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Concessionaire Department of English Language and Literature, SBU

Managing Director Sasan Baleghizadeh (PhD, TEFL)

Editor-in-Chief Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim (PhD Candidate, TEFL)

Editorial Board TEFL Maryam Abbasi (MA, TEFL) Literature Hossein Mohseni (MA, English Literature)

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Website Design Maryam Marandi

Special Thanks to Sadegh Heydarbakian

Contributors Maryam Abbasi Ramin Ahmadi Ghiasuddin Alizadeh Nasrin Bedrood Hanane Divanbeige Mohammad Eghbali Alireza Jafari Reza Jalali Nahid Jamshidi Rad Masood Farvahar Kalkhoran Noushing Loghmani Khoozani Hossein Mohseni Fargol Parhizgar Arash Rahmani Mojgan Salmani Kourosh Shahhosseini Elnaz Shomali Saleh Tabatabai Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim Advisory Board Jalal Sokhanvar, Prof., Shahid Beheshti University Seyyed Abolghassem Fatemi Jahromi, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Kian Soheil, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Shideh Ahmadzadeh Heravi, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Amir Ali Nojoumian, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Mohammad Reza Anani Sarab, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Sara C. Ilkhani, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Alireza Jafari, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Shahriyar Mansouri, PhD, Shahid Beheshti University Sofia A. Koutlaki, PhD, Quran and Hadith University Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, PhD, the University of Tehran Hossein Mollanazar, PhD, Allameh Tabataba'i University Publisher Shahid Beheshti University Publishing House

Website http://www.sbu.ac.ir Indexed by noormags.com

Address Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences Shahid Beheshti University, Evin, Tehran, Iran Tel.: +982129902486 Email: threshold@mail.sbu.ac.ir

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Submission Guidelines • Threshold welcomes contributions of original (not previously published) works of interest in the disciplines of Translation Studies, English Language Teaching, English Literature and Comparative Studies along with related reports, news, profiles of eminent scholars, book reviews, and creative writings. • The contributors are expected to submit their works for the coming issue no later than 30 Tir, 1394. • Prospective authors are invited to submit their materials to the journal E-mail address: thresholdsbu@gmail.com • The manuscripts are evaluated by editors of each section and at least two referees from the advisory board. • The editors require the following format styles:

Informative title Abstract (150-200 words) Keywords (3-5 words) Introduction (500-800 words) Background or review of related literature (1500-2000 words) Methodology (500-700 words) Results and discussion (500-700 words) Notes and references

• The name of the author(s) should appear on the first page, with the present affiliation, full address, phone number, and current email address. • Microsoft word 2007 is preferred, using Times New Roman font and the size of 11 with single space between the lines for the abstracts and the same font size and line spacing for the body of the paper. Graphics can be in JPEG format. • Footnotes should only be used for commentaries and explanations, not for giving references. • All papers are required to follow the APA style for citations and references.

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Table of Contents - Editorial 1

Literary Studies

- Profile: Herbert Marshal McLuhan / Hossein Mohseni 5 - A Greimassian Reading of Rumi’s “The Tale of Sick Slave-Girl” / Masood Farvahar Kalkhoran 11

- An Overview on Word, Image and Adaptation in Literature and Cinema / Fargol Parhizgar 21

- John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and “Songs and Sonnets”: Unresolved Manifests of a Lost Man / Hossein Mohseni 31

English Language Teaching

- Profile: Lawrence Jun Zhang / Maryam Abbasi 47

- A Textbook Evaluation of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts in the American Headway Series / Reza Jalali 55

- How Much Attention Should Be Given to Vocabulary Knowledge in IELTS Reading Preparation Classes? / Noushin Loghmani Khouzani 69

- The 1000 Most Frequent English Words in Different Textbooks at Beginner Level / Ramin Ahmadi 87

Interview

- An Interview with Dr. Ataollah Hassani on History, New Historicism, and Historical Novels / Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim 101

Army of Letters

- Translation: Two Famous Poems / Alireza Jafari 111

- Translation: A Way to the Purification of the Soul from the Impurities / Mojgan Salmani 115

- Translation: The Raven / Elnaz Shomali 119

- Poem: The Burden / Masood Farvahar Kalkhoran 127

- Poem: Subway Poetry / Saleh Tabatabai 128

- Short Story: Secret Meeting in the Basement of My Brain / Mohammad Eghbali 129

- Short Story: Ice Age / Hanane Divanbeige 131

Translation Challenge

- Profile: Mohtasham Kashani 137

- Took My Beloved the World / Nahid Jamshidi Rad 138

- The Universe Took My Beloved Away / Hossein Mohseni 139

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- The Universe Snatched My Beloved / Nasrin Bedrood 140

- Next Issue Translation Challenge 141

Views and Reviews

- Play: Transference in Peter Shaffer’s Equus / Ghiasuddin Alizadeh 145

- Art: The Value of Art / Arash Rahmani 157

- Play: A Review of A Man for All Seasons’ Adaptation in Tehran / Nahid Jamshidi Rad 161

- Short Story: A Reader-Response Reading of “Araby” / Hossein Mohseni 167

- Book: A Review of Noël Carroll's On Criticism / Saleh Tabatabai 173

- Seminar: A Short Review of the Introductory Session on "504 Words Quiz" / Kourosh Shahhosseini 185

Threshelf

- A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory 193

- Fifty Key Literary Theorists 194

- Key Concepts in Literary Theory 195

- Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action 196

- Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing: Principles and Techniques 197

- Comparing Teachers' Views on Grammar with Those of Their Students 198

- Farsi Abstracts 199

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Editorial

Thank God that another issue of Threshold is now out in due course. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our advisory board, editorial team, and all our contributors, without whom our journal would have never reached where it is today. I am especially glad to see that our undergraduate students' interest in Threshold is growing and that more and more contributions - particularly creative writings and literary translations - are coming from them. We have never restricted our journal to rigid academic frameworks and have always welcomed novelty and innovation. This, I assume many of you will agree, is one of our distinctive features.

One of the innovations that we tried out in this issue was to take a thematic approach in the selection of our academic papers. As you can see in our Table of Contents, all three TEFL papers are on content/textbook analysis. Although very desirable at first sight, this method suffers from a major practical drawback: It is often very difficult to select three decent papers on the same subject from the limited number of submissions we receive for each issue. We hope, however, that we will be able to continue this trend in our later issues as well.

Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim

Editor-in-Chief

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Literary Studies

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Profile

Herbert Marshal McLuhan By Hossein Mohseni

Born in Edmonton, Herbert Marshal McLuhan (1911- 1980) studied at The University of Manitoba, where he completed a BA in 1933, and an MA with a thesis on George Meredith in 1934, before moving to The University of Cambridge, where he studied with F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards and gained his next BA in 1936. McLuhan began teaching at St Louis University in 1937, the same year that he converted to Catholicism; the significance of this conversion is apparent in the media theorist Arthur Kroker’s assessment that ‘McLuhan’s mind represents one of the best syntheses yet achieved of the Catholic legacy’.3 During his time at St Louis, McLuhan was working on his doctorate on Nashe, called The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, completed and awarded by the University of Cambridge in 1943. Moving to Windsor, Ontario, in 1944, McLuhan worked at Assumption College before gaining a post at St Michael’s College, The University of Toronto, in 1946, where he was to remain for the rest of his academic life.

It may seem bizarre to today’s technophiles to learn that McLuhan’s thought is rooted in the trivium, the lower division of the medieval liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric and logic (the higher division, the quadrivium, consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). ‘Trivium’ is Latin for a crossroads where three streets intersect: in 1967, over two decades after his doctoral thesis, McLuhan would write of a new type of crossroads, one that transgressed. The crossroads can be traced elsewhere in McLuhan’s thought: in his interest in the modernism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, as well as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, and in the French symbolists of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Mallarmé and Valéry, which crossed with his interests in New Criticism and Catholic thought.

The eternal return to McLuhan begins with such recognition, and various virtual McLuhans repeatedly surface in today’s digital domain as different groups

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reinvent themselves electronically through such leading media gurus. The ‘tribalism’ that results from the creation of the electronic global village is also an ethical responsibility; as McLuhan argues, minority groups can no longer be ignored, and through the commitment and participation of electronic media ‘we have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other’.

Theories and Cast of Mind Punning that one of his books was a ‘collide-oscope of interfaced

situations, Marshall McLuhan hints at how his conceptual terrain needs to be viewed: through multiple lenses that bring different views of his life and work into collision and contrast. McLuhan’s most infamous phrase – ‘the medium is the message’ – is viewed again, from the perspective of the media working us over completely, to become ‘the medium is the massage’. Technology, which has so often been perceived as a fundamental threat to human existence, is explored from another perspective by McLuhan, as the extensions of humanity, prefiguring much current thought concerning cybernetics and robotics. McLuhan’s stock rises and falls with each wave of literary and media theorists who rediscover and critique his work, revealing a process of McLuhanesque eternal return, the point being that McLuhan’s insights into the modern media-based world remain more relevant for a wide range of consumers, than other passing theoretical trends. In other words, McLuhan’s sound-bites remain in circulation and are variously and voraciously recycled.

McLuhan developed the terms ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ medium to describe these two realms: a hot medium is one that is data rich, a cool one being of low definition and data poor; hot media do most of the work for the audience, whereas cool media demand audience work and what McLuhan calls participation. Contrary to many commentators on television, McLuhan regards TV as a cool medium, whereas print, in its fomenting of nationalism and religious unrest, is a hot medium. McLuhan warns against comparing television with film or photography, since with television, the viewer, bombarded with light, is the screen. Film and photography have exceptionally high-definition images; for McLuhan, the low-definition tele-visual image is not deficient or substandard, rather, it is instead a fundamental difference: that of a mosaic pattern, unconsciously reconfigured by the viewer to create an abstract, sculptural and iconic form. McLuhan takes this a step further, to argue that there is a difference between visual and mosaic space. The world of literacy extended visual power in terms of information organization but also led to detachment and noninvolvement; visual power is isolating and isolated in its modes of

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representation, whereas the mosaic is an instantaneous synesthesia of all the senses, and is primarily a non representational extension of the sense of touch.

Deducing from such technological observations, he believes that a hot medium, such as radio or print culture, could have agitated or aroused the people following such political and personal tragedies, leading to unrest and possible anarchy, but a cool medium, in its total absorption and involvement of the people in a ritualistic mourning of which they fully partake, also calms the people in an act of catharsis or psychic massaging. Hot media arouse people to perform or at the least desire cathartic acts in the future, such as political insurrection, whereas cool media fulfill people in the here-and-now in a constant succession of immediate occurrences.

Major Works

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) is a text where graphic space and design massively disrupt the linearity of print culture, mainly through the techniques of close-up and magnification/blow-up. Other effects abound, including the fact that the original printing of the book was done in two different formats, leading to a doubling that points out identifies the residual role of tactility within the visual. Pages in the book are printed upside down, text is treated as graphic image free from the linearity of type, advertisements, cartoons and iconic images from popular culture overpower more conventional pictures, image repetitions overpower fragmented phrases and sentences, and quotations become more important than conventional notions of primary text. The text simultaneously has a modernity and a slightly sixties feel about it; it also may

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have lost much of its shock value due to the multitude of imitations that have since followed.

The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) is a series of pithy observations that analyses of North American advertisements, which figure the mechanization and fragmentation of all aspects of intellectual and emotional life.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) announces McLuhan’s presence on the international cultural scene. In this book, he argues

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that the development of typography leads to a visual realm of culture, one where the psychodynamics of print is making way for that of the auditory spaces of the new electronic media. What is revolutionary about this argument is the fact that for McLuhan, print culture facilitates the organization of a spatial continuum through linear progression, whereas the new electronic, auditory culture, in effect, abolishes the space-time continuum because of its instantaneity and simultaneity. Electric technology is instant and omnipresent and creates multiple centers without margins.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) explores revolutionary modes in the realms of clothing, housing, money, photography, advertising, games and television, to list just some of the chapters.

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A Greimassian Reading of Rumi’s “The Tale of Sick Slave-Girl”

Masood Farvahar Kalkhoran English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract The following article represents a Gremassian reading of one of the famous poems of Rumi, one of the international figures of the Persian poetry. The reading will focus on exegetical aspect of Greimas’s model and identify sender, receiver, object, subject, helper and opponent figures as the actants of the poem so that a hermeneutic reading of the poem can be utilized on the basis of the analysis and one could observe how far Greimas has come from a Proppian reading to a structuralist reading model. To accomplish its objective and depict Greimas’s byzantine model in practice, a number of graphic representations are implemented in the article.

Keywords: Greimas, Rumi, Masnavi, Actant, Sender, Receiver, Opponent, Helper, Subject, Object

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Introduction There has been a genealogy of readings, interpretations and even exegetical elucidations of Rumi’s Masnavi both by Oriental (Iranian, Turkish and Afghan) scholars and by Western devotees of Islamic mysticism and Sufism and both groups in, one way or another, focused their readings of Rumi’s verse narratives on the sublime content of the poems or the Mystic-Sufic ideologies of Rumi himself. This paper aims to magnify the structural bedrock of the narrative of “Tale of Sick Slave-Girl” which begins the Book One of Rumi’s magnum opus; in doing so, Greimas’s “actantial models” would provide the blueprint to define, detect and place the “actants” and their correspondent “acteurs”. In the course of following the narrative, Sufic and mystical doctrines would be brought unto stage to show how Greimassian narrative model and Rumi's use of these doctrines systematically overlap.

Greimas’s implicit dissatisfaction with Vladimir Propp’s model of active factors in narratives’ inner workings and its less than enough intrinsic structuralism led him to develop and introduce his so called “actantial model”. According to Greimas, like language, the grammar of narratives is finite. The attempt to describe the grammar of narratives lies at the heart of the structuralist enterprise (Le Bihan, 1996, p. 64). His point of departure is to define a basic structure whereby the meaning or narration can start to emerge (Bertens, 2005, p. 69). Greimas in his Structural Semantics introduces six actants which by their interconnections and interactions carry out whatever that seems meaning-making in any narrative. The core notion behind Greimas’s model is that he believes, according to Tyson’s wordings, “…the forwarding of the plot-the movement from conflict to resolution, struggle to reconciliation, separation to union and so forth- involves the transfer of some entity (a quality or an object) from one actant to another.” (p. 225)

Greimassian Analytical Elements Rumi’s Poem In Greimassian model the main actant of Subject “desire[s]” the actant of Object. This basic narrative action is neatly embodied in the stories, here tales, involving quests of the hero to achieve some noble objective or the winning of whomever he desires to possess (The king’s desiring the handmaid in “The Tale of Sick Slave-Girl” is handy example where, “When he beheld a slave-girl near the fray/His soul became her servant straight away!”).This very elemental driving force of the narrative corresponds to the elemental narrative of the quest of the Sufi or mystic in the Path of love (tarîqat) (Nicholson, 1914, p. 21). In a lower level of significance in the narrative up come the interactions between Sender and Receiver actants that come in concrete forms in tale of communication (Tyson, 1999, p. 225), where a significant decider in position of power (a god or

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a mentor) sends the Subject in a quest of the Object (the beloved, the guarantor of the wellbeing of the state or in a Sufic-mystic context, the union of body and soul, creator and create or in the case of the “Tale of Sick Slave-Girl” the Stranger Saint in King’s dream, the Old Man embodying God). And as it goes in bulk of ancient narratives the Hero is not always entitled to smooth and worry-free path of winning the beloved or achieving the assigned objectives; hindrances may arise, demons, evil spirits, corrupt step siblings and alike oppose his or her noble aspirations. Helper and Opponent actants fulfill these roles, especially as in subplots of quest and communication plots where they disturb, hinder or even deceive the Hero/Subject role in his course of heroism (Schmitz, 2007, p. 48-51).

The following figure (Hawkes, 1972, pp. 92-93) roughly visualizes idea of interactions among different actants and acteurs:

Mawlana’s narrative of “Tale of Sick Slave-Girl” opening Book One of Masnavi is the tale of A prince or a King, the Greimassian acteur of Subject actant, who while occupied in a hunting excursion, glimpsed of a beautiful maiden who for the time being embodies the Object of the King’s desire and in Greimassian terms the materialized for of the Object actant, and as goes the staple of such narratives, the King fell in love with her, and in alignment with Oriental bonds, bought her and brought her to his province and grants her whatever happiness he, as the King of his domain, could have possibly provided. All these measures backfire, “[b]ut just when he had signed and sealed this trade / By fate an illness overcame the maid: / Like buying saddles for your mule one day/To find that wolves have chased it far away!/ Or fetching water with your finest pot/For it to smash, as if there’s been a plot!” And his favors fail to bring happiness to the Slave-girl; she refused to surrender before his desires (embodying the Opponent actant) and after a while she fell severely sick. Here the Slave-Girl shaking off her guise of the Object of the King’s Desire, puts on another one, which is that of the Opponent, hindering of the fulfillment of King’s passion, making the King’s quest-and-achievement endeavor a failure so far. The King, now as the Sender

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actant, had her examined by the best Healers available. The Healers, brought unto stage by King, operate as Helper actants, tried their best, posing to be fully confident of their worldly expertise, they did not deem the Slave-girl’s sickness as a major challenge, and stated: Sure! Not a major challenge, we will definitely cure her. However, they all omitted to say, “Insha’Allah” “if God Wills” Alas! Their treatment was of no avail. The girl was getting worse day after day.

Mawlana says:

As one they said, ‘Our lives we’ll sacrifice,

We will confer and seek from all advice,

We’re the messiahs for the world’s distress,

A salve for every wound we each possess.’

They skipped ‘If God wills’ through their arrogance

So God revealed through them Man’s impotence:

Again here the Healers acteurs pose to fill the position of Helper actants, but soon they end up being the Opponent elements in the course of the tale. The bent in this phase of narrative stems from what Greimas terms the “Contractual” structure of events, in which some instances of breaking or insulting of agreements or an occasion of alienation or reconciliation are at work (Tyson, 1999, p. 226). The narrative, so far, has undergone an actantial crisis; in that, the Subject King not only fails to achieve the Object Slave-Girl, but he has to surrender his prime position as the main role and adopt the role of the sender and wait for the well-becoming the Slave-Girl, which is the twice the labor and near nothing fulfillment of his passion for the Slave-Girl: smashing of the pot or the wolf’s chasing the newly saddled steed. This escalation of the operating actants’ position could be depicted by the following diagrams; the first one is the normal well-expected-for procession of events with the King successfully enjoying the embrace of the Slave-Girl and the other portrays the situation of the actants according to the what Rumi’s narrative gives us:

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The Slave-Girl now adopts the dual role of Opponent-Object of King’s desire with the difference in hierarchical value of her role; this acteur role as Opponent stands above her role as Object of Desire actant at this moment of narrative, blocking the fulfillment of the common-sense line of Rumi’s narrative, thus twisting the plot and breaching the well-expected-for contract of happy-ending (folk-) tales. The King, having seen the incompetence of the Healers in curing his concubine:

After he watched them fail each single day

The king ran barefoot to the mosque to pray,

Confessing at the prayer-niche all his fears

He drenched the rug beneath him with his tears;

When from annihilation’s trance he woke

With prayers the Lord he started to invoke:

Towards A Greimassian Interpretation of the Poem According to Nicholson , the King reaches another level of acknowledgement of the Divine interference and gains The Gnosis, “The Sûfîs distinguish three organs of spiritual communication: the heart (qalb), which knows God; the spirit (rûh),which loves Him; and the inmost ground of the soul (sirr),which contemplates Him. These all in one way or another operate in parallel with the

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King’s communication with God and the Stranger Saint, the Slave-Girls as the sought-for soul (p. 49).

