تاریخ بهروزرسانی: 1403/06/15
سیروس امیری
دانشکده زبان و ادبیات / گروه زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی و زبان شناسی
پایاننامههای کارشناسیارشد
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The Identity Development of the Protagonist as a Female Emigrant: A Psychological Analysis of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn
1401This study examines the psychological changes and identity development of the protagonist in Colm Tóibín's novel Brooklyn (2009) through the lens of the migration process. Drawing upon psychological concepts such as intrapsychic conflict, refuelling, temporal continuity, subjective-selfsameness, second individuation of adolescence, and ethnic conscience, proposed by Salman Akhtar, an influential psychoanalyst and author, in his book Identity and Immigration (1999), this research explores the protagonist's journey as the protagonist relocates from Ireland to America. Other related concepts such as diaspora, displacement, diaspora identity, host population, and ethnicity that are embedded within the context of migration, are frequently referred to and discussed. By analysing key moments in the narrative, the study reveals the protagonist’s psychoanalytical struggles and the subsequent outcomes of sacrifice and reward, which contribute to her personal growth in the context of migration. The study highlights the protagonist's navigation of the tensions between her understanding of the homeland and the promises of a new country, leading to a more developed sense of self-discovery and self-fulfilment. By examining the psychological mechanisms involved in migration, this study sheds light on the potential effects on identity development. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities and costs associated with carving an accomplished identity in the face of migration.
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Words without Borders: The Politics and Poetics of Born-Translated Anglophone Middle Eastern Novel
1397The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of existence in the contemporary age of rapid communication of ideas has incited a renewed interest in studies of world literature. This is particularly significant with reference to Middle Eastern authors who have tried their hands, more than any time before, in writing works of fiction that address a global audience. Accordingly, the present study investigates the politics and poetics of born-translated Anglophone novels composed by select Middle Eastern authors in the last two decades. The subject is developed via the theoretical framework developed by contemporary critics of world literature including Damrosch, Casanova, Cheah, and Walkowitz. The category of “poetics” addresses issues related to the specific strategies and mechanisms, novelistic techniques, and rhetorical methods employed by these authors which identify their texts as instances of born-translated fiction. The “politics” addresses issues such as the choice of the subject matter, the depiction of social class and gender, audience and readership, the representation of space, and subjectivity. Through detailed readings of Kae Bahar’s Letters from a Kurd (2014), Sumia Sukkar’s The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War (2013), Elif shafak’s Honor (2012), Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2008), Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Laleh Kadivi’s The Walking (2013), and Prochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion (2014), it is shown that these narratives employ similar techniques to make their narratives translatable and appealing to a global audience. While the study articulates major and minor differences in their authors’ approaches to and portrayals of their homeland, it also demonstrates the existence of a set of common formal, structural, and even thematic resemblances that exist among these diverse, sometimes incongruous, texts. The findings of the study suggest that these texts, through practicing partial fluency and self-translation, articulate themselves as global narratives at a time when the thirst for exoticism is dramatically heightened. The findings also suggest that the choice of the subject matter and the portrayals of the characters and the homeland are under the influence of factors beyond the authors’ personal preferences: factors like the demands of the global market, geopolitical determinants, and the critical historical moment in which these narratives are produced. While the majority of the selected narratives preserve a degree of originality by problematizing the stereotypical representations of the Middle East and the Middle Easterner established by other diasporic novels from the Middle East, two of them passively and uncritically reproduce those same clichés.
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Deformity of Afrikaners' Identity in Andre Brink Selected Post-Apartheid Novels
1397The present thesis meticulously examines André Brink’s post-apartheid novels, Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand, based on the premises of disability studies which is a sub category of medical humanities. Medical Humanities as a multidisciplinary field of research focuses on the connection between medicine and humanities and social sciences. One of its subcategories, which is the researcher’s primary focus, is Disabilities Studies in which deformity and disability is viewed as a social construct rather an ordinary physical flaw. Disability studies and literature illuminate how disability as an identity constructive factor will be presented in literature and will define the identities of literary characters. The Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand capture issues of democratic South Africa. A new-born South Africa where blacks rule and Afrikaners have become a marginalized minority. These two novels are replete with deformed and abnormal characters who are symbolically presented to capture the oppressed and marginalized identity of Afrikaners in the new democratic South Africa. Disability studies view disability not as an exclusive phenomenon but as an issue which roots back to other discriminations like feminism, racism and ethnic discrimination.
