philosophers. One of the mystical experiences that he accounts which shall be a way in which the truth is taken is samaa,(singing and dancing) which he later talks in detail about the conditions, types, states of the listeners and its levels in his book Ahya al-Uloom al-Din. However This particular and mystical experience which to some extent is a way of perceiving truth is different and far away from the course of Western discipline;yet, Hans George Gadamer, a contemporary philosopher who critiques subjectivism in order to give presentation of a new approach to ancient philosophy, by delivering an expressivity of what will be happened when art is going to be understood tries to explain how art can be figured out through the art of theater. Though the concept of art in the modern sense has not been a problematic matter to sixth century Muslim jurists, but the purpose of this essay, which is based on Gadamer's hermeneutic account and performed in a descriptive and analytical comparison of these aesthetic experiences with each other, is to try to grasp a new reading of one of the most prominent Persian thinkers Compared to a contemporary philosopher; Because fulfillment of cognition is always based on analogy and comparison.

Abstract Using a psychoanalytical approach, this paper studies Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double to have a better understanding of the main character’s inner complexities. Goliadkin, the main character, is a government clerk who gradually separates from reality. The argument in this research is based on Sigmund Freud’s theories. An important cause of his disruption of identity can be figured out through Freud’s theory about the two primary drives. According to him, there are two types of drive that control every individual’s psychic apparatus. The life drive influences his strategies for surviving. Goliadkin’s feelings of insufficiency cause the death drive to thrive; consequently, the creation of an aggressive double follows. Also, Freud’s theory of Oedipus complex is important in the discussion about the character’s dualistic tendencies, his abnormal way of dealing with social circumstances and his fantasies about love. Moreover, Goliadkin’s behavior and thoughts are psychoanalytically studied according to the symptoms of melancholia.

Abstract Combining the traditional teaching approach with the new audio-visual teaching methods can, apart from smoothing out the learning process, meet the hitherto less-considered objectives in the emotional area. The present interdisciplinary is of an applied characteristic in objective, and descriptive-evaluative in nature and method. The statistical sample includes all the 11-grade students in secondary schools in Torbat-e Jám from among whom 60 were selected within a cluster sampling framework. The measurement was done by means of screening the puppet play "The Legend of the Snake-Shouldered" (Afsanehe-Mardoosh) in teaching the lesson "Kaveh the Justice Seeker" (Kaveh-e Dadkhah) in the Persian textbook of the 11th grade of the secondary schools and a questionnaire which was organized into three categories: Category A, the completion and stability of the learning process in the cognitive and skill areas in teaching; category B, the emotional, motivational, and modeling areas; and category C, questions that assess the film's audio-visual capabilities in the course of learning the lesson. The data were analyzed through T-single sample. The results obtained show that the screening of the film has a high impact on students' desire to and interest in familiarity with the Shahnameh, gaining Iranian identity, modeling the characters in the Shahnameh. The greatest effect is on the students' desire to use pure Iranian names and words. The film screening has a high impact on the completion and stability of students' learning and skills; but the audio-visual effects of the film are not of high quality.

Abstract Setting in literature has long been a prominent issue in literary evaluations. The systematic concern with setting and space dates back to the time Aristotle first discussed the concept of "spectacle" in his Poetics, deeming it essential to the formation of a proper tragedy. Today, spatial studies frequently acknowledge Charles Dickens as one of the greatest observers of the operation of the city in the novel. His foremost novel, Great Expectations, depicts modernity and the social hardships of the time in the form of a love story bringing the plot in close proximity with Morteza Moshfeq Kazemi’s novel Tehran-e Makhuf .This article focuses on the scrutinizing of the creation of social spaces in these two novels through the utilization of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as an active production of each society. The concern with space and city and their function is further reflected in the section “City, Space, and Society,," followed in more detail in the section “The City.” In the section “Society, and the Background of the Author,” and the one after, “The Portrayal of the Two Cities and Social Space,” the cities envisioned are observed apropos of the image created, its relationship to the narrative, and social relations. Consequently it is proposed that the cities produced by these two novels are not essentially objects, but rather, the city is a product of that society-- dominating and producing the society itself through its active production by the witnesses,

Abstract In her poetry Pravin Etesami (1907-1941) has freely borrowed from multiple sources, including Aesop's and La Fontaine’s Fables, her father’s translations of foreign literatures, as well as Persian classical poetry. However, the resulting work remained distinctly her own. A number of critical studies have investigated the relationship between Etesami's poem "God's Weaver" and various texts that inspired or influenced it. Such studies argue that the poem “is based” on a translation into Persian of an editorial by Arthur Brisbane. However, the present paper examines “God’s Weaver” in relation to Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Etesami's yet unexplored creative reception of Whitman. The paper ends with suggestions on revisiting the relation between tradition and modernity in Persian poetry as well as the relation between Persian poetry and world literature.

