Volume 10, Issue 4 (10-2019)
Abstract
By presenting the concept of Paratopy, Dominique Maingueneau gives a new definition of the relationships between text, author, and society in the analysis of literary discourse. According to Maingueneau, the creation of a literary text cannot solely be result and locus of the author's conflict with his/her society but are the consequences of the writer's presence in his/her context called Paratopy. According to him, paratopy is an essential condition for emergence of a literary text and the literary creation is a necessary criterion for paratopy's existence. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the paratopy's effect in literary discourse of two writers whom both narrated the same individual's life. Considering the importance of Hallaj in the field of Islamic mysticism, he has been constantly subject of many works. To clarify Hallaj's teachings and claims, the writers have also created narratives, describing his life. Louis Massignon and Abdul-Hussein Zarrinkoub in two works: The Passions of Hallaj and The Flames of Tour, despite using the same sources, as well as a relative agreement on the rightfulness of this Muslim mystic, have offered a rather different discourse of Hallaj's life. Understanding the reason for the attention of these two outstanding authors despite their different ideological backgrounds and approaches to historiography, as well as the differences between narrative and discourse of the two texts are questions that the authors have tried to answer. Therefore, with emphasis on Maingueneau's theories in this study, the authors examined the paratopy of the two writers and its manifestation in the two mentioned literary discourses in order to understand the genesis conditions of the two works, and also, through understanding their differences, come to a clearer reading of them.
Marzieh Lotfi, Ferdows Aghgolzadeh, Bahram Modarresi, Hayat Ameri,
Volume 13, Issue 50 (5-2020)
Abstract
The absurd works include elements of wordplay, exaggerated clichés, repetition, irrelevant and even innovated phrases, uttered by one of the characters. The current study provides a narrative analysis of six selected literary works, namely "Endgame" and "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Becket, "The room" by Harold Pinter, "The Blind Owl" by Sadegh Hedayat and "The Cold Air" by Virgilio Pinera. By adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, this paper reconsidered narrative actants presented by Greimas (1966) and focused on six new narrative actants proposed by the researchers for analyzing the narrative of the selected absurd works. Narratology is a field of study that is undergoing a re-contextualization. Apart from theories such as Vladimir Propp’s actantial typology, absurdist theories of the self may also have influenced the way structuralist narratologists drew on linguistic theory to re-describe characters in stories as actants. The researchers proposed six new narrative actants that can be found in absurd works. They include sufferer (antihero) for hero, recluse for the receiver, repetition for the helper, failure for the object, partner for opponent. The donor is absent in absurd works and instead, oppressive can be considered as an actant in these literary works. In conclusion, it could be said that a more linguistically particularized account of actants may have significant methodological benefits for present-day researcher, interested in narrative analysis of absurd works