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The Politics and Poetics of Iranican Humor in Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent, Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects and Siamak Baniameri’s The Iranican Dream
1397The present research is an investigation of novels and memoirs written by the writers of the Iranian diaspora community in the United States. On the one hand, this research uses an Orientalist approach to argue that Iran and Iranians have always been viewed from a colonialist perspective which considers their culture, history, traditions, and even the country’s geographical location as inferior. Whereas such a Westernized approach considers Iranian identity as underdeveloped, inflexible, inferior, and profoundly influenced by superstition, it deems the other side of this dichotomy, i.e., Western identity, reliable, powerful, logical, and superior. Accordingly, this research seeks to evince how Iranian-American writers have endeavored to show their western readers the predicament of being Iranian-American through their narratives of disillusionment and alienation. On the other hand, this study also draws attention to the way the selected writers have used humor as a medium through which they can voice their concerns. Using Superiority, Incongruity, and Relief theories of humor to analyze such neglected aspects of these works as humor, politics, as well as the relationship between humor and double consciousness, this study will shed some light on certain aspects of the Iranian-American (Iranican) identity. The works selected for this research include Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas, Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porochista Khakpour, and The Iranican Dream by Siamack Baniameri. Moreover, this study will analyze the above-mentioned works in order to investigate the use of Iranican humor in the narratives of Iranian-American writers. The rhetoric of these works and the unique type of humor used in them help us understand the alienated identity and the double consciousness of an Iranican. They will also help us realize how humor is used as a rhetorical device to portray the hyphenated identity of these writers and their experiences of always living in between, i.e., as an immigrant caught between nostalgia for the homeland and assimilation in the host country, the United States.
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The Literature of Dystopia: Trauma and the Post-Apocalyptic in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jeanne DuPrau's The City of Ember
1397The present research seeks to critically analyse Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember (2003) in terms of Judith Herman’s psychoanalytic concepts of hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction, which are the tree symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the research resorts to Herman’s notions of safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection to represent the possibility of achieving recovery in a post-apocalyptic world. The Road and The City of Ember deal with characters living in a post-apocalyptic territory where there is a constant clash between traumatic experiences and survival instincts. Even though both novels share some basic similarities in their aims and leitmotifs, the study will demonstrate that McCarthy’s, as a male novelist, and DuPrau’s, as a female novelist, approaches are highly different concerning representation of conflicts and their narrative voices. The research is an attempt to orchestrate a traumatic post-apocalyptic reading of both novels and it proposes to discuss the traumatic experiences of the characters trundling in a post-apocalyptic setting.
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Imagined Histories: Dialectic of the Imagined and the Real in Anita Amirrezvani’s The Blood of Flowers and Equal of the Sun
1396This study is a reading of Anita Amirrezvani's The Blood of Flowers and Equal of the Sun in terms of Hayden White's notions of emplotment and narrativity. Through analysis of Amirrezvani's treatment of real historical events, the study raises several questions regarding the historical truth of the presented events, the author's role and purpose in reshaping the past, and the effects of contemporary discourses on Iran's past and present on the narratives. In an attempt to rewrite history, Amirrezvani deviates from official historical records and invents stories about those parts of history that have been marginalized or written out of historical narratives. Amirrezvani has depicted many characters, events, and situations, many of which familiar to us from official records of history, but she mixes these real elements with many imaginary elements, and subjects them to a process of emplotment to support her own reading of Iran's past. This process of emplotment has been worked out through techniques such as selection, insertion, dramatization and novelization. The results of the study show that Amirrezvani's main project in her two novels has been to read Iran's past in terms of the current debates on Iran, especially the place of women in the Iranian society, Amirrezvani articulates some of the dominant contemporary discourses on Iran and accordingly rewrites Iran's past history in a way to make it appealing to contemporary audiences.