Abstract By writing Germinal in the 19th century, Emil Zola brought the working class into the novel writing world as the motive and the hero of the stories for the first time in the French literature history. He had a significant impact on the writers who constantly wrote about revolution. Maxim Gorky is also among those who had taken this into sober consideration in his work, Mother. This comparative study aims to discover the concept of revolution in both of the above-mentioned works. The chains of events in both works illuminate for us the necessary elements for a revolution to occur. Poverty, as the main reason along with awareness, leadership, and sacrifice as the main factors are among the motives of progress with revolution in both novels. Such similarities are separated when it comes to characterization and realism. In the end the both authors give hope to the fighters by depicting a better future for them.

Abstract In this study, in order to investigate how the poetry is connected to a place or, in a more unequivocal way, to the space, the patriotic poems of Mehdi Akhavan-Sales and Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati were studied and the analysis of the homeland’s image in their poetry was conducted employing an interdisciplinary approach utilizing the theoretical foundations and the research method of geocriticism. the analysis shows that: 1. in the poems of Akhavan-Sales and Al-Bayati, the home land is a space that essentially holds a cultural and anthropomorphic representation, not merely a passive scene and a piece of land or a fragment of natural geography with mountains and water and sea and plain; the home land = place + human. 2. Their view toward the homeland is sometimes romantic: when the poet is so passionate about the homeland—and whatever belongs to it—that he cannot tell them apart, or when he recognizes his helpless and forlorn homeland as “the leafless garden” or “grave land” or “stone land city” with a deep sadness. What we find as the homeland in Akhavan-Sales and Al-Bayati Poetry is an image, the homeland’s image. 4. The form and the variation of this image is not identical in their poem; the homeland image in Al-Bayati’s poem is a broad and flowing presentation, while in Akhavan-Sales’ poem it is not that broad and when he talks about the homeland, he only refers to Iran.

Abstract Imagology in Comparative Literature: Knowing the Self from the Other's Perspective
 
Abstract:
 
The present paper examines imagology in comparative literature. Imagology is one of the most important and rooted areas in comparative literature since it is the foundation of comparative literature in France. Impression and influence which form the beginning of the French views of foreign literature depend on the pictorial knowledge of the other. An important part of this knowledge belongs to the culture of the "observer" and the ways in which he or she looks at another's image and in this view involves the culture in which he or she has inhabited. Thus, the present paper deals with the exotic images and literary stereotypes that have been created through the perspective of another. In the end, the paper draws on research on travel writing in the field of comparative literature by analyzing several travelogues. The paper will demonstrate that, at times, there has been misunderstandings about the subject in Iran. By analyzing and critiquing these examples, we emphasize that not every research in which there is a comparing of images belongs in the field of comparative literature.
 
Keywords: Comparative Literature, Exoticism, Imagology, Other, Self, Stereotype, Travelogue.

Abstract Persian and Russian socialist realist literary works can be comparatively studied for their differences in language as well as the historical encounter between literatures of the two countries. The goal of this paper is to draw on the French school of comparative literature to study the influence of the Russian socialist realism on Persian literature with a focus on four famous Persian and Russian novels, that is, Maxim Gorki's Mother (1906), Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1936), Bozorg Alavi's Her Eyes (1952) and Ahmad Mahmoud's Neighbors (1974). According to the results, the most important elements of socialist realism in the two Persian novels are: attention to the masses and the rise of the lower class, partisanship, typification, metamorphosis of the characters and apostasy, elements that did not exist in Persian novels before the emergence of Tudeh Party of Iran and the familiarity of Iranian writers with leftist ideas.