These three lines open up another phase of the narrative with new operating actants working with the former ones. The King acteur himself fulfills starts another quest as the natural result of his former quest which is the riddle-solving one. He and his assigned Healers have breached the rites of the passage in his quest and they required to acknowledge the over commanding power involved; the God of the tale or the Sufic-mystic destination; the supreme Riddle Solver. He observes the rules, goes to mosque and prays. Here we have the Sender, the Old man in King’s dream God the Receiver King and the Object of Desire Stranger Aid from God as the dominant actant pattern at this phase of the narrative.

Here the pattern of arrogance-punishment, repentance-reward starts to emerge, as the King receives the Stranger Saint from God. The King had learned that the real source of the Slave-Girl’s illness was her love for a certain Goldsmith in Samarkand, who had previously bought her, kept her around for a few months and then sold her to someone else; Mawlana writes: “Her pulse felt stable to his knowing hand/ Until he asked the girl of Samarkand––/ Her pulse increased to rates beyond compare,/ She’d been kept from a certain goldsmith there!/ Once the physician solved this mystery/ He found the source of her deep agony.” She was in love with his physical attractiveness, could not part with him, and was unable to endure the Goldsmith’s deceit and exploitation of her. Incapable to deny and denounce her beloved (the Goldsmith), she was rejecting truthful love of the King. From now on the narrative lands on the normal starting point plain of actants as the following table represents:

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The King sends for the Goldsmith who now acts as both the Opponent and Helper to the narrative based on the purpose the Subject actant wants him to play. The Goldsmith can be the Helper in that, he can contribute to the wellbeing of the Slave-Girl and be the Opponent if he acts as the hindrance between the consummation of love between the King and the Slave-Girl. With the reunion of the Slave-Girl with the Goldsmith of Samarkand the objective of the King and the Stranger Saint is fulfilled, the well-being of the Slave-Girl is guaranteed for the time being and another phase of the sub-plot of the Slave-Girl’s history finished. Mawlana then refers back to the backbone story of the King, the Subject and his Desire for her. Again the basic line of Subject desiring Object is back into action. The Saint maintaining his functions the Helper and the mediator between the King and the over-commanding God, embarks on another procedure in helping the Subject actant which is to deal with the Goldsmith; in doing so the Stranger Saint gradually poisons the Goldsmith causing him to deteriorate in beauty and strength so that the Slave-Girl might reject his out of disgust and repulsion:

But then the groom was poisoned in a plot,

She saw the doctor’s potion make him rot:

Through sickness he lost all his youthfulness,

Each day his looks got worse, her love grew less,

He soon became so ugly, pale, and old

That she could feel her heart becoming cold––

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The Goldsmith acteur embodies the Helper-Opponent actant simultaneously and perspectival; that is to say, his being alive and harmony with the Slave-Girl as the Opponent actant and his murder as helping the King reclaim the Slave-Girl. Slave-Girl herself undergoes a real of experience depicted in the following diagram:

The story comes to its happy ending according to the common-sense logic of the (folk)tales in which the outstanding elements of the story, the Greimassian Subject and Object of desire reach the sphere of harmony and reunion that according to Nicholson, “ Whatever terms may be used to describe it, the unitive state (fanâ) (Greimassian Fulfillment of Subject’s Desire) is the culmination of the purifying process by which the soul is gradually isolated from all that is foreign to itself (Tyson, 1999, p. 227), from all that is not God (Greimassian Object). A parallel reading of Greimassian Subject and elemental proponents of a classic Sufic-mystic tale shows more than accidental overlapping of Greimassian actantial model with the centuries-old rites of passage of the Sufi to whatever source of unity or closure or conclusion he seeks. The aforementioned claim could be better visualized with the following figures.

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Conclusion The Greimassian Subject or initiator of the tale corresponds to the Sufic-mystic traveler and initiator of the of the desiring Salik; both are the decisive centers of the action of the narrative, both aim their desire at some Object that sets the mechanism of the narrative on whether these Subjects succeed or fail in their pursuits of the Object, and both as the creator and operator of what comes as the narration runs, becomeinvolved in subplots, or different paths that either help or hinder their objective. In this context two Greimassian actants of Helper and Opponent operate in parallel with the Sufi-mystic concepts of Certainty and Doubt (Nicholson, 1914, p. 43). The King of Mawlana’s tale doubts the rites of unity with the object (punitive state embodied in God concept, according to Nicholson) and invests that certainty in the knowledge of the faking Helpers, namely the material Healers; and this very king, with the aid of the actant of Helper, materialized in the existence of the Stranger Saint acteur comes back to the path leading him back to the Object. Throughout the quest of the King or Greimassian Subject, like that of the Sufi-mystic experiences of joy, pain, boredom and ecstasy, both motivate and discourage the Subject in his moving toward or astray from the Desired Object. The ḥāl experience (the sudden illumination of the heart) of the King in the narrative of the Slave-Girl especially after having been addressed by the Helper is more than similar in its function with the Greimassian Subject’s success in negotiating the Opponent and cooperating with the Helper actant that proves that this paper in its argument that Greimas’ Actantial model compared to classic notions of Sufism and mysticism, are both one frame of analysis of narrative performance, namely the actants, with two verbal representation with seemingly irrelevant terminology and never-meeting ideologies.

References Bertens, H. (2005). Literary theory. New York: Routledge.

Burckhardt, T. (2008). Introduction to sufi doctrine. Indiana: World Wisdom.

Hawkes, T. (1972). Structuralism and semiotics. Berkley: University of California Press.

Le Bihan, K. (1996). Critical theory and practice. New York: Routledge.

Nicholson, R. (1914). A mystics of Islam. London: G Bells and Sons.

Rumi, J. A. (2004). Masnavī: Book one. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmitz, T. (2007). A modern literary theory and ancient texts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Tyson, L. (1999). Critical theory today: A user-friendly guide. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.

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An Overview on Word, Image and Adaptation in Literature and Cinema

Fargol Parhizgar English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract In the present study, the relationship between literature and cinematic adaptations will be reviewed. After representing a short historical review on the emergence of cinema, the encroachment of each realm into one another will be observed. After recognizing historical amelioration of cinematic techniques, this study will regard such utilizations as indices of discursive formations in both cinema and literature. In order to support its postulations, the present study utilizes a number of scholarly observations so that the sense of mutual affinity between cinema and literature can be corroborated historically and academically.

Keywords: Adaptation, Intertitle, Film, Cinema, Novel

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Literature has always been considered a way to enter the world of the imagination. From the time of Plato in whose Republic poets were banned because of their “dangerous” (Miller, 2002, p. 87) imitation of what is not real, which “contaminates” (Miller, 91) readers in leading them to “pretend to be something or someone other than they are” (Miller, 2002, p. 91) to Miller who thinks of literature as a “virtual reality” (Miller, 2002, p. 24) through whose eyes “we see the world […] we then act in the real world on the basis of that seeing” (Miller, 2002, p. 20) literature on the one hand is considered as an “imaginative invention” (Lamarque, 2009, p. 52), with the help of which readers are “enraptured” and “drawn forcibly” out of themselves into “another realm” (Miller, 2002, p. 29). On the other hand, literature has always been associated with the part it plays in the representation of ideology. Literature “as a historical and ideological category” (Culler, 1997, p. 35) reflects the social and political atmosphere in which it is created. Literature with its “performative language makes things happen by its readers” (Miller, 2002, p. 20); in fact, reading literature is “the quickest way to become acculturated” (Miller, 2002, p. 90) to be “better people” through the “free and disinterested exercise of an imaginative faculty that combines knowing and judging in the right relation” (Culler, 1997, p. 37). The invention of cinema and film making have been controversial to the continuance of literature as the ruling medium in providing people with the representations of reality, the imitations of the world, and the imaginative realms. As Miller puts it, “printed literature used to be a primary way in which citizens of a given nation state were inculcated with the ideals, ideologies, ways of behavior and judgment that made them good citizens” (Miller, 2002, p. 9), but now this is done most of all by cinema. Literature being the oldest form while cinema only “has existed for a hundred years” (Tibbetts, 2005, p. xv), early filmmakers turned to literary properties for inspiration. These two realms while constantly affecting each other have at the same time been in clash. According to Kamilla Elliott, “novels and films are opposed as ‘words’ and ‘images’” (Elliott, 2004, p. 1). Although the “word/ image war” (Elliott, 2004, p. 1) plays a role in shaping the definitions of literature and cinema throughout the last century, the important part literature has in the shaping and improving cinema by making adaptation one of cinema’s attractive genres cannot be denied. At the same time cinema has made significant changes and brought about innovations in literature’s ways of narration. The purpose of this essay is to acquaint the reader with the history of the clashes between these two mediums. This history will inevitably lead to the ways in which these two affect each other while being separate worlds without ever the chance of one resolving and disappearing into the other. In order to have a run down on this epochal clash between literature and cinematic apparatuses, the issue of adaptation will be considered as an assumptive ford between literary

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and cinematic images and fruition of words into cinematic incarnations will be observed.

A Historical Insight on the Emergence of Cinema The silent film “during the pre World War I era before the extensive use of intertitles, dialogue titles, and sound technology” was “an international medium” thought to be able to “bring literary properties to a public that otherwise would not bother to read” literature (Tibbetts, 2005, p. xv). Cinema from the very beginning was considered different because of its potentiality of “transporting” (Marcus, 2007, p. 19) the spectators from the routines of their daily life “hovering in time” (Marcus, 2007, p. 18) into “a more restricted and yet a more expanded world” (Marcus, 2007, p. 18). The word comes from the Greek word “Kinema with its dual connotation of motion and emotion” (Marcus, 2007, p. 19). Laura Marcus believes that in this era, “The spectator could go to the movie in order to learn how to talk in the imagination, and how, too, to revive dialogue within his or her own body without the need of interlocutors” (Marcus, 2007, p. 9). According to Marcus “the belief in body’s ability” to represent the inner feelings later developed to the ideal gesture and physical expressiveness in symbolist, expressionist and avant-garde theatre, with its return to the conceptions of the power of non-verbal drama to recreate primal emotions (Marcus, 2007, p. 10). Jean Epstein saw cinema as producing “thought because, it was able to generate new and unprecedented forms and relations of time and space” (Marcus, 2007, p. 4). The early 1900s reviewers “heralded film as a cure for the Tower of Babel” which is later articulated by Christian Metz that “visual perception varies less throughout the world than languages do” (Elliott, 2004, p. 5). The power of cinema was in its ability to “renew the sense of sight…to recapture and transmit primitive emotions, such as fear, anger, joy, and sadness in a direct and unmediated fashion” (Marcus, 2007, p. 7). Nevertheless, “discursive approaches” have always “rendered cinema as a hybrid form, combining the representational devices of the verbal and the visual, the word and the image” (Marcus, 2007, p. 8).

Film’s images from the very beginning have been considered as its “language” (Elliott, 2004, p. 6), which “speaks for itself. It even screams” (Elliott, 2004, p. 6). Filmmakers had considered “filmic representation as one entirely free from verbal language”; therefore, attributing to it a “semiotic purism” (Marcus, 2007, p. 9). The addition of intertitles to the images of films led to an outrage. These intertitles, and later spoken dialogue, were considered a “reinfestation of film by literature” (Elliott, 2004, p. 12). Critics believed that words do not belong to film to the extent that one reviewer as cited by Elliott thought of intertitles as “literary hemorrhages” (Elliott, 2004, p. 12). Moreover,

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Elliott cites from Leonid Skrypnyk that, “cinema has to humiliate itself and seek compromises [with literature]. Intertitles constitute the first major compromise” (Elliott, 2004, p. 12). Therefore, the dominant belief for long had been that words “interfere with and disturb the image” (Elliott, 2004, p. 3). According to Elliott even Christian Metz, the most famous film semiotician of the twentieth century, “does not allow the presence of film words as a definitive element of film” though he acknowledges the presence of them (Elliott, 2004, p. 3). Metz believes, “Speech, noise, and music were annexed at a later time, but film was born with image discourse” (Elliott, 2004, p. 3).

Cinema / Literature and Inevitable Infringements Literature on the other hand has always been the world of words. Miller believes that “each literary work opens up a singular world attainable in no other way than by reading that work” (Miller, 2002, p. 118). Words are for Miller the basis on which the literary world can be created by the reader. Therefore, each reader’s reading leads to an imaginary world with an “unquestionable authority” (Miller, 2002, p. 118). The reason why for some people the experience of watching a movie adapted from a novel they have read is unbelievably unbearable is that they do not want to shatter the world they have made through the struggle of their imagination with words. Miller puts this idea beautifully when he says, “reading, like being in love, is by no means a passive act. […] one must give all one’s faculties to recreating the work’s imaginary world as fully and as vividly as possible within oneself” (Miller, 2002, p. 120). While the major constituent parts of literary works are their words “nineteenth century novelists and critics” strived to “claim pictorial capacities for prose words” (Elliott, 2004, p. 7). Marcus believes that many popular artists like, “Zola, Dickens, Tolstoy, Turner, Degas, Wagner” created a “cinematic vision before the invention of moving pictures, a space and time machine of the imagination” (Marcus, 2007, p. 19). In addition to the cinematic narration of the authors Marcus names illustrations were added to the novels in order to emphasize the importance of the similarity between a novel’s prose and painting. Elliott cites from Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1843 that, “to my mind, a writer should sit down to compose a fiction as a painter prepares to compose a picture” (Elliott, 2004, p. 7). Elliott further continues that:

prose painting analogies pervade nineteenth century periodical reviews of novels to such an extent that it is difficult to find one that does not speak of prose in terms of painting, or of characterizations as portraits, or of the novel as a canvas, or of

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prose style in terms of painting schools, or of writers by analogy to well-known painters.

The illustrations of novels like the intertitles of films underwent cruel criticism. Elliott mentions several of these criticisms; one of which is made by Henry James “declaring prose sufficiently pictorial to do without illustration at all” (Elliott, 2004, p. 9):

A [drawn] picture by another hand on my own [prose] picture is a lawless incident…that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself .

Later while illustrations were eliminated from the books “literary film adaptation was heralded as a superior form of book illustration” (Elliott, 2004, p. 10), and gradually “the rhetoric evolves into one of word against image, with novels and theater cast into the word camp and film into the image camp” (Elliott, 2004, p. 10). Elliot cites a review of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 Lady Windemere’s Fan that, “a good story can be made a better picture…sheerly through cinematic qualities…when it does this, it is doing what is beyond the power of the written work in the books and the spoken word on the stage” (Elliott, 2004, p. 10). Keith Cohen wrote of literary film adaptation as “seeing words changed into images” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2). In the midst of great tendencies towards adapting novels into films the novelists found themselves confined to adapt their writing styles to the methods of film narration. Elliott brings an example from Leo Tolstoy who wrote in 1908 that, “It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary” (Elliot, 2004, p. 10).

This new form of writing according to Bluestone demanded an immediate visual and dramatic narrative, “the novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological realities” (Elliott, 2004, p. 10). Elliott believes that literary critics found this new mode of narration “unfilmable” due to the “superiority of mental images derived from words over actual pictures” (Elliott, 2004, p. 10). John Orr in his essay substitutes the term “picture-book” for “literary film adaptation”, and believes that a picture book “graphically reminds us of textual power”, and therefore, “restores the primacy of the word over the image” (Elliott, 2004, p. 11). There are many critics and scholars who

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“demonstrate intertextual exchanges between twentieth century novels and films” arguing that “modern novels were shaped by cinematic techniques, like ellipsis, temporal discontinuity, fragmented vision, cross cutting, and multiple viewpoints” (Elliott, 2004, p. 4). Jean Epstein, an avant-garde writer and filmmaker, argued in 1921 that, “in modern literature…everything moves…in an aesthetic of mental rapidity or seeing quickly” (Marcus, 2007, p. 2). Marcus brings two examples of the novelists whose works were influenced by cinematic techniques: Virginia Woolf and H. G. Wells. According to Marcus “To the Lighthouse represents, like Wells’s early fiction, forms of time-travel and the passage of time-tunnel between past, present, and future; Mrs Dalloway is, in its way, as much a celebration of movement in and through city spaces as Wells’s technological and futurological city fantasies” (Marcus, 2007, p. 11).

On the other hand, the influence of literary narration, especially the Victorian novels’ narrative traditions, on the formation of the visual characteristics of cinema should not be forgotten. Elliott argues “Victorian novel illustration practices offer precursors of film montage” (Elliott, 2004, p. 14). Montage is a way to differentiate film from “static visual arts and forms a pictorial equivalent of verbal language, as in the novel”. Vanity Fair’s illustrations in chapter 1 as examples offered by Elliott provide readers with “angles and perspectives of the carriage and characters in various sizes” (Elliott, 2004, p. 14). Elliott summarizes the remarks of Sergei Eisenstein, a filmmaker and film theorist, saying that “from the Victorian novel stem the first shoots of the American film esthetic” (Elliott, 2004, p. 4), and that what shaped Western film techniques were “Victorian novel’s attention to visual detail, empirical psychology, atmospheric close-ups, altering omniscient and character viewpoints, and shifts from one group of characters to another” (Elliott, 2004, p. 4).

Amelioration of Cinematic Techniques and Graphic Adaptations and Their Implications on Cinema/Literature Transactions

With the invention of montage and the integration of sound into the scenes another opposition was directed against words as being “film’s literature” (Elliott, 2004, p.11). Historian Gerald Mast says, “the early sound film became the vassal of the theatre once again…the moving picture stopped moving and stopped using pictures. Critics and directors sang a requiem for film art and said amen” (Elliott, 2004, p. 12). Therefore, in order to defy the presence of sound effects some critics and filmmakers began to emphasize the improvement films could make upon the literary texts. One example is “Edison’s 1915 film of Vanity Fair” which “does not include a single line of Thackeray’s prose (only place and

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character names remain)” for the readers to decide for themselves whether it is an improvement on Thackeray’s prose (Elliott, 2004, p. 13).