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Survival and Sanity: A study of Subjection in the Selected Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
1396J. M. Coetzee criticizes the scholarship on apartheid for its apparent “indifference” to the “madness” of apartheid and for its limitation since it approaches apartheid “from outside.” Coetzee’s South African fiction should be regarded as his attempt to address these concerns: an inside view of the apartheid’s madness. It is suggested that the insanity of apartheid, in Coetzee’s fictional representation, lies in the social deformation that springs from its mode of intersubjective relatedness, its “pathological attachments.” It is through regulating individuals’ modes of relatedness and fashioning sadistic and masochistic subjects that the apartheid regime managed to reproduce and perpetuate itself. As such, apartheid represented the era of power struggles, subjection, and victimization. The present study employs the socio-ethical thought of Erich Fromm and combines it with the similar concerns of some other thinkers, to explore the themes of domination, subjection, and character distortion in Coetzee’s South African fiction in the context of apartheid. Coetzee’s novels, this study holds, are the fictionalized expression of his belief that apartheid distorted intersubjective relations, turned humans’ interactions into power struggles, and produced deformed, stunted subjects. It is such unproductive inter-human contacts that characterize the apartheid society as the manifestation of Coetzean insane society. Moreover, this study examines the continuing presence of these deformed subjects and distorted subjectivity in the post-apartheid South Africa and the violence that their presence occasions. The residual presence of character deformity and sadomasochistic intersubjectivity is a social reality of the new South Africa in Coetzee’s post-apartheid fiction; a material reality that diminishes the prospect of the promised sane society of post-apartheid era.
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Unhomeliness, Hybridity and Liminality in the Selected Works of Jhumpa Lahiri: A Postcolonial Reading of The Namesake and The Lowland
1396The present research seeks to critically address Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) concerning the postcolonial concepts of unhomeliness, liminality, and hybridity. The Namesake demonstrates the struggles of a Bengali family migrated to America. Gogol, their son, is embarrassed by his name and his parents’ culture and traditional practices. As the story continues, his conflicts become stronger and he hates his culture more and more. The Lowland narrates the story of two brothers, Udayan and Subhash, with two different worldviews. Udayan is interested in political movements and it leads to his death. On the other hand, Subhash marries Gauri, Udayan’s wife, and they raise Bela, Udayan and Gauri’s daughter, together. Additionally, each of them has different inner conflicts to tackle. These two postcolonial novels by Lahiri can be studied through the lens of Bhabha’s concepts. Unhomeliness, one of the key terms of this thesis, highlights the way a colonial subject identifies the world as split between two cultures and furthermore, that subject does not have the experience of having a home culture. The other key concept, hybridity, is a term used by Homi Bhabha to describe what happens when two cultures commingle. The nature and the characteristics of the newly created culture change each of the two cultures in a process called hybridity. Also, liminality means to be at the threshold. In a liminal state, the colonial subject is stuck between two cultures. This research attempts to shed light on how these concepts are represented in the novels and how each of those processes are different and yet related to each other. In this study, the hybridization of identities of the major characters are explored as well.
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Medical Humanities: Treatment of Deformity in Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult and Staying Fat for Sara Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
1396This study is to investigate the treatment of deformity in the novels Handle with care by Jodi Picoult and Staying Fat for Sara Byrnes by Chris Crutcher. Handle with Care deals with the theme of a congenital disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) and the problems a family is involved with by raising a kid named Willow with this defect. The disease has eight basic types with prenatal symptoms. Type III of OI that the protagonist is entangled with, is marked by lack of cologen formation that leads to a brittle bone with numerous breaks and fractures in the bones of the patient. Staying fat for Sara Byrnes deals with bullies, unlikely heroes, friendship, fear and coping with adversity. Two protagonists of the novel, Eric Calhoune and Sara Byrnes, are social outcasts due to excessive fatness and scars from childhood that develop a bond of friendship between the two protagonists. Medical humanities as an interdisciplinary field investigates the social, historical and cultural dimensions of medicine. It is interesting to note how authors ʻuseʼ disability to tell their stories. Deformity is understood in aesthetic terms as the opposite of beauty or a deviation from normal appearance. According to Foucault, since classical time, body is seen as object and target of power and there is a changing view to deformity from the time when a person with deformity was exhibited as a sheer freak show to the time doctors thought of healing strategies for deformity. While the stigma of deformity derives from the appearance of bodies, modern definitions of disability concern the functions of bodies and their relationship to their social and physical environment. The protagonists’ names in both novels indicate how metaphorically deformity can be viewed.