Abstract One of the areas of research in comparative literature is the study of the relationship between literature and cinema. This research analyses the adaptation process of “Lonesome Trees” (by Houshang Moradi Kermani) in its cinematic adaptation (directed by Saeed Ebrahimifar), from the perspective of literary adaptation. The goal of this paper is to study and analyze the changes that have taken place during the adaptation process. The theoretical framework of this research is based on A Theory of Adaptation by Linda Hutcheon. Hutcheon believes that adaptation is an active and meaning making process in which the adapter interacts with the text as a reader. The result of this reading is a creative interpretation which is the product of the adapter’s mindset. Therefore, loyalty is not the evaluation criterion for a cinematic adaptation. In this paper, we demonstrate how and why, as a director and an adaptor, Saeed Ebrahimifar creates a unique narrative independent from Moradi Kermani’s “Lonesome Trees” a work which has significant differences from the original text.

Abstract The present paper is comprised of two parts, a main part and a subsidiary one. The main part deals with the critical study of the development of the discipline of comparative literature in Iran from the start to the present time. The subsidiary part includes an appendix i.e., the University of Tehran's curriculum of the comparative literature in 1350s. The present paper tries to show that comparative literature has never been established and taught in a sustained and systematic manner based on the theories of comparative literature. It has been deprived of the primary necessities such as independent departments, a proper curriculum, scientific associations, professional journals and expert professors. In different periods of time, the nature and the meaning of comparative literature in Iran has been troubled with a number of misunderstandings from theoretical frameworks and methodology to a lack of familiarity with new theories and approaches. Since everywhere in the world comparative literature involves teamwork (comprised of experts in comparative literature as well as scholars of national and foreign literatures), to get rid of the present dead-end, more than providing what is essential to the discipline, experts of the comparative literature and related disciplines aught to design a curriculum with an interdisciplinary nature and teaching would not be limited to the presence of experts from one or two departments.

Abstract One Thousand and One Nights is of great significance among many different nations in a way that many works in various genres have been inspired by it.  Each of these works has artistically recreated the structure and content of the original story based on the author's views towards life and psychosocial needs. The present paper is a descriptive analytical research and offers a comparative study of the play Shahrzad by Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987) and the screenplay Shahrzad (the Woman of One Thousand and One Nights) by Tahmineh Milani (1960-) based on Erich Fromm's (1900-1980) theory of personality. The findings indicate that according to Fromm's theory of character, character orientations in both works are mostly of Receptive type, even though Shahrzad has both Receptive and Marketing orientations, the Receptive orientation dominates the Marketing one. Tawfiq al-Hakim's play has a philosophical and ontological viewpoint and searches for the discovery of truth by combining pure wisdom and insight (heart) and, in this respect, is different from Milani's narrative. However, both these works have similarities in their subject matters, themes and their central characters. The king's journey is fundamentally different in these works, in a way that Shahriar's journey in Tawfiq al-Hakim's play is philosophical -mystical in nature, while in Milani's screenplay it is a literal, ordinary trip.

Abstract Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications, César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva. New York: Routledge, 2015. £24.99. ISBN: 9780415702683. Persian translation by Masoud Farahmand-far and Roshanak Akrami, Siahroud Publishing in Tehran, Iran.
The Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications by César Domínguez ( Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Haun Saussy (Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago) and Darío Villanueva (Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Routledge (2015), was translated in Persian by Masoud Farahmandfar and Roshanak Akrami and Published by Siahroud Publishing in Tehran. In this article, the book is introduced and then, with an intensive discussion about the challenges of comparative literature studies and activities in this field in Iran, based on the book, suggestions and solutions are presented.

Abstract  
Shakespeare, Persia and the East is a slim book of Comparative Literature. Its main emphasis is on English and Persian literatures and cultures. Without doubt this is the most comprehensive book which is written in this area so far. Shakespeare, Persia and the East, as the title signifies, is about Shakespeare's knowledge and interest in Persia and the East. The book has an introduction, an index (a selection of translations of the works of Shakespeare in several Eastern languages), a bibliography, and an index of authors. It consists of five chapters: 1) a brief biography of Shakespeare, 2) the Tudors and the Safavids,3) Travelers to Persia and Commercial Relations, 4) Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton and 5) Persian and other Eastern references in Shakespeare's plays. The first four initial chapters serve as an introduction to the last chapter which is the most important and somehow innovative part of the book.