Bahareh Nilforoshan; Bakhtiar Sadjadi; Fariba Parvizi; Farid Parvaneh
Abstract
Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature ...
Read More
Introduction: Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a substantial part of narrative studies in particular and literature in general providing a tenable framework of interdisciplinary discourses of knowledge to study and explore fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood embraces a labyrinth of narratives, the Holocaust as its ultimate point of recollection. Phillips, by narrating the horrific memories of a camp survivor, delves into the dark memories of racism and brings it to its old days, as far as Othello’s in Venice. The present study explores this dark legacy through a relatively new approach to literature using socio-cultural anthropological concepts. In doing so, the present paper scrutinized The Nature of Blood through the concepts of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment in order to delineate the true and indisputable role of fiction in other social sciences, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of literature and novel, in particular. Focusing on the conception of ghetto as a stigmatized territory narrated by Eva and Othello, the two major narrators in the novel, the article finds it as an available and costless strategy of punitive containment practiced through the course of history and represented in The Nature of Blood.Background of Study: Wacquant elucidates his ideas on the nexus of marginality, ethnicity, and penalty. However, tenets of territorial stigmatization and ghettoization would cover more nationalities and disciplinary boundaries. He builds his notions of ghetto on a comparison of some canonical cases and concludes that ghetto is an institutional form that would lead to territorial and social stigmatization: “the ghetto is an institutional form, a social-organizational device that employs space to fulfill two conflictive functions: economic extraction and social ostracization” (Urban Outcasts, 3). He develops the concept of territorial stigmatization according to this comparative approach to social theory and applies his findings about neighborhood taint on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, he has contributed to urban studies by his notion of advanced marginality. Methodology: This article is a library-based research and uses various sources both in interdisciplinary discourses and contemporary fiction. Ghetto is pictured as punitive containment strategy to push the members of periphery to territories of stigma and deprive them of their collective identity and sense of belonging. Conclusion: The present paper explores The Nature of Blood as an instance of the author’s multi-layered narration in a versatile scope of time, place and history that makes it an appropriate microcosm to apply Wacquant’s conception of territorial stigma, ghetto, and punitive containment. It is concluded that territorial stigma, along with other labels relegating the repressed to the margins of a society, is a recurrent and dynamic threat to the integrity of the underclass and the precariat making it difficult to grasp to any kind of collective action and thus, reflecting the future lives and struggles of the migrants with diverse ethno-racial and religious backgrounds, especially from the Middle East, who were trying to find refuge in Europe after the wake of ISIS. Moreover, ghetto, scrutinized by Wacquant in its modern sense, finds its roots in Renaissance Europe in Phillips’ fiction, proving the bitter fact that the ghetto is the other side of the prison aiming at the exclusionary closure of the outcasts of the society and continued almost unchanged to the modern urban metropolis. The punitive containment during the course of history proved to be a practical and priceless strategy to keep the underclass precariat and the social outcasts at bay behind the bars of the prison, sometimes embodied in the form of the ghetto and has always been reflected in literature due to its potential socio-cultural and anthropological overtones.
Hanieh Zaltash; Farid Parvaneh; Narges Montakhabi Bakhtvar
Abstract
IntroductionThe inauguration of electronic literature is highly entwined with the evolution of digital media, in a sense that it is called “digital born,” which refers to the works of art that are created on a computer and meant to be read on a computer. Multimodal web-fictions, also known ...
Read More
IntroductionThe inauguration of electronic literature is highly entwined with the evolution of digital media, in a sense that it is called “digital born,” which refers to the works of art that are created on a computer and meant to be read on a computer. Multimodal web-fictions, also known as the second generation of electronic literature, utilize several modes, including image, sound/music, video, and text. Multimodal web-fictions provide us with the flow of various modes on the screen. Moreover, there is no clue that indicate how we could navigate the digital project. Although reading digital fictions seems problematic, we could unearth instances of particular patterns among various modes/media which are randomly scattered in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012) and Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), through following Kathrine Hayles’ and Patrik Colm Hogan’ theories. Background of StudyIn Electronic Literature (2019), Scott Rettberg provides a thorough introduction to contemporary genres of digital writing. The book is divided into seven chapters which focus on various genres of electronic literature. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature (2018), edited by Joseph Tabbi, could be considered as the first authoritative reference handbook to the field of Electronic Literature. It consists of four parts This book collects various scholars’ theories, concerning the significant concepts within electronic literature. Daniel Punday, in “Narrativity,” investigates narrativity within electronic literature. He commences by elucidating the evolution of narrativity and how electronic works can create and use narrativity. In “Rebooting Cognition in Electronic Literature,” David Ciccoricco highlights the significance of cognition in electronic literature. Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2005) by David Ciccoricco pivots on cognitive issues, including memory, perception, attention, and emotion. He explores aesthetic treatments of cognition in three kinds of narrative media: print novels, digital fiction, and story-driven video games. Methodology This research, on the one hand, aims to divulge the patterns that are hidden in random modes/ media of Queerskins (2012) and Motions (2014) through following Katherine Hayles theories, concerning apophenia. On the other hand, the present study utilizes Patrick Colm Hogan’s theories, regarding emotions and narrative goals, in order to delineate the narrative patterns in the aforementioned works. Redefining narrative as the pursuit of a goal, Hogan, according to Sanskrit theories, claims that every story is formed around at least one of the chief goals because these are the goals around which all human life is ordered. The Indic tradition depicts that the goals of life, also known as the purusārthas, are kāma, artha, moksa, and dharma. These goals trigger particular emotions. Therefore, in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012), Sebastian’s romantic relationships and his self-blame emotions are respectively based on Kama and Moksa, and in Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), characters’ quest to again social prosperity reveals that their lives are based on artha.ConclusionFollowing Katherine Hayles’ theories, concerning apophenia, it could be argued that narrative patterns could be traced in electronic literature. In other words, various modes/media, which randomly emerge in Illya Szilak’s Queerskins (2012) and Hazel Smith’s Motions (2014), could portray narrative patterns. Although the novels seem fragmented, reading them through Patrick Colm Hogan’s theories, regarding emotions and narrative goals indicates that the underlying pattern is a picture of working memory process when emotions are triggered by life or narrative goals. In Queerskins (2012), narratives are based on Kama and Moksa, and in Motions (2014), narratives are centered on artha. Therefore, the pursuit of the aforementioned goals in Queerskins and Motions creates narrative patterns which challenge randomness of the various modes.