Therefore, throughout different periods attempts have been made to fuse cinematic techniques into literary ones to connect cinema to literature and emphasize the primacy of literature over cinema, whose popularity was deemed dangerous to the existence of literature. And all of these “foster various interdisciplinary rivalries from resenting film words as literary encroachments, to castigating film words as bad literature, to subjugating film words to literary modes of improvement” (Elliott, 2004, p. 13). Although “no scholar denies that films contain words and that novels, illustrated or not, engage in pictorial and create spatial effects” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2) they believe the prior characteristic of each should not be forgotten; “without visual images there would be no film. Without language there would be no novel” (Elliott, 2004, p. 3).

Adherents of literature look at literary adaptations skeptically and consider literary classics “beyond the resources of film” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 4). Helen Garner claims that “a great novel’s central energy is its narrative voice…and nothing available to mainstream cinema…can translate the authority of that voice” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 4). Virginia Woolf in her essay, “The Cinema”, after describing the excitement and fascination of watching films undermines literary adaptation:

The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says 'Here is Anna Karenina.' A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.' For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet… So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. None of these things has the least connection with the novel that Tolstoy wrote (Woolf, 1926, p. 2).

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Encountering an adaptation of a classic, one expects the film to be exactly like its literary version; “the film is only really valuable as it approximates the precursor literary text” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 4). When viewing a film version of a novel there is “a yearning for fidelity”; the urge to “find in the film what were valuable in the literary work, without asking whether this is the sort of thing film can do” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 6). McFarlane repudiates “a slavish devotion to the original text” and compares such an adaptation to “the work of an industrious bricklayer rather than an architect, with one event from the novel remorselessly following another, without any sense of shape or structuring” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 8).

Literature, Cinema and Discursive Formations Literature and cinema have always been regarded as “modes of expression. Sites and ways of manifestation of an ability to give shape to ideas, feelings, and personal orientations” (Casetti, 2004, p. 81). However, paying attention to them as “sites of production and the circulation of discourses” and “discursive formations” (Casetti, 2004, p. 82) are more revealing of their effect on the societies. Francesco Casetti defines adaptation as “a reappearance” which “is a new discursive event that locates itself in a certain time and space in society, one that, at the same time, carries within itself the memory of an earlier discursive event” (Casetti, 2004, p. 82). Therefore, for him “the development of a new communicative situation” matters more than similarities between the adaptation and the original work (Casetti, 2004, p. 82). The important thing, Casetti believes, is to pay attention to the ways the texts “appear to provide us with useful information for our life-world” or how they entertain us, and how “they establish connections with previous discourses” (Casetti, 2004, p. 84). For him “to present a story that has already been told”, adaptation, means “to explore how cinema is capable of renewing and intensifying the relationship between text, representation, and spectatorship” (Casetti, 2004, p. 84); therefore, to adapt is to “re-program the reception of a story; the second life of a text coincides with a second life of reception” (Casetti, 2004, p. 85). To illuminate what he means by “re-programming”, Casetti brings the example of Luhrmann’s adaptation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which only connections between the two are the reappearance of the same title and the repetition of original lines; however, “while the lines are the same, their reading changes” (Casetti, 2004, p. 85). In fact, Luhrmann’s film “presents an entirely different communicative situation” most of all “in the way in which it positions the spectator”; the change from play to film “the social function of the spectacle” changes (Casetti, 2004, p. 85). Casetti’s suggestion is to consider cinema and literature as “sites of production and circulation of discourses” and to connect them to other social discourses “in order to trace a network of texts, within which we can identify the accumulation

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or dispersion…, the emergence and the disappearance of some themes and issues” (Casatti, 2004, p. 90). Thomas M. Leitch has the same idea; Donald M. Whaley summarizes Leitch’s argument that “we live in a ‘culture marked by the traces of thousands of texts’ and that any ‘original’ novel from which a film is adapted itself has an infinite number of sources, which he labels ‘intertexts’. He calls for adaptation studies to be transformed into ‘intertextual studies, in which every text is a rereading of earlier texts and every text, whether it poses as an original or an adaptation, has the same claim to aesthetic or ontological privilege as any other’” (Whaley, 2007, p. 35). Cardwell also repudiates “fidelity criticism” and hopes for “a noncomparative approach to adaptations” believing that comparison either “leads us to false expectations about the film’s intentions…judging it by the standards of the book” or it “leads us to focus too narrowly on some aspects over others and to ignore other relevant contextual factors” (Cardwell, 2007, p. 52). McFarlane calls for a film training for he thinks “knowledge of the strategies of film narration or enunciation becomes crucial” in understanding how films create meaning (McFarlane, 2007, p. 7).

Conclusion McFarlane describes his ideal adaptation as being “on the one hand, bold and intelligent and, on the other, determined to make something both connected to its precursor and new in itself” since literary work is only “an aspect of the film’s intertextuality” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 9). This is difficult for those trained in literature to “approach a narrative mode which expends itself in two hours and find in it complexity and subtlety…as those a novel may develop over several hundred pages” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 9). Therefore, he suggests that “those of us involved in both film and literature to urge more strongly…abandoning of the fidelity approach in favor of a more productive invoking of intertextuality” and to pay attention to “what makes for such qualities as subtlety and complexity in film rather than complaining of the loss of what is peculiar to literature” (McFarlane, 2007, p. 13). George Bluestone in his book Novels into Film designates “the novel as conceptual, linguistic, discursive, symbolic, inspiring mental imagery, with time as its formative principle, and the film as perceptual, visual, presentational, literal, given to visual images, with space as its formative principle” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2). McFarlane though acknowledges “that film draws on a combination of visual, aural, and verbal signifiers” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2) sees “novel linear, the film spatial, the novel conceptual, and the film perceptual” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2). Woolf distinguishes the separate worlds of cinema and literature and says, “it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene […] what the cinema might do if left to its own devices” (Woolf, 1926, p. 2).

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The opposition between the words and images still continues even though “most other oppositions have been broken down by poststructuralism” (Elliott, 2004, p. 1). Roland Barthes says that, “there is never a real incorporation since the substances of the two structures (graphic and iconic) are irreducible” (Elliott, 2004, p. 1). Hillis Miller believes that, “neither the meaning of a picture nor the meaning of a sentence is by any means translatable. The picture means itself. The sentence means itself. The two can never meet” (Elliott, 2004, p. 1). Bluestone believes in a “separation of representational spheres” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2): “the film and the novel [should] remain separate institutions, each achieving its best results by exploring unique and specific properties” (Elliott, 2004, p. 2). The study of film and literature as distinct but related art forms leads us to “a fuller and more complex understanding of the specificity of the media themselves” (Cardwell, 2007, p. 59) and the vitality of the existence of adaptations since “they cross the boundaries; challenge our notions of medium specificity and art, interpretation, and evaluation” refreshing our intellectual appetites (Cardwell, 2007, p. 6).

References Cardwell, S. (2007). Adaptation studies revisited: Purposes, perspectives, and inspiration.

A literature/film reader: Issues of adaptation. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Casetti, F. (2004). Adaptation and mis-adaptations: Film, literature, and social discourses. A companion to literature and film. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Culler, J. (1997). Literary theory: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Elliott, K. (2004). Novels, films, and the word/image wars. A companion to literature and film. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Lamarque, P. (2009). The philosophy of literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Marcus, L. (2007). The tenth muse: Writing about cinema in the modernist period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McFarlane, B. (2007). It wasn’t like That in the book. A literature/film reader: Issues of adaptation. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc.

Miller, J. (2002). On literature. London: Routledge.

Tibbetts, J. (2005). The encyclopedia of novels into film. New York: Facts On File, Inc.

Whaley, D. (2007). Adaptation studies and the history of ideas: The case of Apocalypse Now. A literature/film reader: Issues of adaptation. Maryland: Scarecrow Press.

Woolf, V. (1926). The Cinema. Retrieved from http://www.woolfonline.com/

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John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and “Songs and Sonnets”: Unresolved Manifests of a Lost Man

Hossein Mohseni English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and “Songs and Sonnets” have been considered to be the sites of genuine transgression from the tradition and therefore, have been interpreted through numerous modern and postmodern perspectives. In the present study, such rupturous departures from the tradition will be reviewed by focusing on the emotional ambiguity of songs and sonnets. Such ambiguities will depict Donne’s ambivalent and iridescent regards towards holy and secular love, attesting how he has obfuscated the boundaries between these two concepts. In the same line of argument, futility of utilization of reason in paradoxical aporias will be observed, ascertaining the irresolvable nature of the sonnets.

Keywords: Holy Sonnet, Donne, Paradox, Petrarchean

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Donne’s “Songs and Sonnets” are among the finest collections of love lyrics in the English language. Such a high valuation still requires emphasis, especially if one desires to find a literature between this sequence and his “Holy Sonnets”. This paper is a humble attempt to find the common denominators and criteria, with which a beginner reader of the vast literature of John Donne as a courtier, poet and anti-catholic preacher could have a better kind of understanding; a kind of understanding that blurs the boundaries of Donne as a religious poet or Donne as a secular poet, making him this Donne as a desperate personage who wishes to convey a series of uncertainties and unresolved questions, with which all of us have been involved in some points of our lives.

Break from Tradition Although John Donne had his intense studies in polemic and Father’s literature, when we read his “Holy Sonnets”, we feel that it is Donne the poet who is speaking through the persona rather than Donne the religious preacher. As we know, the structure of the “Holy Sonnets” was influenced by meditative literature which was a Counter Reformation movement, coming from spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (Archer, 1961, pp. 1-2). However, the explanation that the structure of the "Holy Sonnets" was patterned exactly upon the formal exercises of meditation could not find in the literature its proper justification. As he grew older, his environment and interests changed, but his poems kept their same fundamental structure and dramatic tone. According to Gardener’s division, sonnets 5,7,9,11,12 do have the full sketched plan of meditative exercise; however in most of them, which are shorter than the normal length of a meditative poem, we see the vivid structuring of just a fragment of such meditative poems, conclusion or colloquy. Colloquy fix the mind on the saving love of God in Christ, but they handle the subject matter with the discursive freedom of the form; in that sense, it is felt through vivid sense of the actualities of the passion (Archer,1961, p. 3). So could not we find the same vivification of passion in Donne’s secular poems as well?

Professor Louis L. Martz, applying a formal structure of meditative poem on Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” (for example on “If Poysonious Mineralls”), presented his findings which are valuable to consider: Donne’s poems represent power of soul, reason, understanding and will that could develop meditation. One gets a subject matter, a mystery of faith for example, sets forth imaginatively by memory in a dramatic opening. Then, the persona studies the implications with his hyperbolic reasoning and ultimately a petition for the omnipotent God is drawn by the faculty of will, praising the almighty. John Donne's “Holy Sonnets” exhibit as clearly as any of his poems what Louis Martz calls a "continually shifting series of dramatic moments. temporary conclusions ... but all only 'for a

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moment final'. "' (Skouen, 2009, pp. 8-10) If Donne's lovers in the “Songs and Sonnets” restlessly pursue a still moment of enduring consummation, his persona of the “Holy Sonnets” strives for a sense of harmony with the divine, a foretaste of eternal rest, which seems most elusive when it is nearest at hand:

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

From death, you numberlesse infinities

Of soules.

and you whose eyes,

Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.

But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space

Frequently in these poems, the speaker reaches a point of union, or reconciliation, with God, only to retreat from it in the next line; if, as in a few sonnets, he sustains a sense of harmony throughout, he inevitably loses it in the next poem of the sequences.

It is worth mentioning that in both the “Holy Sonnets” and “Songs and Sonnets”, while dramatic movement is a central feature, progress is not. The speaker constantly changes his strategy of approach to God (and to the beloved in the case of the “Holy Sonnets); he alternately laments and aspires, but never rests long in any one stance. Ultimately, his movement is circular, not linear: his despair is never without a move toward hope; his hope, never without a move toward despair (Wall, 1976, p. 4). The subject of Donne's Holy Sonnets is, therefore, not a movement of the speaker toward resolution of his relationship with God, but instead an exploration of the paradoxes of the Christian life on earth.

The speaker in the “Holy Sonnets” strives, on the one hand, for peace with God; on the other, he is aware that he is powerless to effect reconciliation. He knows that he cannot know the outcome of this drama of redemption short of death; he also knows that he must be included in God's plan of salvation while he is alive, or he will not be included at all.

In “Songs and Sonnets”, the actors have clearly-defined roles; the speaker actively seeks to overcome his beloved's passive resistance and convert it to passive yielding. In the “Holy Sonnets”, the one to be overcome is the speaker himself, who requires God's action to render passive his rebellious hardness of

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heart, or to defend him in his helplessness from the activity of the devil. It is through the various activities of prayer-praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and especially lament-that the speaker is made ready to receive the action of God, whenever and however it comes (Wall, 1976, p. 11). Generally, the movement of Donne's speaker is always toward self-conscious pleading for application of those actions to himself.

The ultimate source of formal rhetoric then, in the works of Donne could not be easily determined. It is believed that it is highly probable that this structure can be traced in poems of Donne's time and in forms other than the Petrarchean structure of the sonnet (Kuchar, 2008, pp. 3-4). This threefold structure recalls the strophe, antistrophe, and epode of the Greek chorus a form almost as old as poetry itself, but such a study would extend far beyond the scope of this paper. Even if it is not made, it would not be too surprising to find that Donne, who is novel in his use of imagery and diction, makes some contribution to structure as well. The evidence presented here has shown that this structure, continuing throughout the poems of Donne, should not surprise when it appears in the "Holy Sonnets." One need not explore the mass of "meditative" literature to explain its presence in either his religious poetry or his secular one.

Humiliation, Self- Esteem and Emotional Ambiguity Regarding the “Holy Sonnets” as the personal confessions of a spiritually troubled persona, one could find the structure of traditional religious poetry in them; first the proud sinner is ignorant of his sins, attaining them more and more, then realizing how doomed he is, he supposes that by announcing his humiliation and disintegration of self through confession, he could attain humble joy and confidence after experiencing wallowing guilt and despair. The will had to be crushed before it would be, or while it was being, taken over by God (Yearwood, 1982, p. 5). The poem "Batter my heart", amplifying the plea of "Good Friday, 1613 Riding Westward": "O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee", instantiates the masochistic strivings whereby Donne tried to subject the whole of himself to God. It attempts to enact, through its solicitation of divine aggression and rape, the conversion process described by William Perkins: "he that will beleeve in Christ must be annihilated, that is he must be bruised and battered to a flat nothing (Stachniewski, 1981, pp. 13-14).

Donne's concern, in this sense, lies in his fundamental inability to forfeit his independent identity. As a result, his only hope -to use a phrase sanctioned by "Batter my heart" and widely used to characterize the concept of conversion-is for divine rape. The doctrine of irresistibility of grace is, significantly for Donne,

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conversion, involved God's simultaneous and irresistible seizure of all the faculties, and it is this that Donne invites:

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you' entrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

If the poems are read as independent articulations in which the discipline of a tight verse form is brought to bear on an often disturbed psychic state, emotional ambiguities will, on the contrary, constitute their vital meaning.

Barbara Lewalski remarks on the "paradoxical reversal of Christ's customary relationships with the soul-as liberator and as Bridegroom". The paradox, as ever in Donne's best poetry, is not mere ingenuity but contains complexity of feeling: the ideas of imprisonment, enslavement, and rape are genuinely affronting (Stachniewski, 1981, p. 14). While embracing God's action, he intimates the loss of integrity which would be involved in the gain of salvation. The paradoxical expressions reflect a genuinely paradoxical attitude towards God. It is particularly in relation to this poem that Wilbur Sanders is illuminating when he comments that the "violence of sentiment" in the sonnets "springs from the attempt to bend a stubborn temper to something which is seen, from a position outside the stubbornness as a good." (Stachniewski, 1981, p. 15) That he presents this as a criticism of the poetry is owing to an underestimation of the self-consciousness with which Donne struggles with this problem. The conflict between his personal integrity and the demands of a theology which brutalized self-esteem is the essential subject matter of the poems (Ruff, 1993, p. 11). Just as the energies of "Batter my heart" seek to burst out of the constricting sonnet form, so the individualistic Donne cannot reduce himself to the size and shape of God's demands. One sees from these two sonnets that while the form and subject of the poem implies the strait-jacketing of theological propriety, other thoughts and emotions peep out: suspicion, resentment, refusal to subject himself entirely to the divine will. And the range of God's characterization is extended to include jealousy, a distorted perspective on events, and a capacity to violate the apparent autonomy of His creatures (Stachniewski, 1981, p. 15). In the poem “Since She Whom I Lov’d”, we have been introduced with two versions of gods; The God of the octave and the God of the sestet are different from one another, or, if the same, then exhibiting greatly differing aspects of one Deity. The first is passively sublime, responsive if found, and discoverable through a woman. The second is also loving, but in an active, ruthless and jealous way, so that the woman becomes identified with the temptations of world, flesh, and devil rather

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than an aid to worship. This is the anthropomorphized Protestant God who will not tolerate sharing human devotion with saints and angels, let alone women (Stachniewski, 1981, p. 12).

The same sense of deconstructive nature in representing a view and then negating it with another definition could be sensed in “A Valediction: Of My Name”; where in the last stanza, he denies the very applicability of the means he has chosen to inscribe his substantial love. Even in “The Dream”, he blurs the realm in which his true love should exist. And in “The Relic”, the very ultimate form of substantial love remains indeterminate, since:

All measure, and all language, I should pass,

Should I tell what a miracle she was.

The very presentation of an earthly object, the relic as the symbol of their substantial love, where even language failed to describe its fullest faculties, reminds me of “This is my play last scene” and “the resurrection of the dead.” In the former, the means and possibility of avoiding the punishment demanded by absolute justice are founded on a deliberately fallacious argument which dates back at least to the medieval "Debate of the Body and Soul ": Since it has been my body that has sinned, and since at the moment of death my body will be separated from my soul, I shall be thus purged of evil and may therefore legitimately hope that God will "impute me righteous." (Peterson, 1959, pp. 7-8) What is particularly interesting is that Donne rejects this argument as fallacious in the latter poem by pointing out that it is the whole man-not the soul alone-that will be judged on Doomsday:

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

From death, you numberlesse infinities

Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe.