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Lost in Trans-Nation: Liminal Formation of Narrative, Identity and Space in Recent Novels of the Iranian Diaspora
1396Abstract The migration of Iranians before and after the Islamic revolution in 1979 and subsequent departure of Iranians to western countries, particularly to the United States, formed the Iranian diaspora. Concerned with various serious cultural and national vacillations, marginalization, and discrimination, Iranian diaspora now looks for new means of redefining themselves in the host land’s cultural context through literature. This dissertation investigates the liminal formation of narrative, identity and space in selected novels by diasporic women authors through the analysis of representative texts in English including, Funny in Farsi, Laughing Without and Accent, The Saffron Kitchen, To See and See Again and Sons and Other Flammable Objects. Theories of post-colonialism and post-structuralism will be crucial in addressing these issues, while the analysis explores how the Iranian diasporic identity is informed by an inherently traumatic and violent history of the Patriarchal hegemony, discourses of power, regimes of truth, and performativity. Focusing on the traumatic experience of the Iranian immigrants and preoccupation of the female subjects with history, performative normative discourse and the relationship of protagonist and author with Iranian cultural practices of the ancestral home, this dissertation investigates the process of hybridization and defining the cultural identity. How literature opens up new spaces of expression for the reconstruction, maintenance and negotiation of a desired state of being and identity for diasporic Iranian communities rooted in their diasporic present and the homeland of the past is also considered. Researches indicate that how the Iranian immigrants attempt to (re)construct and negotiate their identities within conflicting contexts in terms of creating the third space. The anticipated findings concentrate on defining the states in which the diasporic Iranian literature inscribes itself into new society and culture, redefin
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Between Scylla and Charybdis: Radical Cosmopolitanism in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and The Childhood of Jesus
1395This study aims to reimagine J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and The Childhood of Jesus in terms of cosmopolitan concepts of sympathy, shame and limits. In this regard, an eclectic theoretical approach in this qualitative library research is adopted. The explication of Coetzee’s distinct cosmopolitanism is approached in terms of emphasis on law and ethics in Coetzee’s philosophy of living and extra-textual effects of such philosophy on the reading process, author, and reader. As a narrative miniature of a global project, Coetzee’s novels promote a distinctive individualism which reveals the inadequacy of sympathy and shame as contributive to cosmopolitan philosophy of humanity. Not thoroughly attended to in previous critical approaches to Coetzee’s fiction is significance of the initial traumatic event in descent of the subject to the other’s stance and in facilitation of the project of feeling. The subject’s shame in the face of other’s impassivity, extra-textual denial of agency and authority, and ambivalent contribution of feeling to reason challenge the basic premises of cosmopolitanism. One may conclude that the two novels by Coetzee promote a faithbased association between the cosmopolitan subject and the other where the subject experiences otherness via difference. The outstanding expanse of Coetzee’s literary output suggests the need for further studies on problematics of subject-other association, stasis or evolution in such association and role of socio-politics of the imaginative hosting community in this essential transition.
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Janus Iranian Style: The Formation of Identity in Tara Bahrampour and Yasmin Crowther
1395Faced with a number of new political and cultural prospects and unable to relocate to a newly-born Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Iranians migrated from their homeland and resettled in Western countries, in the hope of reconciling the two distinct cultures with each other, each crying out their merits and demerits loudly to make them a follower of their own. Resulting from this dislocation or relocation, the process of identity recognition entered into the consciousness of Iranian diasporic writers. This thesis selected Yasmin Crowther's Saffron Kitchen (2006) and Tara Bahrampour's To See And See Again (2000) as two particular instances of autobiographies written under the shadow of diasporic lives suffering from the lack of a stable land to root in. In the light of Bhabha's post-colonial and cultural theories expressed in his books Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994), the present thesis discusses how various concepts such as "liminality", "ambivalence", "hybrid identity" of an Iranian diasporic subject as a metamorphosed one, are constructed in a space that is called "third space of enunciation". To that end, the versatile nature of Iranian identity, the problematization of notions such as "home", "exile", and "belonging", the way the realities of language are incorporated into their self-narratives, and ultimately molding their culture into a new shape, persisting and transforming in diaspora simultaneously are emphasized. In conclusion, it is proposed that identity is not a given reality but rather a product of a lived one and therefore a social construct which is always in process.
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Postmodern Theory of Literary Historiography: Fictionalization of History in Hilary mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
1395The present research seeks to critically analyze Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies based on the literary historiographical theories of Hayden White. The long historical novels, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) are fictionalized accounts of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. This fictionalized account of the Tudor history reflects several ideas of the postmodern philosophy of history which are mostly proposed by Hayden White as an influential figure in the area of historiography and literary criticism. Hayden White is a prominent figure in the field of history. One of his significant works, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century Europe 1973), is marked as the turning point in historical theory. Hayden White aestheticized historiography and regarded it as a linguistic construction which is not different from literature. The history of Tudors, and specifically of King Henry VIII, has been an interesting subject matter for most historian and novelists and it has been frequently investigated by them. Mantel deals with the historical facts impressively and tries to demonstrate facts and at the same time create a new version of the issues of the Tudor period. She tries to tell the readers that it is possible to have many different versions of the historical reality and this is something that postmodernists view on the relativity of reality. The novel provides corresponding peculiarities with the postmodern approach of historiography that is generated by Hayden White, since he believes that there could be different versions of historical facts and it is the choice of the historian or the writer of historical fiction how to interpret the reality and make his own version of it. In this research, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies as the two contemporary historical novels, will be investigated based on the theories of postmodern philosophy of history and literary historiography.