Mahdi Nezami; Farid Parvaneh
Abstract
Spectrum analysis revolves around the cultural works of the past that is due to the frequency and the residues of the past events. Spectrum analysis of the selected two novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon in the light of Michel Foucault’s Discourse Analysis and Jean Francois ...
Read More
Spectrum analysis revolves around the cultural works of the past that is due to the frequency and the residues of the past events. Spectrum analysis of the selected two novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon in the light of Michel Foucault’s Discourse Analysis and Jean Francois Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition is distilled due to the notions of harmonics introduced by Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. The parameters such as frequency, amplitude, modulation, distortion and noise are among the most important matters for analyzing the trajectory of the cultural and historical spectra. Background StudiesOnly Pynchon’s novels presents mathematical-neurological characters to be subject to spectral analysis that submerge into pure noise that is liquidate the signal-to-noise ratio (Koch, 354). The signal to noise ratio measures the ability to reproduce the spectrum from the same sample, the same condition. (Saptari, 11). Schetzina sees contradiction and writes that Pynchon blames science at one side, and puts his works on the burdens of science at the other side (Schetzina, 63).MethodologyThis research is an attempt of spectrum analysis in the light of the philosophical notions introduced by two French philosophers, Foucault and Lyotard, as Discourse Analysis and Postmodern Condition Approach for the two selected novels by Pynchon, V. and The Crying of Lot 49. ConclusionThe spectra of harmonics of the past events such as World War II and its consequences as the traumas, the roles of superstition, education, and discrimination and racism are studied as like as mechanical waves.
Mahdi Nezami; Farid Parvaneh
Abstract
IntroductionMartin Amis’s novels, Time’s Arrow (1991), and London Fields (1989) have many layers of interpretations including historical study by which scientific study may be distilled. Annealing, as a method in metallurgy science, can be taken into consideration for understanding one of ...
Read More
IntroductionMartin Amis’s novels, Time’s Arrow (1991), and London Fields (1989) have many layers of interpretations including historical study by which scientific study may be distilled. Annealing, as a method in metallurgy science, can be taken into consideration for understanding one of the aspects of the novels’ interpretation. The trend of life after passing the social, cultural and historical circulations based on Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault and their notions of knowledge, power and time is taken back to its original condition and culminates in recreation.Background StudiesSacido about Martin Amis’s works writes that he condensed the spirit of the times while looking back to authors of the canonical tradition in the form of inter-textual games (235). Johnson mentions that we can describe the mysteries of love as the result of strong annealing process while under the influence of some patterns can trigger high energy states (3).MethodologyThis paper is an attempt to reveal Martin Amis’s selected novels as the process of a dynamic trend by which the original condition is recreated as a result of being stuck in the social circulation. The character circulates in the process of society and achieves new acquired being.ConclusionThe main characters of the both novels have a return from death to life or form the synthesized identity to the original identity through the process of annealing as a result of resonance.
farid parvaneh; Hanieh Zaltash
Abstract
Abstract It could be argued that myths always have a salient role in the human’s life, in a sense that all the human’s intentions, motives, deeds, and judgments have their roots in myths. Seemingly, the death of myths causes the annihilation of the world. This research aims to divulge the ...
Read More
Abstract It could be argued that myths always have a salient role in the human’s life, in a sense that all the human’s intentions, motives, deeds, and judgments have their roots in myths. Seemingly, the death of myths causes the annihilation of the world. This research aims to divulge the portrait of myths and the hero’s journey in the technological world of William Gibson’s novels in order to reveal if the metamorphosis of the human to the post-human in the technological world could be considered as the adventure of the hero. On the other hand, the present study is based on the hypothesis that the traces of myths could be found in all times and in all places even in the technological world. William Gibson, who is a significant author of cyberpunk fictions, recreates the old myths through technological features. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to critically investigate the mythical elements, including the hero and the hero’s journey and examining them in William Gibson’s novels, Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) to delineate that Gibson portrays a novel picture of myths and indicates that myths underlie all the stories and narratives. Gibson’s view has its roots in Campbell’s ideas regarding the existence of myths in all places and all times. In his The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Campbell argues that the permanent presence of myths in human history demonstrates that “man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth” (3). Since, according to Campbell, all myths follow the same patterns, the individual can find himself and his status in regard to the myths of the world. He also claims that all the stories, narratives, and works of literature could be more comprehensible through scrutinizing ‘monomyth’ and ‘the adventure of the hero’ which are variously represented.