This process, of depositing feelings in the poems which belie the ostensible argument, or of actually saying something which contradicts what he appears to intend to say, is important in the secular poetry, too, in extending the range of a poem's feeling. Take “Negative Love” for example; here the narrator is

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announcing that it is much better to abandon all faculties of customary procedures of courtship and love rather than:

I never stooped so low, as they

Which on an eye, check, lip can prey;

Unlike Petrarchean sonnets, the narrator does not know what he really wishes for and he knows whatever it is, it should not require the narrator to lose its agency to attain it. That is why in this poem and in “The Relic” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, we see the same motif of lack of knowledge and as a result, lack of fulfillment, which makes the very traditional annihilation of the lover for the sake of beloved silly and improbable:

My Love, though silly, is more brave,

For may I miss, whenever I crave,

If I know yet, what I would brave. (“Negative Love”)

First, we loved well and faithfully,

Yet know not what we loved and why; (“The Relic”)

But we, by a love so much refined

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. (“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

Godly Emotions As Donne explains in a sermon (having the “Holy Sonnets” in mind) on how to achieve a godly fear, our emotions can produce either good or bad effects, depending on whether or not they are guided by the divine spirit (Skouen, 2009, pp. 12-13):

For, as it is a wretched condition, to be without natural affections, so it is a dangerous dereliction, if our natural affections be left to themselves, and not regulated, not unanimated by the spirit of God; for

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then my sadness will sink into desperation, and my fear will betray the succors which reason offer.

The key to the correct handling of the emotions is thus to be able to place them upon the right object. Only then can they be moved and stirred up for the service of virtue. That is why in nearly all sonnets dealing with sadness, the speaker is eager to distinguish between two kinds of tears: those which are brought on by worldly sorrows and those which are tears for sin (Peterson, 1959, p. 3). The distinction is made the main topic of sonnet 3, where the speaker wishes that he could rather have spent all those tears that he has wasted on worldly losses in the new state of holy discontent that he is presently experiencing. It makes him cry to think of all those vain tears that he has cried. Because he used to cry for the wrong reasons, his sadness became a sin and now he must cry because of that, as a kind of punishment. The speaker wittily contrasts his own sins with those committed by thieves and drunkards, and by proud or lecherous men. At least they were able to derive some pleasure from their sins, whereas he has always been in pain. But he clearly has some hoped that something good will come out of it in the end, since he assumes his new kind of tears will allow him to “mourn with some fruit,” as he has previously “mourned in vain” (Skouen, 2009, pp. 18-19).

The same idea of putting your passion and feeling on the righteous object of desire could be seen in “The Negative Love”, where the narrator advised us that in order to soar to the highest positions, which even virtue or mind could not admire, one should not focus his attention on trivialities of courtship such as the very physicality of the beloved [1. 1-2]. Besides, the very sense of these lines has been rephrased in “The Relic” [3. 23-26] and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” [5. 17-20].

Significance of Secular Elements in the “Holy Sonnets” Donne did write religious poetry, around the probable time of composition of the "Holy Sonnets," which do not convey their personal impetus. It is poems like "La Corona," with its reassuring circularity in a format traditional to the Church, which depersonalize Donne's predicament. People R.C Bald believes that in “La Corona”, "there is a ritual element that gives them a certain restraint and formalism which are much less strongly marked in the 'Holy Sonnets'." This suggests that in so far as Donne was following traditional religious prescriptions as to the form and content of his poetry, he was inhibiting the expression of his real spiritual preoccupations. No such inhibition need to be read into the ''Holy Sonnets."(Stachniewski, 1981, p. 10) Indeed, Donne was acutely aware of the

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limitations imposed on him by theological propriety. In all the “Songs and Sonnets”, there is not one formal sonnet; yet in the "Holy Sonnets," his break with tradition is in the direction of conservatism: he imposes on himself the discipline of the sonnet. It represents the frame to which, by spiritual contortions, he is to fit his thoughts and feelings. He fails. The thoughts and feelings escape (Stachniewski, 1981, p. 11).

Such sense of deviation from traditional religious poetry could be reflected in “Since She Whom I Lov’d”, where the speaker is no doubt mourning his wife, but the sonnet is not primarily about his sense of loss, but about his new-found love. While making a comparison between the kinds of love he used to feel for his wife and his love of God, he claims that his love for his wife was more than that, since it was animated by a better love than itself. Every time he looked at his wife, he was brought closer to God, who is the source of all love. Thus, the sonnet produced is not just a love sonnet, but a holy love sonnet (Skouen, 2009, p. 21).

Because of presence of such a secular entity in the spiritual’ religious pursuit of the speaker, he describes his yearning for God as a “holy thirsty dropsy”; this runs counter to the ideal that one should rather be possessed by “a strong sober thirst” (“La Corona” 1,1.12). Ironically, whereas the speaker of the poem has nevertheless managed to direct his attentions towards heavenly things (1.4), God seems to have gone in the opposite direction and is wooing the speaker’s soul as if he were a character in a secular love sonnet. Performing the role of a melancholic lover, God appears both jealous and fearful at the thought that his beloved should prefer to be with some one else (a similarly ironic effect occurs in “Show me dear Christ, sonnet 18, where the speaker describes the spouse of Christ or the church in strikingly profane terms, especially in stanza 2, line 11-14).

By both playing on and insisting on the difference between a devout and a worldly state of mind, and by making clear that even devout feelings may need to be restrained, the “Holy Sonnets” do offer some instruction on how to handle the passions.

Futility of Reasonable Arguments in Resolutions of Paradox "If poysonous mineralls, and if that tree" questions the justice and mercy of God in order to dramatize the futility of attempting to resolve by reason the mystery of God's justice:

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

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Cannot be damn'd; Alas; why should I bee?

Why should intent or reason, borne in mee,

Make sinnes, else equall, in mee, more heinous?

And mercy being easie, and glorious

To God, in his sterne wrath, why threatens hee?

To argue such questions-to dispute the paradoxical concept of a deity who is at once absolutely just and infinitely merciful-is pointless. The penitent is obliged to accept God and His decrees on faith and to throw himself upon His mercy. Thus, the stimulation of fear by meditating upon God as absolute justice brings home to the penitent the need to make full repentance. The poem ends with a plea for the grace that will, in effect, transform sorrow incited by fear to sorrow incited by love:

But who am, I that dare dispute with thee?

O God, Oh! of thine onely worthy blood,

And my teares, make a heavenly Lethean flood,

And drowne in it my sinnes blacke memorie.

That thou remember them, some claime as debt,

I thinke it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

That is why in sonnet 10, “captive reason” is capable of “white truth”; sorrow is now “true grief”. The penitent is in a state of grace: “valiantly I heds wide mouth o’rstride.” Even when it comes to contrition, Donne's conjecture as to whether or not the souls of the dead perceive intuitively is also relevant to the question of assurance. Contrition is a matter of inner conviction, achieved only with the aid of grace, and, consequently, supra-rational. It can not, therefore, be perceived through the senses or reason, but only intuitively, a mode of knowing possessed only by God, angelic substances, and, perhaps, by the souls of the dead. The point that Donne makes implicitly is this: although his sorrow may appear outwardly to be proper, the only real evidence is the feelings of his own heart; thus only God, angels, and perhaps the souls of the dead can know whether his assurance is justified (Peterson, 1959, p. 8).

The same kind of argument has been made in “The Tripe Fool”, where the speaker is a fool on the basis of a twofold argument: for loving and saying so [1.1-12]; however, since he wishes to soothe this melancholy of his in love by:

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I thought, if I could draw my pains

Through rhyme’s vexation, I should them allay:

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce;

For he tames it, the fetters it in verse.

The ultimate result of this desperate reasonable attempt to soothe the melancholy of love (which is indeed a paradox) is that many suffer from the very grief he thinks he has confined in the words:

But when I have done so,

Some mean, his art and voice to show,

Doth set and sing my pain,

And, by delighting many, frees again

Grief, which verse did restrain.

Lack of Resolution at the End of the Sequence The “Holy Sonnets” as a sequential poetry ends with no indication that the efforts it represents have been successful: each of the preliminary stages which ought to lead to contrition is represented, but there has occurred no expression of contrite sorrow. "Since she whome I lov'd, hath payed her last debt " has customarily been read as a lament for the poet's deceased wife (Peterson, 1959, pp. 13-15); but her death is only incidental to the real subject of the poem, a condition Donne introduces to explain his present feelings toward God:

Since she whome I lov'd, hath payd her last debt,

To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,

And her soule early into heaven ravished,

Wholly in heavenly things my mind is sett.

Through her the poet's longing for God has been sharpened, but the real subject of the poem is a kind of spiritual sickness:

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Here the admyring her my mind did whett

To seeke thee God; so streames do shew the head,

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,

A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett.

The sickness is an inordinate desire that God provide him with further indications of His love, some assurance that he is in a state of grace. The sickness is correctly diagnosed in the sestet:

But why should I begg more love, when as thou

Dost wooe my soule, for hers offring all thine:

And dost not only feare least I allow

My love to saints and Angels, things divine,

But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt

Least the World, fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out.

It is sufficient assurance, Donne concludes, that the penitent feel in his heart that God desires his love and would see him remain free from sin. Donne's main concern is clearly not with his wife's death but with his inordinate desire for assurance; the very assurance which is based on uncertainty and contrasts. In Donne’s poems, inconstancies become a constant habit. The inconstancy of Donne's devotions are the result of his failure to resolve another set of contraries, contraries which he had defined in " If poysonous mineralls, and if that tree." He is confounded by a deity who is at once absolutely just and infinitely merciful.

Even when he is narrating through territorial terminology his secular poems in “Songs and Sonnets”, he is mapping with the text not the female body, not the fullness of a presence, but the unrepresented gaze as the symbol of an absence, the lack that precipitates desire. The gaze in question is always double and without resolution; the gaze of the subject, which brings into being the imaginary world of objects, and the gaze of the world, which is constitutive for the subject. The very contingent nature of this dual gaze have been accomplished with the speakers in Donne’s love poems keeping at bay the public world of the economy, politics and history. This public world is the world where the subject is subjected to language and language is the place of lack. Language makes us desire what we ca not have by virtue of its endless postponement and differentiation of meaning, knowledge and subjectivity. So this possibility of

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absence makes the very faculty of love a possibility in Donne’s love poems, which is contingent and full of ruptures. The only fulfillment and resolution, in general, in Donne’s poetry is the unmediated, unimagined, unimaginable I Am, this claim to mastery of the possibilities of signifying practice, demonstrated in the text (Belsey, 1994, pp. 130-149).

As Stanley Fish thought of the “Songs of Sonnets”: A consciousness that can rewrite its own grounds in the twinkling of an eye is not a consciousness at all, but a succession of refiguring; that is why the speaker of the sonnet “Oh, to vex me”, is worried, not because of cultivating the virtue of constancy, which would be the most natural way of handling his internal conflict, he has made inconstancy itself into a constant habit; a habit which was regarded a sign of melancholy and by some, a fundamental necessity for the practice of meditation. (pp. 223-252)

Now that I am reviewing the headings and discussions of this paper, the only thing I could put as the conclusion is that John Donne in both of these sequences was a man with lots of questions in mind; the very questions we as post modern readers are involved with; affirmation or flight from tradition, sacrifice of persona’s agency for the sake of discourse he wishes to produce, the very open ended ness of the sequences at exactly the points we think that a conclusion could be accomplished and the sense of duality and deconstructive nature of arguments, even scriptural certainties were some of the issues that could make Donne and the persona of his poems as a lost, indefinite citizen of 20th century; a person who explicitly withholds the moment of substantiation. It is precisely the undecidability of the text, its lack of closure, which sustains the desire of the reader. The text not only brings to light, but also stages, puts on show, perhaps even celebrates the lack which resides in the process of signification.

References Archer, S. (1961). Meditation and the structure of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”. ELH, 28 (2),

137-147.

Belsey, C. (1994). John Donne’s worlds of desire. Desire: Love stories in Western culture. London: Oxford University Press, 130-149.

Donne, J. (1971). The complete English poems of John Donne. London: Penguin Publishing.

Donne, J. (1956). The songs and sonnets of John Donne. London: Cambridge University Press.

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Fish, S. (1990). “Masculine persuasive force: Donne and verbal Power. Soliciting interpretation: literary theory and seventeenth century English poetry, 1990, 223-252.

Grant, P. (1971). Augustinian spirituality and the “Holy Sonnets” of John Donne. ELH, 38 (4), 542-561.

Guibbory, A. (2006). The Cambridge companion to John Donne. London: Cambridge University Press.

Kuchar, G. (2008). Petrarchism and repentance in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”. Modern philology, 535-569.

Peterson, D. L. (1959). John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and the Anglican doctrine of contrition. Studies in philology, 56 (3), 504-518.

Ruf, F. J. (1993). Lyric autobiography: John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”. The Harvard theological review, 86 (3), 293-307.

Skouen, T. (2009). The rhetoric of passion in Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”. Rhetorica, 27 (2), 159-188.

Stachniewski, J. (1981). John Donne: The despair of the “Holy Sonnets”. ELH, 48 (4), 677-705.

Wall, J. N. (1976). Donne’s wit of redemption: The drama of prayer in the “Holy Sonnets”. Studies in philology, 73 (2), 189-203.

Yearwood, S. (1982). Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”: The theology of conversion. Texas studies in literature and language, 24 (2), 208-221.

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TEFL

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Profile

Lawrence Jun Zhang By Maryam Abbasi

Lawrence Jun Zhang is professor of Linguistics-in-Education (Applied Linguistics & TESOL) in the school of curriculum and pedagogy and associate dean (International Strategic Engagement) for the faculty of education, University of Auckland since he accepted the offer on 15th July 2011. His research program spans cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and developmental factors in reading/biliteracy development, critical reading awareness in language education, metacognition, self-regulated learning (SRL) and reading development in L1 and L2 contexts, bilingual/biliteracy acquisition and bilingual/biliteracy education in primary and secondary schools, and learning and teaching English as a second/foreign language at university settings.

He is a past post-doctoral visiting fellow at the university of Oxford department of education. He was the sole recipient of the TESOL award for distinguished research 2010-2011 awarded by the TESOL International Association, USA, for his paper published in TESOL Quarterly, 44(2), “A dynamic metacognitive systems perspective on Chinese university EFL readers”. He is also the winner of the best paper award for international participation at TESOL Convention 2014 (co-authored with Lin Teng): “Developing self-regulated L2 writers: Self-efficacy, SRL strategies and L2 proficiency”.

As one of the leading scholars in the field of TESOL, he has served the profession as an editorial board member for several international journals of strong repute, including TESOL Quarterly (SSCI), System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics (SSCI), Applied

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Linguistics Review, Metacognition and Learning (SSCI), and RELC Journal. He has also been a frequently invited manuscript reviewer for leading journals in the fields of applied linguistics and education such as Applied Linguistics (SSCI), TESOL Quarterly (SSCI), Language Learning (SSCI), Language Teaching (SSCI), System (SSCI), Foreign Language Annals (SSCI), Language Teaching Research (SSCI), English for Specific Purposes (SSCI), Language Awareness (SSCI), Language, Culture and Curriculum (SSCI), Journal of Second Language Writing (SSCI), Journal of Multilingual & Multilingual Development (SSCI), Reading Research Quarterly (SSCI), Psychological Reports (SSCI), Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal (SSCI), Instructional Science (SSCI), Research Papers in Education (SSCI), Asia Pacific Journal of Education (SSCI), Asia Pacific Education Researcher (SSCI), European Journal of Psychology of Education (SSCI), International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (SSCI), Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology (SSCI), and Review of Educational Research (SSCI), among others.

He was principal investigator of a Singapore MOE-funded research project (200K NZD equivalent) and Co-PI of two other MOE-funded projects (380K NZD equivalent). He was also a co-investigator of a current research project funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China (April 2014 - April 2017, ¥200,00RMB or 40K NZD).

Teaching and Research Interests

Zhang is particularly interested in the effects of self-regulated reading and writing instruction on bilingual/biliteracy development, and teacher identity and cognition in language teacher education. In detail, he is interested in:

• Cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural and developmental factors in

reading/biliteracy/writing development • Critical reading awareness in language education/TESOL • Metacognition, self-regulated learning (SRL) and reading/writing

development in L1 and L2 contexts • Language learning strategies; vocabulary learning strategies; reading

strategies of bilingual learners • Multidimensionality of learner autonomy/independence/self-regulated

learning (SRL) • Affective factors (e.g., motivation, anxiety, inner voice, etc.) in SLA

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• Cognitive linguistics/Language processing in SLA (accuracy and fluency in L2 written production)

• Bilingual/biliteracy acquisition/bilingual/biliteracy education • Development and representations of lexical and syntactic knowledge in

SLA • Effects of self-regulated reading and writing instruction on

bilingual/biliteracy development • ESP/academic writing and writing teacher education • TESOL • Reading and writing pedagogy • Critical reading pedagogy • Grammar & oral communication pedagogy • Teacher professional development • Teacher identity formation and change

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Contribution to the Profession

Zhang has served a three year term (2011-2014) for the Non-native English-speaking Teachers Interest Section that has over 1000 members within the TESOL International Association headquartered in the USA, the largest international organization for teachers of English to speakers of other languages worldwide. He was elected to be part of the nominating committee for the TESOL International Association. The responsibility of the committee is to nominate the next President of the Association.

He has also been actively participating, as an organizing committee member, in hosting the 13th International Symposium on Second Language Writing (SSLW 2015) in Auckland, New Zealand. Moreover, he was chair of the organizing committee, for the 18th ALANZ Symposium for the New Zealand Association of Applied Linguistics held in November 2014, Auckland, New Zealand.

Publications

The large number of research projects, articles, conference proceeding papers, and book chapters indicate that Zhang has significantly contributed to the literature in his field. A number of his publications include:

Journal Articles

Zhang, L. J., & Rahimi, M. (2014). EFL learners’ anxiety level and their beliefs about corrective feedback in oral communication classes. System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics, 42, 429–439. Oxford, UK: Elsevier. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L., Aryadoust, V., & Zhang, L. J. (2014). Development and validation of the Test Takers’ Metacognitive Awareness Reading Questionnaire (TTMAARQ). Asia Pacific Education Researcher, 23(1), 37-51. New York: Springer. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2013). Second language writing as and for second language learning. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22(4), 446-447. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2013). Perspectives on second and foreign language learning, teaching, and research: What are the foci? Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 396, 1-4. DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2013.12.010

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Zhang, L. J., & Zhang, D. L. (2013). Thinking metacognitively about metacognition in second and foreign language learning, teaching, and research: Toward a dynamic metacognitive systems perspective. Contemporary Foreign Language Studies, 396, 111-121. DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2013.12.010

Zhang, L. J. (2010). A dynamic metacognitive systems account of Chinese university students’ knowledge about EFL reading. TESOL Quarterly, 44(2), 320-353. Malden, MA, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2010). Negotiating language, literacy and identity: A sociocultural perspective on children’s language learning strategies in a multilingual ESL classroom in Singapore. Applied Linguistics Review, 1, 247-270. New York, USA/Berlin, Germany: Walter De Gruyter.

Zhang, L. J., & Wu, A. (2009). Chinese senior high school EFL students’ metacognitive awareness and use of reading strategies. Reading in a Foreign Language, 21(1), 37-59. Manoa, Hawai‘i, USA: National Foreign Language Resource Centre, University of Hawai‘i College of Languages, Linguistics and Literatures.

