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In this article, fantastic genre as a literary genre which nowadays has significantly become common in contemporary literature of Russia, will be studied. "My Father is an Antibiotic" is an outstanding example of this genre, which has been written on the basis of critical conditions and abnormal events of the present world and their influence on humans' life. Afterwards, through introduction of Sergei Vasilivich Lokiyanenko as one of the pioneer fantast writers in modern literature of Russia, we will  examine his works and his motivations for choosing this specific genre. Sergei Lokiyanenko is a writer with a marvelous skill at portraying life in past, present and future, with the help of imagination and science. He wrote "My Father is an Antibiotic" in 1992. In Lokiyanenko's view, it is hard for contemporary man to get accustomed to modern lifestyle, numerous numbers of newspapers, increase of contacts, and new methods of communications. He believes that unprepared for facing such an attack, man's spirit sometimes prefers to sacrifice real world and sink in a world made by his own mind. In this novel, the writer tries to show that children are the main victims of abnormalities and pugnacities of adults in the present world. Through analysis of "My Father is an Antibiotic", as a fantastic work of Russian contemporary literature, we have also tried to somehow pave the way for the Iranian readers to get familiar with contemporary literature of Russia, particularly fantastic genre.

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Fantastic Realism is a genre which remind us of Russia and its great writer Dostoevsky. This genre has been developed in Iran among Iranian writers who have been familiar with the books of world literature, especially Russian literature. Fantastic Realism employs and combines reality and imagination, and while it concerns the reality related to human beings, it pictures that kind of reality which is internal. That is why the reader has some difficulty in finding the true meaning in such novels. Among the Iranian writers, Khosro Hamzavi is more inclined to this genre and the novel The City which Died under the Cedar Trees is one of the best novels of this writer which is written on the basis and reflects Fantastic Realism. The City which Died under the Cedar Trees is discussed in this paper based on Fantastic Realism using a descriptive-analytic method.

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In this paper, based on the contemporary theory of cognitive metaphor, the metaphoric functions of Jamal (Beauty) and the clusters of images related to it, namely the world, man, face, sun, mirror, etc. in Mawlavi's lyrics are explained. In theology, the motif of conceptual metaphor of Jamal is Ro'yat (vision). Finding its way into mysticism, "vision" is expressed in the metaphor of Beauty and thus the idea is conveyed through metaphoric language. Through the analyses of beauty as a metaphor and its related images in Masnavi and Divan-e Shams, we find out that "God is visible". This metaphoric idea is evident in the depth of the structure of the works. Accordingly, Mawlavi describes the Jamal-e-Haqq (the Beauty of God) through particular metaphors, such as Hosn-e-Yousof (the Beauty of Joseph), the world, the Perfect Man, the sun and food. Using these metaphors, Mawlavi proves that God is visible. In this paper attempt is made to analyze and explain the relationship between metaphor and ideology, and also to suggest a new reading of Persian poetry, especially in regard of mystical discourses.

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Although literary texts are extensively taught at schools and universities, to date the attitude of Iranian students towards literary texts has remainedunderstudied. Taking this research gap into account, the writers of the present article adopted a descriptive-analytical approach and examined a sample of students' attitudes towards Persian contemporary poems. Taking Vala (2011) theoretical model, three concepts, i.e. evaluation, comprehensibility, and impressiveness are considered. Next, two poems including"Remember the flight, the bird is mortal" by ForouqFarokhzad, and "Abyss" penned by Ahmad Shamlou are selected and used to design a researcher-made questionnaire. 120 students of Humanities read the poems and answered the questions. The findings indicated that the participants evaluate the level of the poems higher than the mean. They stated that the poems are comprehensible and fairly express their emotions. Analyzing the data with respect to the gender variable showed that the male and female participants have quite the same attitude concerning the evaluation and impressiveness of the poems, but a significant difference was noticed in comprehensibility as the female participants believed that the poems are more complex. The subjects maintained that "Abyss" was more complex than"Remember flight, the bird is mortal". The subjects selected "loneliness" and "despotism" as the key concepts of the poems of Farokhzad and Shamlou respectively. We believe that measuring the attitudes of language users towards literary works contributes to the educational syllabus design and opens a novel horizon in the interdisciplinary studies with the emphasis on Persian language and literature.

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The crisis of representation is a topic widely discussed in critique and theory of postmodern literature. This refers to the crises of the present era including the crisis of meaning, the perplexity of contemporary humankind amidst a mass of valid and invalid data, alienation, etc. Literature, as the epitome of human life, is a reflection of these crises in the contemporary era. Azadeh Khanoom and Her Author or‌ the private Auschwitz of Dr. Sharifi, written by Reza Baraheni, is among the most well-known novels of the last three decades in Iran. This novel is regarded as a noteworthy example of postmodern fiction. In the present article, the crisis of representation in Azadeh Khanoom and Her Author is analyzed based on “subject”, as the philosophical substitute for the concept of “man”. In this analysis, the crisis of representation, its consequences for human subject and its influence on Baraheni’s fictional characters are explored; consequently, crises such as identity crisis, personality crisis, etc. can be considered as complications of man’s current affliction of the crisis of representation.
 