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The Narrative of Political Unconscious and Utopia in J. M. Coetzee’s The Time and Life of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians
1395The present dissertation seeks to closely investigate JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K in terms of Fredric Jameson's concept of the political unconscious. The central Argument of the present research is to demonstrate how JM Coetzee’s waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K are in close association with the core idea of the political unconscious. Jameson believes that any work of art could be read in a context of its historical circumstances, that is to say, its socio-economic determinants. To this end, the present dissertation has been colored to enrich itself by investigating other code words such as totality, narrative and interpretation, ideologeme(s), mode of production, and the ideology of the form. Jameson’s dialectical aesthetic in The Political Unconscious is the corollary of the confluence of Freud and Marx’s fundamental premises of unconscious and sociopolitical anxieties respectively. Fredric Jameson’s intellectual hermeneutic lies in uncovering the way in which the contradictions and antinomies as well as sociopolitical and cultural anxieties are to be unfolded within his three semantic horizons of interpretation, namely, ‘the political’ or ‘the textual’, ‘the social’ and ‘the historical’. The present dissertation argues that Coetzee’s selected novels, through the political unconscious analysis, reveal the repressed desires encoded in the unconscious of the narratives. To unravel the underlying contradictions and antinomies beneath the surface of the text, the narrative demands interpretations so as to pierce into the latent meaning of the novels. Coetzee’s selected novels depict the cultural and sociopolitical anxieties by which the south Afrikaners’ collective consciousness is determined and shaped.
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Levinas’s Post-Structural Subjectivity and Humanism of the Other in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
1395This dissertation seeks to illuminate Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy by taking Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘ethics’ into consideration and fosters debate on its key terms including the Other, subject, the face, trauma, and responsibility. Atwood’s trilogy consists of Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) which have been thoroughly investigated to validate that both Atwood and Levinas demand to establish alternative forms to end a dystopian world. Atwood with an apocalypse and Levinas through ‘humanism of the other’ strive to establish a utopia filled with responsible subjects. The purpose of this dissertation is to explicate to what extent the characters in the novels are considered to be Levinasian responsible subjects and it is clarified that Levinasian subject is a responsible one whose self is split due to the presence of the Other. This state of subjectivity is traumatic since he/she becomes awake to respond to the Other’s call. The apocalyptic trauma parallels with a traumatic essence of subjectivity and traumatic childhood that contribute to the post-apocalyptic insomnia. This traumatic state of being awake stems from the Other’s face which is widely considered to be the most significant and perplexed issues of Levinas’s ethics. A command lies at the heart of the face that is ‘thou shall not kill’ the other. This dissertation presents a comprehensive account of Levinas’s concept of the Other in the various forms before and after apocalypse. It includes ‘intersubjective relations,’ ‘death and future as the other,’ the role of the ‘feminine alterity’ with regard to a new generation after apocalypse, ‘paternal and fraternal’ encounter of self and the other with reference to the characters’ childhood memories which propels the majority of the novels.
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Liminal Identity in Diasporic Iranian Narratives: The Case of Firoozeh Dumas and Elizabeth Eslami
1395The present thesis attempts to read Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi (2003) and Elizabeth Eslami’s Bone Worship (2010) in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and third space. In recent years, a number of Iranian immigrants have tried their hand at writing memoirs which are highly reflective of their hybrid identities. Immigrants carry with them a set of cultural customs to the new country where it has its own specific culture. These two different cultures constantly intervene the acts of immigrants and leave them with a hybrid identity. Meanwhile, immigrants have to adjust themselves to the host country and mimic the behavior codes of that country. As a result, they will always be living in an in-between space, namely third space, between these two spaces. In other words, they belong to neither the original nor the host country, but to both of them. In their memoirs, these Iranian immigrants describe their life experiences and the difficulties they are facing in the U.S. A considerable part of these memoirs is about Iran and the important aspects of Persian culture such as language, family, education, hospitality, and Nowruz. However, these writers usually use the English language as their medium, which means they have successfully assimilated into the American culture. Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi (2003) and Elizabeth Eslami’sBone Worship (2010), the study reveals, abound with characters of different generations of Iranian immigrants who have been able not only to incorporate the American culture but also remain, in some ways, connected with their original Persian culture.