Zhang, L. J. (2008). Constructivist pedagogy in strategic reading instruction: Exploring pathways to learner development in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom. Instructional Science: An International Journal of the Learning Sciences, 36(2), 89-116. New York: Springer. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2008). Making a case for the skills/strategies approach to L2 listening development. Reflections on English Language Teaching, 7(2), 99-109. Singapore: National University of Singapore.

Zhang, L. J. (2008). EFL teacher professional development through critical reading pedagogy: Meeting the challenges in the Asian classroom. Teaching English in China: The CELEA Journal, 31(6), 349-351. Beijing, PRC: National Foreign Language Education Research Centre/Beijing Foreign Studies University/Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Zhang, L. J., & Xiao, Y. (2006). Language learning strategies, motivation and EFL proficiency: A study of Chinese tertiary-level non-English majors. Asian Englishes: An International Journal of the Sociolinguistics of English in Asia/Pacific, 9(2), 20-47. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Zhang, L. J. (2004). Interpreting continuity and change in secondary school English Language teacher education in Singapore. Teaching English in

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China: The CELEA Journal, 27(4), 329-341. Beijing, China: National Foreign Language Education Research Centre/Beijing Foreign Studies University/Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Zhang, L. J. (2002). Metamorphological awareness and EFL students' memory, retention, and retrieval of English adjectival lexicons. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 95(3), 934-944. Missoula, MT, USA: Simmons Scientific Inc. (SSCI-indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2001). Awareness in reading: EFL students' metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies in an acquisition-poor environment. Language Awareness, 10(4), 268-288. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. (SSCI- & Arts and Humanities Citation - indexed)

Zhang, L. J. (2000). A cannon of wider choice: Enlarging the reach of EFL teachers and students at the middle level in the People's Republic of China. English Today: The International Review of the English Language, 16(3), 55-60. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (SSCI-indexed)

Book Chapters

Zhang, L. J., & Zhang, D. L. (2014). Identity matters: An ethnography of two non-native English-speaking teachers in a New English context. In Y. L. Cheung, S. Ben Said, & K. Park (Eds.), Advances and Current Trends in Language Teacher Identity Research (pp. 116-131). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis.

Zhang, L. J. (2013). Making a difference in bilingual education: Biliteracy learning as curricular appropriation. In M. East & S. May (Eds.), Making a Difference in Education and Social Policy (pp. 173-198). Auckland, NZ: Pearson Education.

Zhang, L. J. (2011). Understanding and teaching reading. In Y. Wu (Ed.), Applied Linguistics: A Second Language Education Perspective. Beijing, PRC: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Zhang, L. J. (2004). Extending the reach of middle school EFL teachers in the People's Republic of China. In W. K. Ho, & R. Y. L. Wong (Eds.), English Language Teaching in East Asia Today: Changing Policies and Practices (2nd/rev. ed., pp. 147-162). New York, USA: Marshall Cavendish Academic.

Zhang, L. J. (2002). Extending the reach of middle school EFL teachers in the People's Republic of China. In W. K. Ho, & R. Y. L. Wong (Eds.),

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English Language Teaching in East Asia Today: Changing Policies and Practices (pp. 147-162). Singapore: Times Academic Press /Eastern Universities Press.

Papers in Refereed Conference Proceedings

Zhang, L. J. (2011). A “rediscovery” of metacognition for enhancing EFL students’ self-directed learning in Asian classrooms. In JACET (Ed.), The Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Commemorative Conference of the Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET) (also available on CD-ROM). Fukuoka, Japan.

Zhang, L. J. (2010). The ecology of communicative language teaching: Reflecting on the Singapore experience. In J. P. Chen (Ed.), Innovating English Teaching in China: Selected Papers from the 2006 CELEA Annual Conference and the 3rd International Conference on CLT in China (pp. 51-80). Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Zhang, L. J. (2007). Nexus and change in English language teacher education: Lessons from Singapore. In W. D. Dai (Ed.), Foreign Language Teaching Methodology: Opportunities and Challenges (pp.1011-1031). Shanghai, China: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Zhang, L. J. (2000). Metacognition in L2 reading literacy acquisition: The case of ten Chinese tertiary students learning to read EFL. In A. Brown (Ed.), English in Southeast Asia '99: Developing Multiliteracies (pp. 83-96). Singapore: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

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A Textbook Evaluation of Direct and Indirect Speech Acts in the American Headway Series

Reza Jalali

TEFL, MA, SBU

Abstract This study investigated the use of direct and indirect speech acts in the American Headway series. The researcher examined student- and work-book activities, namely conversations, dialogues, and interviews, in search for different types of speech acts in order to demonstrate whether or not the content of this series is appropriate from pragmatic-acquisition point of view. The textbooks' activities were carefully scrutinized, and all the speech acts identified were classified into two main categories, direct and indirect, and their subcategories (assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative). The results of this study showed that the frequencies and distribution levels of main categories, as well as the subcategories, were not equal both across the textbook levels and each level independently. According to the data collected in this study, direct speech act frequencies were about triple that of indirect ones. Moreover, expressive speech acts had the most frequency while declaratives showed the least. Although the American Headway series enjoys a high and growing trend in frequency of speech acts, it cannot be considered as a supportive textbook for empowering the learners to develop mastery over communicative competence.

Keywords: American Headway series, direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, textbook evaluation

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Introduction Textbooks are believed to be the center of curriculum and syllabus in most classrooms, especially in EFL context where they provide the main source of input for the learners. Along with the components of the communicative competence, some theorists even went further to claim that the main component to be mastered in EFL contexts is pragmatic competence, for it enables the L2 learners to use what they have learned in new contexts and be involved in every day interactions (Taguchi, 2008). However, learners often have difficulty gaining a mastery of pragmatic competence with the given information and activities in textbooks (Vellegna, 2004). Moreover, the beliefs that pragmatic competence should not be taught until the learners have developed a good command of English, that is until they are proficient and old enough to actually 'digest' the input ,are now rejected by language experts (Taguchi, 2008); they believe for L2 learners to successfully acquire pragmatic competence, they should be exposed to rich input containing various exemplars of different pragmatic skills.

Pragmatic competence includes many aspects: speech acts, implicatures, presupposition, etc. all of which are essential in making meaningful conversation with interlocutors. But speech acts are the most important part to be learned by non-native speakers since they equip the learners with a tool which is needed in most, if not all, interactive contexts. In fact, people know how to communicate what they mean through what Searle calls "speech acts" or, in linguistics terminology, intended language acts. In his famous article What is a speech act?, Searle (1965) distinguished between "illocutionary acts" and "speech acts". The very notion of illocutionary acts was first introduced by Austin (1962) in his well-known book How to do things with words. Austin believed that illocutionary acts are the same as speech acts. However, Searle (1968) is of the idea that mind's conventional content (semantic illocutions) is different from intended force (pragmatic speech). Therefore, he makes a distinction between what the speaker says and what he means.

Using his proposed framework, Searle (1969) later attempted to classify different speech acts. He broke speech acts down as follows (pp. 12-30):

1. Assertives, which commit the speaker to the truth or falsity of something's being the case.

2. Directives, which constitute an attempt by the speaker to get the listener to do something.

3. Commissives, which commit the speaker to do something.

4. Expressives, which express the psychological state of the speaker.

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5. Declaratives, which brings about a correspondence between the propositional content of the statement and reality.

In 1969, however, he added another dimension to his taxonomy, the idea of indirectness. Searle defines the notion of indirect speech acts as follows:

In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer. To be more specific, the apparatus necessary to explain the indirect part of indirect speech acts includes a theory of speech acts [and] certain general principles of cooperative conversation.... (1979, pp.31-32)

So much, briefly, for gaining information about speech act; now relating this information to textbooks, it seems textbooks writers have a demanding job to do. Including this huge amount of input in several activities, which should empower the learners to actively use them in real life, has been a challenge for materials developers.

According to Taguchi (2011), pragmatic competence is the ability to communicate and interpret meaning in social interactions; EFL textbooks have always failed to develop learners' knowledge in this area (Ellis, 2008). Furthermore, one aspect of pragmatic competence which is vital for successful communication‒speech acts‒ has impaled into insignificance. Furthermore, textbooks, especially in beginner levels, have shown no favor to the special kind of the illocutionary force, indirect speech acts, which need deeper understanding on the part of learners.

Thus, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the world's most trusted English course, the American Headway series, in terms of activities devoted to direct and indirect speech acts. Since all the speech act activities were the focus of this study, both student- and work-books' content were examined. The researcher drew on Searle's (1969) taxonomy of speech acts. The following research questions were the objectives of this study:

1. What is the frequency and distribution level of direct vs. indirect speech

acts in each textbook?

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2. Does the frequency of direct and indirect speech acts increase as the level of textbooks gets more proficient or vice versa?

3. What is the frequency and distribution level of each kind of speech act (expressive, declarative, etc.) in each textbook?

4. Does the frequency of different kinds of speech acts increase as the level of textbooks gets more proficient or vice versa?

Review of Related Literature In 1995, Boxer and Pickering conducted a survey on seven ELT textbooks which were organized around the teaching of functions in order to explicate several problems evident in their presentation of speech acts. A specific speech act sequence, complaint and commiseration, was the focus of their analysis. That speech behavior was highlighted in order to demonstrate the mismatch between data from spontaneous speech and contrived data through the native speaker intuitions of textbook developers. The first problem posed by their study was that intuition about speech act realization often differed greatly from the way in which naturalistic speech patterned out. Second, it was demonstrated that important information on underlying social strategies of speech acts is often overlooked entirely. They offered a sample lesson on complaining/commiserating based on spontaneous speech, to draw a contrast with the lessons on complaining presented in the textbooks surveyed.

A groundbreaking research conducted by Tavakoli (1995) concerned with the language functions in the dialogues inserted in the English textbooks of Iranian senior high schools. The data were analyzed based on Searle's model of speech acts as the criteria for evaluating the dialogues to see whether the different kinds of speech acts were correctly used. She revealed that out of five different kinds of language functions, only three of them, representative with high frequency, directive, and expressive were used in the texts. While commissive and declaration have been ignored.

In 2001, Akutsu investigated Oral Communication A textbooks regarding speech acts presentations quantitatively. Oral Communication A was one of the three subjects in Oral Communication course in high school English curriculum. As the subject was only speaking aspect of oral communication, the writers should have included realistic and practical model conversations in the textbooks so that the learners understand how to talk appropriately using request strategies provided in Oral Communication A textbooks in a given situation. In the study, the sentences used in each speech act situation were counted and checked if they appeared in concrete contexts; and if readers could tell who were using the sentences. The variations used in each speech act were also counted to examine

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the different formulas presented for each speech act. The study revealed that presentation of speech acts differed greatly among textbooks. Furthermore, there was a large difference in providing information about the interlocutors using the sentences. The study pointed out that some information in the textbooks could easily result in teaching-induced failures without proper instruction from the teachers. The study showed that although all the textbooks had been authorized by the Ministry, there were differences in them in terms of speech act materials, and that there may be also some problematic presentations.

In a study conducted by Vellenga (2004),eight EFL and ESL textbooks were compared. She argued that learners hardly acquire pragmatic competence due to the lack of information in textbooks. She concluded that both EFL and ESL textbooks did not provide enough metalinguistic and explicit meta-pragmatics information. In spite of this pitfall, the comparison showed that majority of EFL texts enjoy pragmatic information.

Another study has been carried out by Darali (2007) in the area of pragmatics. She made a careful analysis on Spectrum series with the application of six models proposed by Searle, Leech, Matreyek, Holms, Leech, Thomas, and Halliday. She reported that the series have provided a variety of language functions, but some important language functions that are used in everyday conversation more frequently, e.g. promising, vowing, and threatening, not only were in the form of unintended function, but also they were not as frequent as others.

In a study done by Soozandehfar and Sahragard (2011), the conversation sections of Top Notch Fundamental textbooks were analyzed from the pragmatic dimension of language functions and speech acts. For this purpose, they randomly selected 14 conversations from the entire 14 units of the books. The researchers applied the two pragmatic models of Halliday’s language functions and Searle’s speech acts to the conversations. The results indicated that the conversations in these newly-arrived textbooks are not pragmatically effective and functional. Finally, some implications for teachers, material developers, and textbook designers were proposed.

Alemi et al. (2013) conducted a study which investigated four speech acts in three popular textbooks in the world. The researchers examined the speech acts in order to find out whether three textbooks - American file, American Headway, and English Result – are pragmatically appropriate. Three different levels, lower-intermediate, intermediate, and upper-intermediate, of each series were examined in search of four speech acts: refusal, request, apology, and complaint. The result of this study showed that the distribution level of the four speech acts was not equal both among textbooks and within each textbook considering the three levels. Among the four speech acts, ‘complaint’

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was seen to have the highest frequency in all textbooks while ‘refusal’ had the least. According to the results obtained from the study, the three textbooks were not considered as appropriate or useful materials in order to teach or learn speech acts in an EFL context. However, the New Headway textbook enjoyed a higher and increasing mode of frequency of speech acts throughout its levels in comparison to other textbooks. They concluded that EFL/ESL teachers and material developers should consider pragmatics more in the limelight to improve the quality of both learning and instruction through rich materials.

Poupari and Bagheri (2013) attempted to evaluate the conversations of two currently used textbooks in Iranian context, Top Notch and ILI textbooks, on the basis of two frameworks of Halliday (1978) and Cohen (1996) to determine features of the books in general, and the strengths and weaknesses of each in particular. To this end, two levels, basic and intermediate, were selected and two pragmatic models of Halliday and Cohen were applied to analyze them. The researchers codified different speech acts and language functions in the conversations. The researchers concluded that the absence of one of the speech acts and language functions in the conversations of the two previously mentioned textbooks could be regarded as a weak point. The results showed that the conversations in the two textbooks had some pragmatic problems with regard to language functions and speech acts.

Methodology Materials

This study aimed at evaluating the American Headway series. The series, which is written by John and Liz Soars, consists of six textbooks for six levels ranging from beginners to advanced level. Two integrated books, student and workbooks, together with an interactive CD, constituted the materials for each level. However, the researcher based the evaluation procedure on student- and work-book content and not the interactive CD (since it is just the audiovisual version of the textbooks' content). Therefore, only textbooks from each level were analyzed.

Instruments

The researcher used Searle's (1969) taxonomy of speech acts, which breaks the speech acts into five distinct components, and his definition of indirectness to investigate the activities in the textbooks. Although other models and taxonomies have been proposed, Searle's categorization is still valid and widely used in pragmatics research body.

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Data Collection Procedure

Activities in the form of dialogues, conversations, and interviews are the main source of speech acts in every textbook. They provide the learners with a situation which they should first understand (this is especially true of indirect speech acts) and then fill in the missing parts, or sometimes respond to some questions. For measuring speech act activities in each textbook, therefore, all conversations, dialogues, and interview situations were examined in both textbooks. It may be worth mentioning that examples and sample answers were also counted. The American Headway series contains numerous conversation and activities, especially as listening component, which are sometimes as long as the whole page. Nevertheless, all conversations, dialogues, and interviews, in any form, were selected and analyzed.

Data Analysis Procedure

The main statistical analysis, in this study, was frequency counts to identify the level of distribution of speech acts in each workbook. Having counted speech act frequencies, the percentage values were then calculated to determine whether or not the distribution levels are equal across the series. In fact, it was expected that with progress along the levels, the advanced level would enjoy more (indirect) speech acts. Therefore, to determine whether the difference between the expected and observed frequencies was statistically significant, the Chi-square test was also applied (though not reported here, the results of Chi-square test were significant for all speech acts, except for the declaratives category). As is obvious, the focus of the researcher was on the content analysis of the textbooks through which the distribution levels of direct and indirect speech acts were examined.

Results and Discussion The following tables illustrate the frequency and distribution level of five speech acts and, consequently, those of direct and indirect speech acts. Table 1 shows the distribution level of speech act categories in different textbooks each of which relating to one level of proficiency.

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Table 1 Frequency of speech acts based on Searle's taxonomy

Levels

Speech

Acts

Starter

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

Total

Assertives 201 332 319 413 430 498 2193

Directives 576 412 408 461 421 532 2810

Commisives 32 53 46 94 127 76 428

Expressives 248 447 429 527 553 715 2919

Declaratives 0 7 21 35 37 42 142

Total 1057 1251 1223 1530 1568 1863

According to this table, the expressives category has the most frequency and distribution across the textbooks, and the declaratives have the least. As the proficiency level of textbook increases, the number of presentations and follow-up activities for all kinds of speech acts also increases, except for Level 2 textbooks which is an exception in this growing trend. The distribution level of all speech acts, though, is not equal in textbooks. Whereas expressive acts were counted most frequently in all activities, declarative ones appeared only 142 times in all textbooks. The rather high frequency of directives in the Starter level indicates that the teaching strategy for interactions in general and for sentences in particular is based on imperative structure. However, the huge amount of speech acts in Level 5 implies that for the advanced learners to be successful in their L2 learning, they should be more aware of speech acts. Of course, Level 5 textbooks are somehow a review of the previous learned materials, thus a gathering of all speech acts may be expected. The American Headway series, therefore, seems to consider the need of learners for more communicative acts and exposes learners to more instances of speech act use in conversations as they become more competent in English. Table 2 shows the frequency of speech acts in each textbook.

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Table 2 The distribution of speech acts in all levels in percentage (%) terms

Levels

Speech

Acts

Starter

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

Total

Assertives 9 15 15 19 20 23 100

Directives 20 15 15 16 15 19 100

Commisives 7 12 11 22 30 18 100

Expressives 8 15 15 18 19 25 100

Declaratives 0 5 15 25 26 29 100

The speech acts distribution for each level is expressed in percentages in Table 2; that is, it determines whether or not the differences exist between speech act frequencies for each textbook. According to this table, the high percentage values are gathered in level 5; an exception is commisives category which has the highest percentage value in level 4. The percentage of assertives, expressives, and declaratives increases as the proficiency level of textbooks increases. This does not, however, apply to directives category which starts with its maximum percentage at the Starter level, then goes without any sharp difference until the final level whereby it, again, mounts to a rather high percentage. Moreover, the commisive acts follow the growing trend in percentage points up to Level 4; a dramatic drop can be seen in Level 5 which is indicative of fewer presentation instances and follow-up activities devoted to commisives in this level. As is obvious, the percentages of speech acts are not the same through the textbooks which, in turn, is a convincing evidence that speech acts are not distributed evenly across the levels.

