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Modernist novel and short story have played a significant role in modern retouching of mythical narratives and in their recreation in the contemporary narrative literature. One of the major reasons for the particular attention of these novels and short stories to mythical roots is the necessity that the recent authors feel due to alterations in social conditions as well as the fundamental transformations in human’s intellect and attitude. The disorder in today’s chaotic world, the discourses of which are full of contradictions, irregularities, and rule aversion has intrigued today’s man in incoherent, nonlinear and discontinuous narratives abundant with temporal disorders, a characteristic which has a rich background in mythical narratives. A prominent writer in contemporary Persian literature is Shahriyar Mandanipour, the works of whom can resemble mythical narratives in terms of both the structure and the processing of some elements of story, specially the element of time. This study attempts to demonstrate that just like in some mythical narratives, in some of the stories by Mandanipour, 1- time is qualitative and mental not quantitative and objective; 2- time takes its validity from the narrated event or phenomenon; and 3- time is circular and cyclic not linear and straight. Of course, confirming these resemblances does not necessarily imply that Shahriar Mandanipour has consciously been influenced by mythical narratives

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Najdi is one of the outstanding contemporary writers due to his specific style. He has a different attitude towards human life and cultural elements of Iran, which makes his stories a good subject for discussion and research. In this article, two stories of Najdi are analyzed in the light of Deconstruction: “The Day of Asb-rizi” and “The Night of Killing Sohrab”. Deconstruction is mostly based on Derrida’s theory. It originated and was initially used in Philosophy and then it spread to literary criticism. The aim of Deconstruction is to find the binary oppositions, to analyze them in order to reveal the contradictory points and to deny the accepted assumptions. The results of this process is to doubt those beliefs that have been considered as axiomatic up to that time. In Najdi’s stories, the binary oppositions include man/animal, man/nature and man and civilization. In “The Day of Asb-rizi”, the opposition between man and animal, and, freedom and slavery causes some contradictions in the major themes of the story. In “The Night of Killing Sohrab”, the binary opposition is that of harsh patriarchal world/ innocent childish world, or, experience/inexperience.

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In this paper, Persian short storyis studied in the light ofTzvetanTodorov’s Narrative Theory. The hypothesis of this research is that there are various types of relations among the sequences, and each relation serves one or more functions. For this purpose, seven collections of Persianshort stories written by outstanding writers were selected. These collections consist of 63 short stories, beginningwith Jamalzadeh, the founder of this genre in Persian literature, and ending with Ahmad Mahmoud covering a period of fifty years. After analyzing deductively the selected stories it is demonstrated that there are many kinds of relations among the sequences of narratives, such as contrastive relation, memorial relation and stichomythic relation. In addition, each of these relations serves some functions, such as prescience, foregrounding of the story’s content and creation of suspense.

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Based on the theory of reflection in the sociology of art, literature in its broadest sense is a mirror of society that reflects the orientations, tastes and social currents and helps to dissect the society better than science and technology. In particular, among literary works, short stories and novels are more dependent on social life than other types of literature, and while being affected by changes in society, they themselves are the source of change and show the changes in societies. In this way, by recognizing the fluctuations and changes of the world inside the main characters of the stories, a path can be found to know the transformations and changes in the world outside them. The purpose of this study is to examine the image of the main character in Houshang Golshiri’s short stories. In this regard, an attempt was made to conduct a comparative content analysis of the works using the descriptive-analytical method and by extracting the characteristics of the main characters of Golshiri’s short stories in the 60s and 70s (Persian Calendar) and by identifying the main socio-political events and currents of the years following the victory of the Islamic Revolution. The results show that in his collection of stories Golshiri directly and indirectly presented a part of the mentalities and thoughts of intellectuals, artists and the middle class of his time and there is a close relationship between the spiritual, political, social and cultural characteristics of the main characters of each collection of stories with the prevailing socio-political situation of that period. This corresponds to the author’s political and social perception of the developments of the period because when the status of society changes, some of these characteristics also change.  
 

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