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Scenes from History: Dramatic Emplotment in Howard Barker's Selected Historical Plays
1395The present dissertation seeks to closely read and critically investigate Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, The Castle and Victory in terms of Hayden White's notions of history as narrative and emplotment. Critical assessments of Barker's plays make frequent mentions of his modern literary strategies and his active engagement with historical issues. His emphasis on the form of the plays devotes little attention to the history of the story on which each play is based, since he is interested in imagining history rather than reflecting it as it is. Thus, in the process of dramatizing the historical events of his plays, he invents some events or characters to create his own version of them. His aim is to emplot history via different modes of explanation such as tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, and irony. Barker brings his approach alongside those of postmodern philosophers such as Hayden White. White suggests that it is possible to have different versions of what happened through emplotment. Therefore, in this way, there is always the challenge and uncertainty for what has exactly happened when representing it by dramatic emplotment. White's view on historical representation is in line with Barker's ways of representing history in his historical plays. Barker is known for his theatre of Catastrophe in which the moment of beauty is the moment of collapse of moral certitudes. Barker's selected plays are considered as history plays. In each of them, historical events and historical characters are taken into account. He himself, by displaying scenes or dialogues rooted in the mind, leaves no place for one who proclaims clarity.
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Liminality and Ethnicities in André Brink's Novels
1394This dissertation endeavors to address the issue of liminality in the selected novels by the South African novelist, André Brink. The concept of liminality, here, is defined from the viewpoint of the British cultural anthropologist, Victor Witter Turner. Rumors of Rain (1978), An Act of Terror (1991) and The Rights of Desire (2000), are the three novels which will be exclusively examined in this dissertation. South Africa, as a multi-ethnic country comprising different ethnic groups such as blacks, whites, coloreds and Asians, is known as the Rainbow Nation. Brink's novels depict liminality as a significant factor in the lives of South African ethnicities during apartheid, the transition period, and the post-apartheid era. Although the dominant impression supposes the blacks to be in a more in-between situation, Brink reveals liminality in the lives of other ethnic groups as well. This study comes up with this conclusion that being a minority serves as a unifying factor that negates other differences and gathers different ethnicities in the communitas. Consequently, liminal beings are in communitas rather than a structured society. They are like guests in a carnival who are equally welcomed regardless of their respective significance. The holders of the carnival are the socio-political authorities who observe minorities as a whole rather than separable entities. The fixation of the beings in liminality has made it an integral component of South Africa. Regarding the lives of ethnicities, the transition of power does not change anything for the better.
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Mark Ravenhill’s Selected Plays in the Light of Giddens’ Globalization, Risk, and Uncertainty
1394The present research is an analysis of Mark Ravenhill’s selected plays, Some Explicit Polaroids, Faust Is Dead, The Cut, and Product in terms of Anthony Giddens’ major theoretical concepts regarding the condition of Late or High Modernity. The study attempts to consider Giddens’ critical concepts including Globalization, Risk, and Uncertainty in the selected plays. Reading the plays in light of Giddens’ theories, it will be illustrated that Ravenhill, as a dramatist, records the social changes of the contemporary era in his plays. The researcher addresses the concept of Globalization in these four plays and how the transformations brought by it have affected individuals’ day to day life. Each of Ravenhill’s plays represents the social state of their setting. Anthony Giddens is well-known for his theory of Globalization and Late Modernity; according to him, the world of Late Modernity is full of risks and dangers. This concept, for him, has a highly significant place in individuals’ life. Similar to Risk, the concept of uncertainty plays a prominent role in today’s world. These two concepts are investigated in Ravenhill’s plays in order to demonstrate that these features have penetrated into people’s lives undoubtedly. The main argument of this study is to indicate how people’s personal issues have been transformed in the globalized world they live in. Giddens’ critical concepts are explored in each play separately. Not only these three concepts but also other remarkable concepts including: Trust, Dilemmas of the Self, and the Transformation of Intimacy are investigated as well. Additionally, the study explores the impacts of those issues on the process of Self-identity in the condition of Late Modernity. According to Giddens, the characteristics of contemporary world intrude deeply into the heart of self-identity and personal feelings.