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Table 3 The distribution of speech acts across the levels in percentage (%) terms

Speech

Acts

Levels

Assertives

Directives

Com

misives

Expressives

Declaratives

Total

Starter 19 55 3 23 0 100

Level 1 27 33 4 35 1 100

Level 2 26 33 4 35 2 100

Level 3 27 30 6 34 3 100

Level 4 27 27 8 35 3 100

Level 5 27 28 4 38 3 100

Table 3 illustrates the percentage points for all speech acts across each of the distinct levels of the series. As is obvious, different speech acts are not spread equally throughout each textbook. With the Starter level as an exception, expressives dominate the speech acts in all the levels; this finding can be explained by the fact that they occur most frequently in natural language use, hence being presented extensively to the learners. As mentioned previously, the high percentage of directives in the Starter level may be due to pedagogical value they bear. The following table shows the results of frequency counts for direct and indirect speech acts.

Table 4 Frequency of direct and indirect speech acts across the levels

Levels

Speech

Acts

Starter

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

Total

Direct 781 921 902 1129 1120 1289 6142

Indirect 276 339 325 401 448 574 2363

Total 1057 1251 1223 1530 1568 1863

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According to Table 4, direct speech acts have higher frequency than indirect ones. The number of direct speech acts increases as the learners become more competent. The fact that more advanced levels provide the L2 learners with longer and more complex sentence structures may explain this result. Although not mentioned in statistical measurements, it was observed that student-books contained more samples of target structure, here speech acts. As was expected, the growing trend towards speech acts is reversed in Level 2 books. As with the direct ones, indirect speech acts maintained the growing trend; however, their appearance is of lower frequency. Percentage of direct and indirect categorization for each level is illustrated in Table 5.

Table 5 The percentage (%) of direct and indirect speech acts across the levels

Levels

Speech

Acts

Starter

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Level 4

Level 5

Total

Direct 13 15 15 18 18 21 100

Indirect 12 14 14 17 19 24 100

Table 5 shows the distribution level of direct and indirect speech acts in percentage terms. It is a clear indication that direct and indirect speech acts are not distributed equally across the levels. As with the previous results about speech act categories, the percentage of both direct and indirect speech acts increases from Starter to Level 5 textbooks. However, it was observed that direct speech acts appeared three times as the indirect ones. The results, on the whole, proves the growing trend towards the use of speech acts across the textbook levels, and that direct and indirect speech acts are equally spread over the series.

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Table 6 The percentage of direct and indirect speech acts within each level

Levels Direct Indirect Total

Starter 74 26 100

Level 1 74 26 100

Level 2 73 27 100

Level 3 74 26 100

Level 4 71 29 100

Level 5 69 31 100

The distribution level of direct and indirect speech acts within each textbook is shown in Table 6. According to this table, direct and indirect speech acts are not evenly spread in each level. In general, the direct-indirect ratio stands at 3:1 in this series; however, Level 4 and Level 5 textbooks seem to present learners with more instances of indirect speech acts; and, as a result, these levels flout the three-to-one convention between direct and indirect speech acts. One reason for this violation may be that the more competent the learners become the more complex structures and sophisticated speech acts they need in order to engage in communication. Therefore, the textbooks in advanced level seek to offer opportunities to the learners by presenting more contextualized exemplars of indirect speech acts.

Conclusion Despite the current beliefs about effective trends in English teaching methodology that pragmatics knowledge should be developed early in the leaning process, modern textbooks, which are believed to be the primary source of input in EFL contexts, are not pragmatically rich and, hence, unsuitable for L2 learners. Similarly, this study proved that the American Headway series is not pragmatically appropriate for L2 learners, and that it may fall short of supporting pragmatic competence. Adding to learners' woes, the distribution level of direct and indirect speech acts is not equal within each level. Moreover, not all speech act categories, based on Searle's taxonomy, are evenly spread over each level. The learners exposed to this series, therefore, may grow competent in using one speech act and unable to produce, or sometime comprehend, another.

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The implications of this study are for teachers, institutes, and materials developers. First, teachers can teach, explicitly and implicitly, the pragmatic points needed for communicative purposes to be successfully accomplished. Second, Institutes can decide on supplementary materials to be presented along with the common textbooks. Last but not least, materials developers and course designers should carefully consider pragmatic dimension of language learning while writing course books.

This study is useful in exploring the pragmatic aspects of the American Headway series; however, it has its limitations. First, the study enjoyed Searle's taxonomy of speech acts, though still a valid and widely used model. Future studies may utilize other pragmatic models, Cohen's (1996) model for instance, to explore the pragmatic dimension of textbooks. Second, the only textbook series investigated in this study was the American Headway series. However, further research is needed to compare several textbook series, preferably all levels, from pragmatics point of view. Finally, the results of this study were reported based on the macro-structure, to use Searle's term; that is, the broad categories of expressives, directives, etc. In pragmatics perspective, there are other micro-structure speech acts, namely apologies, requests, and promising. Therefore, future research needs to be carried out in both macro- and micro-structure speech acts; for example, the link between these two structures can be investigated.

References Akutsu, Y. (2001). Examining speech acts in “Oral Communication A” textbooks (1).

Kyoai Ronsyu, 13, 163–178.

Alemi, M., Bemani, M., & Roodi, F. (2013). Pragmatic investigation in three global English textbooks. The Internet Journal Language, Culture and Society, 36, 1–6.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boxer, D., & Pickering, L. (1995). Problems in the presentation of speech acts in ELT materials: The case of complaints. ELT Journal, 49(1), 44–58.

Cohen, A. D. (1996). Speech acts. In S. L. McKay & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language teaching (pp. 383-420). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Darali, G. (2007). Pragmatic dimension in spectrum textbooks. (Unpublished Master’s Thesis).Shiraz University, Iran.

Ellis, R. (2008). The study of second language acquisition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London, Edward Arnold: Baltimore, University Park Press.

Poupari, Z., & Bagheri, M. S. (2013). Correlation of speech acts and language functions in Top Notch Series vs. ILI textbooks from a pragmatic point of view. International Journal of English Linguistics, 3(2), 72–81.

Searle, J. R. (1965). What is a speech act?. In M. Black (Ed.), Perspectives in the philosophy of language: A concise anthology (pp. 253–268). London: Allen and Unwin.

Searle, J. R. (1968). Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. The Philosophical Review, 77, 405–424.

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Soars, L., & Soars, J. (2001). American Headway Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taguchi, N. (2008). Pragmatic comprehension in Japanese as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal, 92(4), 558–576.

Taguchi, N. (2011). Teaching pragmatics: Trends and issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 289–310.

Tavakoli, F. (1995). Functional analysis of the dialogues in the Iranian senior high school English textbooks. (Unpublished Master' S Thesis). Allame University, Tehran.

Vellenga, H. (2004). Learning pragmatics from ESL & EFL textbooks: How likely? TESL-EJ, 8(2), 1–18.

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How Much Attention Should Be Given to Vocabulary Knowledge in IELTS Reading

Preparation Classes?

Sasan Baleghizadeh

TEFL, Associate Professor, Shahid Beheshti University

Noushin Loghmani Khouzani

TEFL, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract This study was conducted to investigate the proportion of technical words in comparison to the whole amount of general English words in the reading passages of the IELTS test. Seven IELTS test preparation books including past IELTS test examination papers were surveyed and analyzed in order to find the most common domains in reading passages of the academic module and the percentage of technical words related to each domain. The results showed that, basically, the total amount of technical words compared with the whole is insignificant and there is more focus in general on environmental topics in the passages. Thus, this study suggests that less attention should be given to specific vocabulary items and more to general and the most common words in addition to the academic word list.

Keywords: vocabulary, IELTS, reading, reading comprehension, vocabulary teaching, vocabulary Knowledge, technical words

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Introduction

It is an indisputable fact that there are many benefits to having large vocabulary knowledge. Many have provided evidence that the students’ knowledge of words and their meanings can have an essential role in a student’s reading proficiency (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001). A rich vocabulary repertoire can be one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension (Beck & McKeown, 2007) and therefore can positively contribute to reading comprehension. As a result, one of the main aims in teaching vocabulary is to help learners improve their understanding of texts. What should not be neglected is that vocabulary instruction is a long-term proposition and consequently attention to its expansion has to start early (Nagy, 2009). However, students preparing for the IELTS test do not usually have the luxury of dedicating a lot of time to learning words and are predominantly under time pressure. There is no doubt that when reading a passage, one often comes across unknown words, or sometimes familiar words used in uncommon ways. This is true even for native readers and it is naturally even more so for foreign language learners.

Despite the fact that encountering unfamiliar words might not impede the overall comprehension of the text, when there are too many of them, or the most essential ones are unknown, then understanding will suffer. However, if the reader tries to guess in context, it is likely that an improvement in their command of vocabulary would perhaps involve an improvement in their ability to reasonably predict the unknown word. Whether or not the learners are able to make use of contextual clues and guess the unknown word correctly, at certain levels of proficiency, has been a subject of controversy for many years. Nonetheless, some researchers have concluded that explicit vocabulary teaching would be considered as a waste of time and most probably new words could be acquired through exposure with direct teaching (Bensoussan & Läufer, 1984).

On the other hand, there are a number of researchers and teachers who believe that the “new-word” density, that is the proportion of new words to the proportion of already known words, is an important factor to reading comprehension. Johns (as cited in Bensoussan & Läufer, 1984), argues that there is a ‘threshold effect’ and this occurs when there are more than approximately 50 unknown words per 1000 known words. In this case, Johns claims that there will not be sufficient context for successful guessing, and consequently perception will be significantly blocked.

It is difficult to find out the extent to which students can use context in guessing the meaning of new words. Therefore, some teachers prefer to expose students to new words in context, and hope that they will guess the meaning of the word through contextual clues and thus learn them; whereas others have a

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tendency to explicitly teach and drill vocabulary terms (Bensoussan & Läufer, 1984).

Review of Related Literature

Receptive and Productive Vocabulary

There is a well-known and recognized distinction between receptive (recognized or passive) vocabulary and productive (or active) vocabulary. Researchers and teachers have always been interested in measuring their learners’ vocabulary size and its importance. A perception of students’ receptive vocabulary size can provide teachers with a gauge as to whether those students have the capability to comprehend a text. Knowing students’ productive vocabulary size can provide some sort of an indication as to the degree to which students will be able to speak or write (Web, 2008).

Webb, in another study, demonstrates that receptive learning can be a very effective method of gaining vocabulary knowledge. The results suggested that if the main goal of learning is improving comprehension, receptive tasks are likely to be the most effective. He argues that word pairs can be learned receptively or productively and that is when receptive learning of word pairs involves meeting a decontextualized L2 vocabulary item, and then trying to recall its L1 meaning, while productive learning is actually meeting a decontextualized L1 item, and then trying to recall its L2 form . He argues that receptive learning of word pairs is perhaps a more widely used method. Using either productive tasks or a combination of receptive and productive tasks, is likely to be more effective in improving the overall vocabulary knowledge and as a result reading conception (Webb, 2009).

He continues that tasks such as productive learning of word pairs, and sentence production are two methods that could be merged into a vocabulary-learning program with slight effort. In turn, incorporating more productive learning tasks into the classroom could also narrow the gap between the size of learners’ receptive and productive vocabulary. Brown (2007) brings up the question of how one can explain this apparent "lag" between comprehension and production. There is no doubt that adults can grasp more vocabulary than they use in speech, also they can comprehend more syntactic variation than they produce. He continues by asking if the same competence accounts for both modes of performance. Or, is comprehension competence a separate part from production competence? Or more importantly, is production indicative of a smaller part of competence? He believes that this is surely not the matter and he emphasizes the necessity to make a distinction between production competence

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and comprehension competence. In fact, he argues that linguistic competence has several modes, at least four, since speaking, listening, reading, and writing are all distinct modes of performance (Brown, 2007).

Lee (2012) defines Lexical density as the percentage of lexical words in a text divided by the total number of words. In this researcher’s words, lexical words refer to nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. However, the writer mentions that the disadvantage of this distinction is that the relationship between lexical words and non-lexical words depends on the text’s syntactic and cohesive properties. In addition, Lee argues that lexical sophistication compares the number of advanced words in a text with the total number of words. Indeed, the definition of advanced will depend on the researcher and obviously must be related to the learner’s level because what is considered advanced vocabulary for a learner often will be very different from what is advanced for another learner (Lee & Muncie, 2012).

Nevertheless, based on the instrumentalist position, individuals who can score high on a vocabulary test are most probably to know more of the words in most texts they face than low scoring individuals. The core of the instrumentalist hypothesis is that being aware of the meaning of more words enables the reader to gain a fuller text comprehension. That is, vocabulary knowledge is directly related to text comprehension (Anderson & Freebody, 1979). All in all, the commonsense view of doing a good reading test is that the reader should be aware of the meaning of the general words in a text in order to understand it.

What Is IELTS?

IELTS is the International English Language Testing System and is considered to be the world’s proven English language test. IELTS was one of the pioneers of four skills English language testing which was established in 1989, and continues to set the standard for English language testing today. IELTS is considered to be an international standardized test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers. It is jointly managed by Cambridge English Language Assessment, the British Council and IDP Education. IELTS is one of the two major English-language tests in the world, the other being the TOEFL (IELTS, 2014).

IELTS is recognized as a secure, valid and reliable indicator of true-to-life ability to communicate in English for education, immigration and professional accreditation. There are two versions of the IELTS test: the Academic Version and the General Training Version. The Academic Version is proposed for those who want to enroll in universities and other institutions of higher education and for professionals such as medical doctors and nurses who

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want to study or practice in an English-speaking country, while the General Training Version is intended for those planning to undertake non-academic training or to gain work experience, or for immigration purposes.

No minimum score is required to pass the test. In fact an IELTS result or “Test Report Form” is issued to all candidates with a score from "band 1" ("non-user") to "band 9" ("expert user") and each institution sets a different threshold. In 2007, IELTS tested over a million candidates and became the world's most popular English language test for higher education and immigration.

IELTS Test Structure

All candidates must complete four modules - listening, reading, writing and speaking - to obtain a band score, which is shown on the IELTS test report form. All candidates take the same listening and speaking modules, while the reading and writing modules differ depending on whether the candidate is taking the academic or general training versions of the test. The listening module comprises four sections. Each section, which can be either a monologue or dialogue, begins with a short introduction telling the candidates about the situation and the speakers.

In the Reading section, the academic module of the reading test comprises three sections, with 3 texts normally followed by 13 or 14 questions for a total of 40 questions overall. The General test also has 3 sections. However, the texts are shorter, so there can be up to 5 texts to read. As for the Writing section, in the Academic module, there are two tasks: in Task 1 candidates describe a diagram, graph, process or chart, and in Task 2 they respond to an argument. In the General Training module, there are also two tasks: in Task 1 candidates write a letter or explain a situation, and in Task 2 they write an essay.

The speaking section which is usually held on a different day contains three sections. The first section takes the form of an interview during which candidates may be asked about their hobbies, interests, reasons for taking IELTS exam as well as other general topics. In the second section candidates are given a topic card and then have one minute to prepare after which they must speak about the given topic. The third section involves a discussion between the examiner and the candidate, generally on questions relating to the theme which they have already spoken about in part 2.

This study aims to look at the domains and the amount of specific vocabulary in IELTS examination papers of the Academic module in order to discover the domains of the reading passages and the proportion of technical words in each passage. Moreover, the necessity of paying attention to technical

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vocabulary in IELTS preparation classes will be looked at. The sources examined provide four complete Academic plus two general tests in addition to answer keys and recording scripts making them ideal sources for test preparation.

Methodology The Test Preparation Books

In this study, seven Cambridge IELTS books containing authentic examination papers from university of Cambridge ESOL examinations were surveyed. There are currently 9 books of such available in the market worldwide; however, books 1 and 2 were omitted from the study due to the fact that they are considered outdated and the form of the test has changed slightly. Table 1 shows the test preparation books used for the survey in this paper.

Table 1 Test Preparation Books

Title Publisher Year

1 Cambridge English IELTS Book 3 Cambridge University Press 2002

2 Cambridge English IELTS Book 4 Cambridge University Press 2005

3 Cambridge English IELTS Book 5 Cambridge University Press 2006

4 Cambridge English IELTS Book 6 Cambridge University Press 2007

5 Cambridge English IELTS Book 7 Cambridge University Press 2009

6 Cambridge English IELTS Book 8 Cambridge University Press 2011

7 Cambridge English IELTS Book 9 Cambridge University Press 2013

Procedures

Out of the 9 IELTS test preparation books available in the market, seven of the most recent books (Book 3 to 9) were chosen. Each book consists of 4 Academic and 2 General Module Tests. In this study only the Academic tests in each book have been taken into consideration. Each Academic test includes a reading section containing 3 passages on different domains. Each passage was examined for the domain and categorized. Then the total number of words in each passage and the number of technical vocabulary words related to that domain in the passage were identified and counted (tentative). A vocabulary item was

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considered to be a single word or any type of phrase or expression with a specific meaning.

As each of the seven surveyed books consist of 4 academic tests and each test includes 3 reading passages, there are 84 passages overall. The passages were initially categorized based on the domains and the topics they are related to. Subsequently, in order to facilitate the calculations the passages were broadly categorized into 19 domains and the number of times each domain was encountered was counted. Seven tables were designed illustrating the topic of each passage, the domain in addition to the total number of words in each passage and the number of technical words related to that domain (see Appendix). The percentage of the technical words to the whole was calculated and the proportion of technical words in all similar domains were added up and eventually compared to the total number of words in all reading passages.

Results and Discussion Overall Results

The overall results are shown in the pie chart below. The pie chart (Figure 1), illustrates the percentage of technical vocabulary items in comparison to the whole number of words in the 7 IELTS books used in this research. It is obvious that the percentage of specific vocabulary items is unnoticeable. As can be seen, only an insignificant proportion of 2% of the texts included technical words which were related to the specific domain of each passage and naturally the rest of the words were non-technical.

Figure 1 The percentage of technical and general words

The results of the type of domains and the frequency of each are shown in Figure 2.

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Figure 2 The frequency of each domain

The bar chart indicates the various domains referred to in IELTS academic reading passages in the seven surveyed books. The initial impression is that, Environment / Biology was the most common domain, repeated 17 times. This is followed by Trade/Industry and Psychology, as the second most significant domains, both taking up 9 passages and Science/Research and Education with 8 passages. As seen, Health/Medicine and Linguistics as well as Meteorology and History took 5 and 3 passages respectively. The remaining domains had fewer than 3 repetitions with Semiotics, Aviation, and Space with only one related passage.

The percentage of technical words related to one domain in comparison with the rest of the domains was also looked at. The chart (Figure 3) demonstrates the percentage of technical words related to the 17 domains. It is

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clear that the most prominent sector is related to Environment/Biology with just over 20%. Trade/Industry, Psychology and Science/Research have approximately the same share of roughly 10%. Plainly, Health/Medicine and Education have around 7% more or less specific vocabulary related to them. However, as clearly seen, the percentages of connected words to other domains drop to less than 8 percent with Space accounting for the least related words of less than 1%.

