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This study explores how Lacanian psychoanalysis governs and understands the mother-child relationships in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1944/2014) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). In so doing, the primary purpose of this study has been to establish the links between the central characters' behaviors and the psychoanalytic concept of 'deferral of desire’.' The research proposes a novel aspect of 'psychoanalytic meaning' by basing it on the counter-intuitive process of evading the jouissance of actualizing and immersing oneself in one's object of desire. To support the proposition mentioned above, this study has explored the eventual fate of the children in Black Swan (Nina), and The Glass Menagerie (Tom and Laura), analyzing their respective experiences of (dis)satisfaction after their ultimate success or failure in their attempts to attain their objects of desire. This study has employed the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of the objet petit a and register theory to posit that satisfaction lies not in obtaining one’s object of desire, but in repeatedly failing to do so, due to the fact that possessing the object of desire shatters the lack which is the necessary condition of maintaining the desirability of the object of desire. The article concludes that while we are intuitively equipped to think of satisfaction as the effect of the realization of the object of one's desire, psychoanalytically speaking, satisfaction is found in precisely the opposite direction, that is, in a repeated failure to obtain the object of one's desire.

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The present research examines the concept of love in two separate and distinct spheres. On the one hand, love is considered as a transcendental experience and concept that is static and related to a meta-human truth. This type of reading of love is mainly initiated and developed through Plato’s writings. On the other, there is a view that considers love (even in its Platonic sense) a humane, cultural and more importantly “textual” phenomenon. In other words, love can only be understood, multiplied and experienced within language (or as Jacques Lacan calls, “symbolic order”). In this paper, I have studied these two views in relation to the collection of short stories entitled, Love on the Sidewalk, written by the contemporary Iranian writer, Mostafa Mastour. In order to do this, I have first studied the concept of ‘absence’ in love and how the experience of love always depends on the absence of the lover or the beloved. I then argue that love, in these stories, is a ‘sign’ that is constructed and signified with a system of signs. And finally I illustrate how the characters in these stories fall in love and understand love through “narratives of love”. All this would give love a plural and narrative significance. Love is therefore a sign that is always in the process of being constructed.

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In spite of the growing acceptability of the works of women novelists in Iran, literary criticism of these works suffers from significant shortcomings and limitations. The most prominent of these shortcomings is the critics’ lack of interest in separately analyzing each novel as a distinct literary unit in order to appreciate its singular literary excellence and uncover those aspects that are less likely to appear in the literature of men. Above all, feminist literary criticism of Iranian novels lacks an approach to focus on the notion of femininity as an indispensible part of the narration that can offer new literary potentials both for the writer and the reader. The present study uses concepts from poststructuralist psychoanalysis, especially Lacan’s theories of mirror stage and femininity as pretense and Irigaray’s theories regarding mimesis, difference and the development of the feminine subject, to discuss the function of game playing in Belgheis Soleimani’s novel, The Last Game of the Lady. Golbanoo, the protagonist, through her games and theatricality, manages to take what Irigaray believes to be the first step in challenging the phallocentric discourse: the strategy of subversive mimesis of that discourse to open a space for a new definition of femininity that allows for the development of the female subject. Her last game, which is the game of the narrative, is in fact the beginning of her victory. Golbanoo and the novelist join forces to playfully crack the phallocentric mindset and achieve feminine subjectivity by means of creative production.