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The Reduplications are made by repeating part of the base. The repeated part does not make sense and will never be used alone and is just popular in spoken language. In recent times, they have been used in some texts of poetry and prose, in particular, in stories written in vernacular. This research, with a historical approach, and with an analytical-explanatory method, examines the information obtained from literary and historical sources; and while analyzing the use of reduplication in Persian language and literature, it investigates three hypotheses: first, the effect of the changing of the face and meaning of the ancient Persian vocabulary on the formation of reduplication in Persian language; second, the effect of the Arabic syntax on the formation of reduplication in Persian language; and third, the effect of Arabic vocabulary and synonyms on the formation of reduplication in Persian language and literature
According to the findings of this research, the history of the use of reduplication dates back to the thirteenth century AH. Most of the compositions, from the first to the thirteenth century AH, are seen in poetic and prose works, and the writers of dictionaries have described them as examples of reduplication but in fact they are synonyms connected by conjunctives which due to a change of face and passage of time are mistakenly claimed to be reduplication. Reduplication has been introduced into Persian language since the thirteenth century AH. This was due to the prevalence of Arabic vocabulary in Persian language and also people’s habits of using synonyms in speaking. Along with developments in Persian prose and the tendency of writers to simplification and vernacularism, these compositions were introduced into Persian texts, especially satirical fictional works. 

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Qotol-al-Qolob is an organismic and rich text that has been very effective in stabilizing the Sufist discourse. This is because of the flow of Sufism articulated in the late second century in the context of religion and passed through contradictory discourses such as jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy and then emerged in a period that radical rationalism, jurisprudential controversy, philosophical conflicts as well as political and social quarrels spead over the entire Islamic world. The ideologues of Sufism highlighted absent and separated propositions with the help of the logic of discursive difference and by studying and recognizing dominant approaches. They were gradually able to successfully integrate and dominate the Sufist discourse. This is visualized in Qotol-al-Qolob which we consider to be the confluence of two scholarly and insightful discourses. To achieve this important point we use the method and discourse analysis of La Clau and Mouffe and we show how Abutaleb Makki could renovate the absent, excluded, and depleted propositions of the jurisprudential discourse by the use of interpretation model.
 

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Nizami Ganjavi is a well-known literary figure in Iranian cultural history whose influence has not been diminished in contemporary era. The scene of “Shirin bathing in a fountain” is one of the most prominent scenes of Khosrow and Shirin poem which has been the focus of attention for many modern poets. Following a content analysis approach, this study attempts to explain why such a scene has been so rich and influential in contemporary poetry. The scene has been impressive in two ways: In the first, and the most important type, the whole poem is dedicated to this scene, and in the other type, the poets have only partially referred to the scene. In this paper, it is argued that the scene of Shirin bathing in a fountain is a romantic theme and since some poets were influenced by romanticism – at some points in their professional career – they were fascinated by this scene. Rebellion, violation of moral boundaries, attention to local legends, mythological manifestation of a woman/the beloved one, metaphorism, dynamism and maturity of the scene and its vivid expression, the vague location and time of the event as well as the naturalism of the scene have been parameters of the romantic poems and images most of which are represented in the studied scene. Another attraction of the scene is its eroticism. This classical image has the potential to arouse sensual attraction and to reflect both physical and feminine tensions of our time and to give an indigenous identity to modern poetry.  


 

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The general discourse of Islamic Sufism is a sacred attitude that was formed in the context of religion, in response to other opposing discourses such as jurisprudence, scholastic theology, philosophy and asceticism. At the end of the second century A.H., the followers of the Sufi movement incorporated the alchemy of love in the ascetic copper. Unlike other intellectual and religious movements of Islamic culture and civilization that regarded  the text of the Qur'an as a text descended from heaven to earth in a dialectical movement between heaven and earth, they considered the Qur'an to be a text for the movement from earth to heaven, that is, the Sufi ascension. With this in mind, we witness various encounters of Sufism with conceptualizing prominent and frequent signs, especially the floating sign of “trust” in Sufi discourse as well as other works of Sufism including scholastic and intuitive prose texts. In this paper, using the descriptive-analytical method and the approach of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, we have demonstrated the metamorphoses of this floating sign in several scholastic Sufi texts in Persian and Arabic, and through this we have explained the interactions of these texts.
 

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In the play Farhad and Shirin, the Azerbaijani poet and writer Samad Vurgun has recounted the poem of Khosrow and Shirin in a way contrary to Nizami Ganjavi's intentions. In his work, he tried to create a self and the other divide. Iranians are portrayed as a threatening enemy of the lands beyond Aras and an intractable enmity between the two sides is imagined. In agreement with the communist politicians, Vurgun sought to prepare an independent identity for the newly established Republic of Azerbaijan; in a way that did not overlap with Iranian and Ottoman cultural commonalities. The current research, which is carried out in a descriptive-analytical way, tries to answer the question, how did Vurgun describe the self and the other and what methods did he employ to determine and embody the cultural identity of the Caucasus? The author of this play described Iranians as people with negative aspects such as raping, kidnapping, killing parents, lying, etc. and instead, attributed all the positive qualities to the people of Barda District. On the other hand, the introduction of Shirin and Farhad as lovers from Azerbaijan and the creation of a character named Azarbaba have been part of the strategies to promote the new identity of the Caucasus.