Figure 3 The percentage of technical words

Looking across the domains, it is evident that more than half of the specific words in IELTS reading passages are linked with Environmental research, Science and Technology, remaining a fairly minor concern for the rest. Nevertheless, the fact remains that having a vast knowledge of vocabulary in all domains can have an influence in the reader’s comprehension.

Implications

For IELTS preparation teachers the results suggest that a different view of vocabulary knowledge needs to be adopted. Primarily, the awareness should be

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given to the candidates that learning and knowing the meaning of technical words in IELTS reading passages is not necessary for understanding and answering the reading comprehension questions as their proportion is insignificant in comparison to the total number of words. Also , if decision is made to look as some specific words, more attention should be given to the domains predominantly used in IELTS reading passages such as Environment and Biology.

More fundamentally, greater consideration for general vocabulary knowledge should result in more effective materials. There is no doubt that Vocabulary researchers have established the significance of the most frequent items of vocabulary, specifically the Academic Word List (AWL) and the prominence of knowing these items very well. Learning the Academic Word List will undeniably require a lot of time and many encounters with a word, albeit textbooks prior to IELTS preparation books have generally provided the students with many of such encounters.

It is therefore recommended that IELTS preparation classes introduce vocabulary books that focus on the academic word list in addition to the 3000 general English words and revisit them regularly. In this way the learners are less likely to become overwhelmed and consequently demotivated with the large amount of words. By focusing on what they know and learning to guess the meaning from context, they can gain a more comprehensive understanding of items. This approach might help resolve the problem of the confusion caused by too many books and resources focusing on vocabulary from all sorts of domains.

For teachers the main implication would be assigning appropriate books and resources, focusing and practicing the most appropriate words, essential for an acceptable comprehension. Teachers should take the responsibility of guiding the students on the right path and ensuring that their learners will have adequate opportunities to learn limited but useful words. As a result, teachers are recommended to take the above into consideration while providing the students with regular repetition and exposure to the right range of vocabulary items.

Limitations

This research was limited due to the ambiguity of what words would be considered as ‘Technical Terms’ related to a domain. Furthermore, most passages were related to two or sometimes three different subjects; however, in order to decrease the vagueness, the researcher classified them into broader categories. Therefore the results are clearly tentative and should be considered exploratory.

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Conclusion This study investigated seven current test preparation books with regard to the aspects of vocabulary and technical words related to specific domains. The reading passages in the academic module of the test practice books were looked and were categorized into 17 different domains. Then the whole number of words in each passage was compared with the number of technical words and the percentage of each was calculated and compared. These results led to the understanding that the amount of technical words in comparison with general words was insignificant; however, the most common area of concern was Environment/Biology which included around a quarter of the whole.

As a result, teachers should encourage test takers to ignore the technical words in a reading passage and help students to learn to anticipate or guess the meaning of words which seem to be required in comprehension from context. It is worth noting that we do not expect for all the predictions to be good or correct. There might be some incidents where the word may not be predictable with high probability; this could be because they are too small to have a distinct identity (Daugulu, Bernard, Freitas, & Forsyth, 2002).

Future research may be needed to look at the General Module and also the domains covered in the listening and speaking sections and to investigate any differences between them. This study sought test preparation books that are available internationally and are published by Cambridge University Press but there are many other books that can also be looked at.

References Anderson, R. C., & Freebody, P. (1979). Vocabulary knowledge. Technical

report no.136. E-journal of Eric. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED177480

Beck, I.L., & McKeown, M.G. (2007). Increasing young low-income children’s oral vocabulary repertoires through rich and focused instruction. The Elementary School Journal, 107(3), 251–271.

Bensoussan, M., & Läufer, B. (1984). Lexical guessing in context in EFL reading comprehension. Research in Reading, 7(1), 15-32. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.1984.tb00252.x

Brown, D. B. (2007). First language acquisition. Principles of language learning and teaching (pp. 38-39). NY: Pearson Education Inc.

Cain, K., Oakhill, J.V., Barnes, M.A., & Bryant, P.E. (2001). Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and their relation to knowledge. Memory

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& Cognition, 29(6), 850–859. doi:10.3758/ BF03196414

Daugulu, P., Bernard, K., de Freitas, J.F.G., & Forsyth, D.A. (2002). Object recognition as machine translation: Learning a lexicon for a fixed image vocabulary. In A. Hyden, G. Sparr, M. Nielsan, & P. Johansen (Eds.), Computer vision (pp. 97-112). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/3-540-47979-1_7

IELTS - International English Language Testing System. (December, 2014). Retrieved from http://www.ielts.org/about_us.aspx

Lee, S.H., & Muncie, J. (2012). From receptive to productive: Improving ESL learners’ use of vocabulary in a post reading composition task. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 295-320. doi:10.2307/40264524

Nagy, W. (2009). Why vocabulary instruction needs to be limy-term and comprehensive. In E.H. Hiebert & M.L. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (pp. 27-44). New Jersey: Taylor & Francis

Webb, S. (2008). Receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of L2 learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(1), 79-95. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263108080042

Appendix

Cambridge TESOL Examinations

Book 3

No. of

Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 The rocket –From East to West Technology 985 23 2.33

1 2 The risks of cigarette Health/Medicine 808 24 2.97

1 3 The scientific method Science/Research 799 17 2.12

2 1 The remarkable beetle Environment/Biology

791 18 2.27

2 2 No title Management 1265 23 1.81

2 3 The concept of role theory Science/Research 954 24 2.51

3 1 The department of ethnography History 825 24 2.90

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3 2 Secrets of forests Environment/Biology

775 19 2.45

3 3 Highs and lows Psychology 825 19 2.30

4 1 No Title Environment/Biology

823 27 3.28

4 2 Votes for women Politics 816 17 2.08

4 3 Measuring organizational performance

Politics 945 17 1.79

Cambridge TESOL Examinations

Book 4

No. of

Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 No Title Environment/Biology 746 20 2.68

1 2 What do whales feel? Environment/Biology 710 16 2.25

1 3 Visual symbols and the blind Semiotics 787 19 2.41

2 1 Lost for words Linguistics 786 14 1.78

2 2 Alternative medicine in Australia

Health/Medicine 684 24 3.51

2 3 Play is a serious business Psychology 3.51 16 1.54

3 1 Micro-Enterprise credit for street youth

Education 776 11 1.41

3 2 Volcanoes- earth-shattering news

Environment/Geology 997 18 1.80

3 3 Obtaining linguistic data Linguistics 1280 16 12.5

4 1 How much higher? How much faster?

Sports 842 16 1.90

4 2 The nature and aims or archeology

Environment/Geology 825 8 0.97

4 3 The problem of scarce resources

Health/Medicine 855 14 1.64

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Cambridge TESOL Examinations Book 5

No. of Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 Johnson’s dictionary Linguistics 720 11 1.53

1 2 Nature or Nurture? psychology 923 17 1.84

1 3 The truth about the environment Environment/Biology 909 11 1.21

2 1 Bakelite-the birth of modern plastic

Science/Research 881 17 1.93

2 2 What’s so funny? Science/Research 845 14 1.66

2 3 The birth of scientific English Linguistics 802 9 1.12

3 1 Early childhood education Education 904 11 1.22

3 2 Disappearing delta Environment/Biology 894 23 2.57

3 3 The return of artificial intelligence

Technology 869 9 1.04

4 1 The impact of wilderness tourism Trade/Industry 945 17 1.80

4 2 Flawed beauty Trade/Industry 909 21 2.31

4 3 The effect of light on plant and animal species

Environment/Biology 783 14 1.79

Cambridge TESOL Examinations Book 6

No. of Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 Australia’s sporting success Sports 571 19 3.33

1 2 Delivering the goods Trade/Industry 752 18 2.39

1 3 Climate change and the Inuit Meteorology 899 25 2.78

2 1 Advantages of public transport Trade/Industry 473 14 2.96

2 2 Greying population stays in the pink

Health/Medicine 897 23 2.56

2 3 Numeration Education 777 9 1.16

3 1 No title History 675 13 1.93

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3 2 Motivating employees under adverse conditions

Management 942 17 1.80

3 3 The search for the anti-aging pill Health/Medicine 926 31 3.35

4 1 Doctoring sales Trade/Industry 688 9 1.30

4 2 Do literate women make better mothers?

Education 780 12 1.53

4 3 No title Education 810 18 2.22

Cambridge TESOL Examinations Book 7

No. of Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 Let’s go bats Environment/Biology 884 17 1.92

1 2 Making every drop count Environment/Biology 752 14 1.86

1 3 Educating psyche Education 910 10 1.09

2 1 Why pagodas don’t fall Architecture 1089 13 1.19

2 2 The true cost of food Trade/Industry 924 17 1.83

2 3 Makete Integrated rural transport project

Trade/Industry 1120 24 2.14

3 1 Ant intelligent Environment/Biology 966 18 1.86

3 2 Population movements and genetics

Sociology 843 11 1.30

3 3 No Title Environment/Biology 880 12 1.36

4 1 Pulling strings to build pyramids

Architecture 755 14 1.84

4 2 Endless harvest Environment/Biology 886 19 2.14

4 3 Effects of noise Psychology 750 11 1.46

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Cambridge TESOL Examinations Book 8

No. of Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific

%

1 1 A Chronicle of Timekeeping History/Technology Development

976 20 2.05

1 2 Air Traffic control in the USA Aviation/ Air Traffic 936 22 2.35

1 3 Telepathy science/communication/Research

979 16 1.63

2 1 Sheet Glass Manufacture: The Float Process

Manufacturing 775 19 2.45

2 2 The Little Ice Age Meteorology 866 18 2.08

2 3 The Meaning and Power of smell

Olfaction/Research 662 10 1.51

3 1 Striking Back at Lightening with Lasers

Meteorology 802 14 1.75

3 2 The Nature of Genius Education 1023 16 1.56

3 3 How Does the Biological Clock Tick?

Biology 754 18 2.39

4 1 Land of the Rising Sum Education 818 15 1.83

4 2 Biological Control of pests Biology 770 24 3.12

4 3 Collecting Ant Specimens Biology/Environment 832 11 1.32

Cambridge TESOL Examinations Book 9

No. of Tests

No. of Passages

Title Domain Total Specific %

1 1 William Henry Perkin Trade/Industry 492 23 4.67

1 2 Is there anybody out there? Science/Research 1090 18 1.65

1 3 The History of the tortoise Environment/Biology 819 37 4.52

2 1 No Title Psychology 991 27 2.72

2 2 Venus in transit Science/Research 985 24 2.44

2 3 A neuroscientist reveals how to think differently

Psychology 990 17 1.72

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3 1 Attitudes to Language Linguistics 630 15 2.38

3 2 Tidal Power Science/Research 695 19 2.73

3 3 Information Theory - The Big Idea

Space 862 14 1.62

4 1 The Life and Work of Marie Curie

Science/Research 984 24 2.44

4 2 Young Children's Sense of Identity

Psychology 887 20 2.25

4 3 The Development of Museums

Sociology 897 15 1.67

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The 1000 Most Frequent English Words in Different Textbooks at Beginner Level

Ramin Ahmadi

TEFL, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract The present study aimed to investigate the use of the first 1000 most frequent words in the West’s (1953) General Service List (GSL) at beginner level of different textbooks used to instruct English language in EFL settings. The textbooks used for this study were English Time published by Oxford press for children, Connect published by Cambridge press appropriate for teenagers, Top Notch published by Pearson Longman for adults, American English File published by Oxford for adults, American Headway published by Oxford for adults, Family and Friends published by Oxford for children, Interchange third edition published by Cambridge for adults, English Result published by Oxford for adults, and finally Touchstone published by Cambridge for adults. The results of the study showed that in books for children, at least 8.7 percent of the GSL words were used. In Connect, which was designed for teenagers, 39 percent of the words mentioned in west’s GSL were used. In addition, in all textbooks provided for adults, at least 43 percent of the GSL words were covered. Indeed, different textbooks had quite varying numbers of words and GSL words. For example, books for adult and teenager learners had higher numbers of words than the books which were designed for children. The results carry some implications for materials writers and textbook practitioners.

Keywords: textbook, beginner, General Service List (GSL), number of words, percentage of words

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Introduction Vocabulary is central to language acquisition, whether one is learning a first or a second language. In the past, vocabulary and lexical items of a language got less attention compared to other aspects of language acquisition like grammar and speaking (Richards & Renandya, 2002). Nowadays it is somehow axiomatic that vocabulary items constitute the main component of language production and comprehension in that a learner should have some kind of knowledge about lexical aspects of a language in order to produce that language or comprehend it sufficiently. Having this point in mind it is easy to see that vocabulary is the core component of language proficiency, and it provides much of what is needed for language learners to listen, speak, read, and write in any language (Richards & Renandya, 2002).

As mentioned earlier, vocabulary has not always been recognized as a priority in language pedagogy, but after conducting numerous experimental studies in the field of language learning and teaching the undeniable role of vocabulary instruction and learning became apparent. These studies have tried to answer many questions like: What does it mean to know a word? Which words do learners need to learn? And how will they learn them? These questions highlight the need for lexical competence and the roles teachers have in helping learners to achieve these aims.

Review of Related Literature In her book, Ur (1996) specifies some important aspects of vocabulary that should be taught. The first one is form which entails pronunciation and spelling, a learner should know what a word sounds like and what a word looks like. The second one is grammar, grammar of a new word should be taught completely; an item may have some unpredictable changes in some contexts that are not clearly covered by general grammatical rules. The third one is collocation, learners should know if some particular combination of words sound right or wrong. The forth one is aspects of meaning: denotation, connotation and appropriateness. Denotation is the type of meaning generally given by dictionaries. Connotation is the words associations and the positive or negative feelings it evokes. Appropriateness is whether a word is appropriate to use in specific contexts and situations. The fifth one is meaning relationships; these include the way one word is related to other words. There are several of such relationships like synonym, antonym, hyponym, superordinate, and translation. The last one is word formation, learners should be familiar with the formation of vocabulary items and whether they can be broken down to different parts or not.

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Brown (2007a) sees vocabulary instruction as the other 'half' of form focused instruction and argues that lexical items are basic to all of the four language skills, so in his view vocabulary is not a skill as we normally use the term. Then he goes on mentioning that toward the end of the twentieth century, there has been a revival of systematic attention to vocabulary learning across different proficiency levels and contexts, ranging from very explicit focus like the Lexical Approach, to more indirect approaches in which vocabulary is incorporated into communicative tasks. Brown (2007a) specifies some guidelines or principles for the communicative treatment of vocabulary instruction. First he points out teachers should allocate specific class time to vocabulary learning. Second they should help students to learn vocabulary in context; this principle emphasizes the role context plays in expediting vocabulary items' retention. Third, teachers should play down the role of bilingual dictionaries; this principle implies that teachers help students to resist the temptation to overuse their bilingual dictionaries. Forth, encourage students to develop strategies for determining the meaning of words. And the fifth is to engage in "unplanned" vocabulary teaching, this implies those impromptu moments that for example a student asks about a word that deserves attention in the classroom.

One of the very important issues of vocabulary instruction that some scholars also find as a hot topic in the field of language teaching in general and vocabulary instruction in particular is whether learners learn the target vocabulary incidentally or intentionally. The former is also called implicit learning and the latter is also called explicit learning. In his book Brown (2007b) defined implicit learning as acquisition of linguistic competence without intention to learn and without focal awareness of what has been learned. He went on and defined explicit learning as acquisition of linguistic competence with conscious awareness of, or focal attention to, the form of language, usually in the context of instruction.

Hunt and Beglar (2002) argued that in general emphasizing explicit instruction is probably best for beginning and intermediate learners who have limited vocabularies. On the other hand extensive reading and listening as techniques improving implicit learning of vocabulary might receive more attention for more proficient intermediate and advanced learners.

Speaking of principles, Hunt and Beglar (2002) also provide some general and insightful guidelines demonstrating how to treat vocabulary instruction. Now the first one is to have learners provided with opportunities for incidental learning of vocabulary, one way to achieve this aim is injecting extensive reading activities in the curriculum or the use of graded, simplified texts for learners who have low proficiency in English. The second one is to provide opportunities for explicit learning of vocabulary. This can be achieved by

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supplying learners with vocabulary items, a good and practical example is the first 3000 most frequent words in English and demanding learner to try to study them explicitly. The next principle is to provide opportunities for elaborating word knowledge. Knowing a word means knowing more than just its translated meaning or L2 synonym. Nation (1994) identifies multiple aspects of word knowledge such as knowing related grammatical patterns, affixes, common lexical sets, how to use a word receptively or productively, typical associations, and so on. So it is up to teachers' shoulders to always give attention to different aspects of lexical items so learners will have a rich and elaborated knowledge. The forth principle is to develop fluency over the known vocabulary. This partly depends on developing sight vocabulary through extensive reading and studying the high frequent words in English −an example could be paced and timed reading activities to achieve fluency. Explaining timed and paced reading activities are beyond the scope of this paper (for more information, see Hunt & Beglar, 2002).The fifth one is to experiment with guessing from the context. This kind of activity can be complex, of course it is said to be more effective with highly proficient learners. To guess successfully one needs to know 19 out of 20 words (95%) of the text (Hunt & Beglar, 2002). The last one is to introduce appropriate dictionaries to learners, whether they are monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries or bilingualized ones.

N. Ellis (1995) identifies four main points on an explicit-implicit vocabulary learning continuum:

1. A strong implicit learning hypothesis holds that words are acquired largely by unconscious means.

2. A weak implicit learning hypothesis holds that words cannot be learned without at least some noticing or consciousness that it is a new word which is being learned.

3. A weak explicit learning hypothesis holds that learners are active processors of information and that a range of strategies are used to infer the meaning of a word, usually with reference to its context.

4. A strong explicit learning hypothesis holds that a range of metacognitive strategies such as planning and monitoring are necessary for vocabulary learning; in particular, the greater the depth of processing involved in the learning, the more secure and long term the learning is to be.

This list can be a good source for us to get a better understanding of the implicit-explicit construct, each of the points mentioned in this list can reflect multiple

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positions taken by different scholars in the history of language learning and teaching.

One way to introduce vocabulary items into the classroom is to include them in the textbooks that are used by teachers to instruct the target language. Some scholars believe that textbooks are not appropriate materials to use in the classroom since they limit the role of the teachers. But some find them excellent attachments to the classroom instruction because they can provide a map for instruction and are prepared by experts in the field. Discussion about textbooks and their merits and demerits is beyond the scope of this paper (for an excellent review of textbooks see Crawford, 2002).

