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The Lost and gone glory of the once magnificent Sasanid palace, Taq-e Kasra ,  has posed a grievous emotional impact on the many who have visited it for many years. Poets like Khayyam, Behtari, Khaghani, Sheikh Reza Talebani, and Ma'rouf Alrasafi, among others, have indicated their sad feelings of their visits to the ruined palace through their poems. From among all poetry on that theme, Khaghani's poem enjoys a higher prestige and reputation on such grounds as simplicity, and elegance in terms of both form and content. This article aims at scrutinizing the question whether Khaghani's poem, as assumed by a great number of contemporary researchers, was indeed written according to the motive of national patriotism on the side of the poet or rather stemmed from the poet's feeling of despair and fickleness regarding the unstable world. It is hoped that the findings of this study will shed more lights on the issue.

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Identical Rhyme is one of the important factors which plays a great role in turning up the lateral music of poetry. The fact that it is placed after rhyme containing verbal and semantic unity, has been the common denominator of all the definitions given for this very concept from the beginning to the present time. Deviating from these concepts, and employing linguistic capacities such as figurative, ironic and new metaphoric meanings in the context of discourse, Khaghani Shervani (515-595 after Hijrat), has challenged all the existing definitions in this respect and more specifically in the field of semantic unity in a way that he has presented 116 different meanings for "Identical Rhyme" only in a long (145-couplet ballad). In the present study, after demonstrating Khaghani's artistic capability in this field, we have made an attempt to revise the definition of Identical Rhyme as well. To achieve this purpose, all types of nominal, verbal and adverbial Identical Rhymes and the like, as reflected in Khaghani qasaed (odes ) were scrutinized.

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The studies of language categorization demonstrate that there is no direct relationship between the rhetorical and semantic-intentional categories. A major part of the difficulties in literary concepts go back to the lack of knowledge of secondary meanings of the semantic-intentional categories of the sentences. The purpose of the present research is to explore the semantic-intentional aspects of the interrogative sentences in Shams' Ghazals. The method of this research is descriptive and the data were analyzed based on the discourse analysis approach and according to library and document analysis method. The corpus includes 264 Ghazals selected randomly according to Cochran formula. The results show that Moulawi employed 27 functions out of 35 secondary functions under discussion in this research. The statistical analyses demonstrated that the most frequent secondary functions include the following: wonder, forbiddance, negative interrogation, blaming,

negation, expressive interrogation. The application or nonapplication of a number of the functions is in close association with their affinity or lack of affinity with Molana’s worldview, which has been fully investigated in the paper

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Simile and allusion are two rhetorical aspects that have been taken into consideration by the scholars of rhetoric since long time ago. Some of the Iranian poets have used the capacities of the Persian language and integrated these aspects to create a modern rhetoric which in this study is introduced as rhetorical simile. The objective of the present study is the investigation of this rhetoric in 1340s poems and some of early 1350s works of Shafiee Kadkani. For this purpose, “a mirror for sounds” including “whispers”, “night reading”, “from the leaf”, “in the garden alleys of Neishabour”, “like a tree in a rainy night”, “from existence and singing”, and “Booye jooye moolian” are studied. The objective of this study is to introduce the features of this rhetoric such as defamiliarization, highlighting, succinctness, non-translatability, validity, and assigning them to Farsi, which is done in Persian literature for the first time. Introducing the implicit relationship of these similes and the themes of Shafiee Kadkani as well as his capability in employing the rhetoric constitute another objective of this study is investigating the use of descriptive and analytical method and content analysis. Placing mythological, religious, mystical, and scientific personalities in these similes show the awareness of the poet regarding rhetoric. This justifies the frequency of such similes in his poems, his innovations, and observation of the semantic-thematic proportion of the poems with these rhetorical aspects.
 

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Boasting (Mofakhereh in Persian) as a poetic theme or as a sub-genre has a strong presence in the books of poems of classical Persian poets. Adopting an analytical approach, this research attempted at analyzing ‘boasting’ in poems of Manouchehri Damghani, Sanaei Ghaznavi, and Khaghani Shervani based on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. To do so, after extracting instances of their ‘boasting’ odes and considering the historical and social issues of their times and their different habitus and mindsets, we tried to analyze the poems based on Bourdieu’s four literary field principles (habitus, capital, struggle, and disinterestedness). The results showed that Manouchehri, due to his inclination to the power filed, and to make a name and a living and to stabilize his position, used his art and poetry for boasting. He did not observe the principle of disinterestedness in the literary field which attempts at purifying literature from personal intentions. As a result, he was pushed to the margin. But as the power field changed during the second Ghaznavid and Seljuk periods and some new problems and instabilities affected poets’ conditions, poets such as Sanaei and Khaghani distanced themselves from the power field, due to their specific habitus, and attempted at purifying literature and fighting the power field. From the two poets, Khaghani was more successful due to his disinterestedness and observance of the rules of the literary field.

 

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Masterplot is a group of plots that are widely repeated among different ethnic groups and cultures. The purpose of this paper is to discover the structure of universal masterplot of “deal with the Devil” in two narratives of “Zahhak” in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Dr. Faust by Goethe. In the present study, we have tried to answer two questions by descriptive-analytical method: First, what is the repetitive structure that governs this masterplot; second, what are the similarities and differences between the narratives of Ferdowsi and Goethe in this masterplot in different sections such as the reasons for dealing with the Devil, the motives of the deal, the actions of the heroes, how the Devil appeared to the heroes and their fate. The results show that the structure of this masterplot has a repetitive pattern in this form: Devil’s deal with individuals having superior characteristics, selling one’s soul to the Devil, performing similar kinds of functions after dealing with the Devil, and a complete downfall or return to salvation after suffering the painful consequences of wrongdoing. The differences between these two narratives from a single story include the motives of making a deal, which in Faust is the full enjoyment of material and worldly pleasures, and in Zahhak’s story is power-seeking (domineering). Another difference is in the actions of the heroes after the deal which in Faust involves false testimony and acceptance of stolen property, but in Zahhak it includes murder and illegitimate sex, which are common in both narratives. How the devil appears to these two is also different. In Faust, the devil appears in the form of a dog, a hippopotamus, and a scholar seeker, and in Zahhak, he appears in the form of a well-wishing man, a cook, and a physician. The end of the deal in Faust, after enduring many difficulties, is salvation and in Zahhak leads to his imprisonment at the bottom of a cave. Based on this research, one can speculate the possibility that Goethe was influenced by Ferdowsi.


 

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The prison poems of Ahmad Shamlou are significantly different from the classical form of prison literature in terms of structure, function, content, and discourse. In the present research, we have tried to study Ahmad Shamlou’s prison poems with an integrated approach using discoursal and semiotic tools. In order to interpret the function of prison as a punitive tool, we have taken Foucault’s views and to explain the relationship between power and disciplinary space and prison punishment, the issue of authority and domination has been briefly discussed based on the ideas of some sociologists and philosophers such as Max Weber and Thomas Hobbes. Lefebvre’s views on space have been used in the interpretation of prison environment. The results indicate that unlike the classical prison poets, Shamlou first discredits the punitive and disciplinary function of the prison by not admitting the charge and considering the punishment illegitimate. Second, the prison environment in Shamlou’s prison poems is a discoursal space in which the poet has tried to use the dialectical capacity of the space by successively escaping to the outside world, emptying the prison of its physical and defined identity as an enclosed space, and portraying it as a required developmental experience in the path to achieve the goal.


 

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