The following paper is intended to evaluate the use of vocabulary in some textbooks; the author is going to find out how the first 1000 most frequent words from West's (1953) General Service List (GSL) are used in beginner textbooks. This paper is only going to evaluate the use of the first 1000 most frequent words but it is delighting to know that the 2000 high frequency words in West's (1953) General Service List (GSL) cover 87 percent of an average non academic text (Nation, 1990).

Methodology Materials

Nine textbooks were selected for this evaluation. The beginner book or level of each of these series are selected to see to what extent the authors have considered the first 1000 high frequency words in English. The textbooks used for this study were English Time published by Oxford press for children, Connect published by Cambridge press appropriate for teenagers, Top Notch published by Pearson Longman for adults, American English File published by Oxford for adults, American Headway published by Oxford for adults, Family and Friends published by Oxford for children, Interchange third edition published by Cambridge for adults, English Result published by Oxford for adults, and finally Touchstone published by Cambridge for adults. These materials are also shown in the following table:

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Table 1 Textbooks

Textbook Author(s) Learner Publisher

English Time second edition (1) Susan Rivers

Setsuko Toyama

Children Oxford Press

Family and Friends (Starter) Naomi Simmons Children Oxford Press

Connect Jack C. Richards Carlos Barbisan, Chuck Sandy

Teenagers Cambridge

American English File (Starter) Clive Oxenden

Christina Latham-Koeing

Adults Oxford Press

Top Notch (Fundamentals) Joan Saslow,

Allen Ascher

Adults Pearson Longman

American Headway (Starter) John and Liz Soars Adults Oxford Press

Interchange third edition (Intro)

J. C. Richards Adults Cambridge

English Result (Elementary) Mark Hancock

Annie McDonald

Adults Oxford Press

Touchstone (1) Michael McCarthy

Jeanne McCarten

Helen Sandiford

Adults Cambridge

Procedures

The first book of each of these series which is prepared for beginner level is used to evaluate how and to what extent the first 1000 most frequent words are used in

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these textbooks. One way for counting the words is to refer to the wordlist of these textbooks that is provided in the last pages of each book. This approach was done only to two of the mentioned textbooks that are English time and Connect. As we know the General Service List is written alphabetically and also the wordlists at the end of each textbook are written in alphabetical order, so this will make it easier to compare the wordlist of each book with the GSL to find out how many of GSL words are used in any of the textbooks. Since vocabulary items listed in the General Service List are single words in a sense that there are not any phrasal verbs or idiomatic expressions, it makes it easier to find the exact word used in the textbook that are mentioned in the GSL. Fortunately, the wordlists in each textbook do not include any idiomatic expressions so again this will make it much easier to decide whether a particular word is present in the General Service List or not.

The second approach to evaluate the number of GSL words in textbooks was the use of software and computer. In this approach the author found the portable document format (PDF) of each of the textbooks, the next step was to put each and every word present in the GSL list in the PDF file and find out whether the word is present in the book or not. All the previously mentioned textbooks except for English Time and Connect were evaluated by this approach. The software used for this aim was Acrobat Adobe Reader 9.3 in which the author put the word in the search box and the software showed whether the word is present in the book or not.

This paper did not show how many times a particular word is repeated in a textbook but whether the word is included in the General Service List or not. If any word from the General Service List is used in any form of it, the word is going to be counted as a word that exists in the General Service List. For example, suppose the word broke is present in the textbook and the word break is also in the GSL, since the latter is the past form of the former, they can be basically the same word for our purpose. There are other examples such as using the gerund form of a word from the General Service List in the textbook or the third person singular form. The other example would be compound words like notebook: if one part of such words is used in the General Service List, it is again counted as a word present in the GSL. In the present study, the procedure was to have the PDF of all the textbooks and to check each word from the GSL individually to find out about the presence of the word. If the word was included in the textbook, the author would add a mark for the textbook and this procedure would go on until all the one thousand words in the GSL were checked in all textbooks. Since the GSL only included each word once and avoided repeating the word for different parts of speech, the repeated words in each textbook were eliminated for the final counting.

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Results and Discussion As mentioned above, the wordlists from the end of two textbook were compared with the one that is provided in the General Service List, and for the other seven textbooks the PDF file of them was evaluated. It should be reminded that only the beginner level (i.e. the first book) of these series was involved in the study. The repeated words were eliminated and the number of words in each textbook that were present in the General Service List was calculated. The following table shows the number of GSL words used in each textbook:

Table 2 Numbers and percentages of GSL words

Textbook Number of GSL words

Total number of words in the textbook

Number of pages in each textbook

Percentage of the GSL words in the textbook to the total number of GSL words

English Time second edition (1)

129 6600 72 12.9%

Family and Friends (Starter)

87 3400 74 8.7%

Connect (1) 397 28500 134 39.7%

American English File (Starter)

452 40500 119 45.2%

Top Notch (Fundamentals)

497 30500 147 49.7%

American Headway (Starter)

438 34300 134 43.8%

Interchange third edition (Intro)

458 32300 143 45.8%

English Result (Elementary)

528 68700 159 52.8%

Touchstone (1) 493 37500 143 49.3%

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As it is shown in Table 2, the first textbook named English Time, which is provided for children, has 129 words that are included in the General Service List. This numbers show that 12.9 percent of the GSL words are used in this textbook. The second textbook called Family and Friends has 87 words that are also included in the GSL list. This number constitutes only 8.7 percent of the GSL words and is the lowest number among other textbooks. The third book which is Connect prepared for teenagers' education has 397 items (39.7 percent) that are present in the General Service List. This shows that there is a jump in the number of GSL words in this textbook which is prepared for teenagers compared to the ones for children. The fourth book which is American English File contains 452 words that are present in the GSL list which equals 45.2 percent of the words in the list. Top Notch has 497 words that are present in the GSL list; this finding puts Top Notch rated as the second book with the highest numbers of GSL words. Top Notch includes 49.7 percent of the words in the list. American Headway, another book designed for adults, includes 438 items that are also included in the GSL and this specifies percentage coverage of 43.8 of the GSL list. The next book is Interchange having 458 words that are also present in the GSL list which give a coverage percentage of 45.8 to this book. English Result showing the maximum number of GSL words among the textbooks studied in this paper includes 528 words that are mentioned in the GSL list which gives this book the highest percentage of coverage that equals 52.8 percent. Last but not least, Touchstone was being rated the third book in the number of GSL words that equals 493 and a coverage percent of 49.3. Judging the data provided in Table 1, it is clear that English Result, Top Notch, and Touchstone have the most number of GSL words respectively. And also Family and Friends and English Time which were prepared for children have the least number of GSL words respectively. For a better visualization of the number of GSL words used in each textbook, these numbers are shown in the following Bar graph:

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Figure 1 Number of first 1000 GSL words

0100200300400500600

Number of GSL words

As the graph shows, Family and Friends which is a textbook provided for children has the least number of GSL words in its content but also it should be mentioned that this textbook has the least number of words used which equals only 3400 words. It is clear that English Result which is a textbook provided for adults has the most number of GSL words in it and also it has the most number of words i.e. 68700 that is a big number. As shown in Figure 1, as we move from textbooks provided for children toward those that are provided for teenagers and adults, the number of GSL words in each textbook also increases. This could be also related to the total number of words used in each textbook which was mentioned about Family and Friends and English Result.

Looking at Figure 1, one would assume that as number of total words in each textbook goes up so the number of GSL words. However, this is not the case. As shown in Table 2, Top Notch is ranked as the second book in having the most number of GSL words with 497 items. Nevertheless, it is ranked as the sixth book in the number of total words with only 30500 words. Another example could be American English File; this book is ranked as the fifth book in having the most number of GSL words, but it is the second book in the total number of words with 40500 items. This could also be the case about the relationship between the number of GSL words and number of pages in each book. Connect, which is prepared for teenagers, shows promising results in the use of GSL

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words. As shown in Table 2 and Figure 1, Connect makes a great jump from the books prepared for children and is more close to those books that are prepared for adults. All the books suitable for adults in this study also showed remarkable results. Each and every one of these books has at least 43 percent of the GSL in its content. One implication from this result is important for textbook and materials writers in that in providing a textbook for beginner classes, at least 43 percent of the words used in GSL should also be used in their materials. Another general implication derived from the results of this study is that materials designed for children have less number of GSL words compared with those books prepared for teenagers. This is also true about textbooks provided for teenagers and adults; adult textbooks have higher numbers of GSL words compared with teenager books. Thus, as the age of the learners goes up, the number of GSL words used in their textbooks must increase as well. Of course this point could be totally influenced by the teachers’ ideologies. The above mentioned results point to the importance of GSL as a source for providing vocabulary items in a textbook.

Conclusion Vocabulary is one of the major components of the language learning and teaching. However, in the past it was not taken seriously as it is today. Nowadays there has been an increase in the attention given to the role of vocabulary and lexical items in a language which can be the result of many experimental studies showing the importance of vocabulary items. One way to introduce vocabulary items in the classroom is to incorporate them in textbooks; textbooks are good tools for systematic presentation of vocabulary and lexical units. A valuable source to decide which items to include in classroom's curriculum is West's General Service List which includes the first 2000 most frequents words in English. This paper was intended to evaluate the use of the first 1000 most frequents words in the General Service List in the beginner level of some textbooks. It was found that at least 43 percent of the GSL words were used in textbooks provided for adults. It was also found that as the age of the learners goes up their exposure to words that are present in the GSL list can also increase. These points make an important implication that materials writers should always see the first 1000 words in the GSL as an important source to decide which words should be included in the textbooks.

One limitation of this study was the small number of children textbooks used in this paper. In addition, this study only used one textbook that was provided for teenagers. Future studies should make an effort to use more textbooks for these levels. Another limitation of this study was the unavailability of the number of new entries in each textbook. Indeed, this paper provided the

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total number of words in each textbook but for the evaluation of the percentage of GSL words in each textbook, the number of new entries would be necessary. Last but not least, this study only evaluated the beginner level of each textbook and only the first 1000 words of the GSL. Future studies can go beyond the beginner level and try to evaluate the use of the second 1000 words of the General Service List.

References Brown, H. D. (2007a). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language

pedagogy. (Third edition). White Plains, NY: Longman.

Brown, H. D. (2007b). Principles of language learning and teaching (Fifth edition). New York, NY: Pearson Education.

Crawford, J. (2002). The role of materials in the language classroom: Finding the balance. In J. C. Richards & W. A. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 80-91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, N. (1995). Vocabulary acquisition: Psychological and pedagogical implications. The Language Teacher, 19(2), 12-16.

Hunt, A., & Beglar, D. (2002). Current research and practice in teaching vocabulary. In J. C. Richards & W. A. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 254-266). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. New York: Newbury House.

Nation, I. S. P. (Ed.). (1994). New ways in teaching vocabulary. Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Penny, U. (1996). A course in language teaching: Practice of theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C., & Renandya, W. A. (Eds.). (2002). Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

West, M. (1953). A general service list of English words. London: Longman.

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Interview

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An Interview with Dr. Ataollah Hassani on History, New Historicism, and Historical Novels

By Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim

Threshold: Many thanks, Dr. Hassani, for accepting this interview invitation. I would start by asking a few questions about your educational and teaching background. You hold a PhD in history, but you have also majored in Persian literature. Am I right? So where and when did you complete your studies? And what made you shift to history?

Dr. Hassani: First of all, I would like to thank you, Mr. Yousefpoori-Naeim, and your Threshold team for giving me the opportunity to be interviewed here by Threshold. In response to your questions, let’s begin from my ethnic origin. I belong to Il-e Shahsevan-e Baghdadi, which is a nomadic confederacy dwelling in areas around Saveh, Tafresh, Ghom, Hamedan, Malayer, Shahrekord (Markadeh), Zanjan, Ghazvin, Karaj, Shahriyar, Varamin, Gharchak, Tehran, and some places in Kordestan and Kermanshahan. They were transferred from Kirkuk to Khorasan by Nader, the future Afsharid Shah, in 1733 AD. Also, the

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remnants of some tribes of this confederacy - known as Döger or Düger, Mosullu, Köseler or Küseler, Deller etc. - are living in the northern parts of Syria and Iraq and different parts of Turkey at the moment. By the way, I got my Diplma from Dar ul-Funun and my BA from Pahlavi (nowadays Shiraz) University. After finishing my 2-year military service as an Armorial Second Lieutenant Officer, I studied History and Persian Language & Literature at graduate level at Tabatabaee and Tehran Universities respectively. Indeed, literature was, and still is, my favourite but it was not so easy for me to enter the higher levels of it. One who intends to study Persian literature has to devote him/herself to this goal completely. In that case, he/she’ll need a lifelong patronage. Because of this, I preferred to continue my studies in the history branch. At that time, higher education encountered Cultural Revolution period in the country and all universities remained closed for many years. So, as soon as the first university reopenned, which was the Islamic Azad University, I participated in the entrance test and was accepted there as a doctrate student. I got my PhD in Persian History in 1991.

Threshold: As far as I know, you have never totally abandoned literature, and you still write Persian poems occasionally. So can you tell our readers more about your literary activities?

Dr. Hassani: My literary activities began from a cool event. One of our teachers in Dar ul-Funun high school asked students to memorize two Ghazals from Hafez. Instead of memorizing Hafez’s Ghazals, I preferred to write and present my own lines. I did so and faced the admiration and encouragement of my teacher and classmates. It happened in 1349, and from then on, I’ve been a humble student and lover of Persian literature. Some of my poems are published at Shahid Beheshti University Journal of Ayineh and in some other journals. My last poem, published recently in Khabarname of History Department of Shahid Beheshti University, was entitled A Memory of Old Times: Student, Love, Politics, and Knowledge.

Threshold: I would like to take the opportunity here to share with you some of my long-lasting questions about history. I guess many others might have the same questions in mind whenever they are dealing with history. What are some of the major aims that historians pursue in their studies? What is history (as a scientific/academic discipline) looking for?

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Dr. Hassani: There exist numerous definitions of “History.” It depends on one’s profession and school of thought and also his/her ontological, epistemological, or methodological approach. Historians, men of letters, philosophers, politicians etc. have their own specific definitions of the concept of “history.” In my point of view, as a teacher, “history” is not a one-sided phenomenon. There are differences among “history” as the past life of human beings, “history” as texts written by historians (primary sources), “history” as outcomes of scholars’ research, and “history” as an academic, not scientific, discipline that has been and is taught at educational institutions with specific educational aims. "History" is not “scientific” because of not having a scientific “method” of research and also lack of enough data about events that should be examined by researchers. “History” was the life our ancestors lived, and is what we continue to live. A phenomenon which is still being lived by human beings could not be examined as a complete entity. The metaphor of “history” is the metaphor of a river, as said by many scholars before. Human beings are as the drops of water flowing through a natural canal interacting with each other, confronting unknown situations, passing through different places at a specific time, heading forward towards unknown floodways. Naturally, there is a mutual relationship between the canal and stream of water. As the water gives shape to the canal, the canal also gives shape to the stream and indicates how the water should move through it. Alike, human beings make history and, in turn, history shapes the characteristics of human beings. I may add this, in response to the first part of your question that historians aim to understand the meanings of past events as they were. But, as everyone else, historians are outcomes of their surrounding social and geographical environments. Because of that, when narrating historical

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events, they, indeed, impose themselves, intentionally or unintentionally, on narrations and do narrate events as they “see” and “understand” them. Threshold: One of the clichés around history is that it teaches us many lessons from the past. But many people question the validity of such a claim by arguing that what happened in the past cannot easily be applied to the present time. In other words, they think that today's world is so different from the past that they are not comparable anymore. To what extent do you think there is truth in such a belief? Dr. Hassani: Nothing is but historical. Human beings themselves, their social and physical environments, and their cultural products are all outcomes of the past events. As I said before, history is shaped by human beings’ deeds and interactions. This huge living and active entity never lets us, in the meaning of all human beings, act independently from its effects. History warns us that we never can get rid of our deeds. Every generation of human beings is affected by the old generations’ deeds physically and socially, and also affects, in turn, the future generations. We live within the structures which have been created by our ancestors. The role of human generations in changing the inherited structures like languages, beliefs, values, even inventions like alphabets and numbers, and geographical features like climate etc., is very limited, if not absent. It has been more than 200 years that we have been trying to get modernism, but it has not happened yet. The resistance of traditional elements and social powers against the intended changes are realities that we may not ignore. No generation could begin its own history from a zero-point civilization. History, unlike human beings, forgets nothing and acts deterministically. The consciousness of human beings of the nature of history is the only way to safeguard human beings against some harm of the ancestors’ malfeasances and mal-deeds, and it is the only possible means which may prevent the man from falling in inhumane behaviors towards himself, Mother Nature, and creatures living around. So, dividing the past, present, and future, is not possible historically.

Threshold: Another important concern over history is, "how subjective is it?" I mean how much can we rely on what historians have written throughout years, trying to depict the factual events of their times? Put simply, how trustworthy is history? Or, in a similar vein, from the perspective of literary criticism, how do you see the shift from Historicism to New Historicism?

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Dr. Hassani: History, when historians think of and talk about it as the life lived, seems to be subjective, but as texts written by historians, is an objective reality. History, in its first meaning, despite its subjectivity from our point of view, is trustworthy and reliable, because it exists and lives shoulder to shoulder with human beings and affects every aspect of their life permanently, even though one is or is not aware of its existence. Trustworthiness of the history as texts created by historians, however, is in doubt. One can rely on the former, but can’t rely, entirely, on the latter. For sure, the historical texts, even distorted, are real entities. Every different version of a text, by itself, is an independent historical event which indicates the existence of a reality in the society which it belongs to. One can ask about its identity and about how and why it has been manipulated. When studying and investigating the texts as signs of historical events, for sure, one needs to have confidence in their originality, credibility, and reliability by criticizing them, both internally and externally. In this phase, historical context, text, author, and those for whom the text is produced might be examined for understanding the aims of the historian, his/her understanding of the narrated events, the meaning of the past events as contemporaries understood them, the

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relationship between the events, and the whole thing about the big picture which the text is a part of.

Threshold: All right! Now let me move on to the questions on the relationship between history and literature. Culture is among the controversial issues that is of interest to scholars of many fields, including history, literature, and even language teaching. Culture manifests itself both in history and in literature. My question is: How differently is culture reflected in these two fields?

Dr. Hassani: Literature is the soul and the language of history and other disciplines. To explore the reality of every discipline, one is obliged to encounter it. Literature and art are the only means helping human beings to express themselves. Literature, as a social mirror, is the key to the understanding of the human beings’ thoughts, which are manifested in the bodies of different disciplines. Without understanding the literature of a nation, you will never understand its historical realities. For sure, as literature goes under the effects of historical events, in turn, it affects and leads historical events.

Threshold: Another point where history and literature go hand in hand is what is commonly called "historical novels". First of all, at first glance, this sounds like an oxymoron! Novels are usually considered as prototypes of fiction, while history tries to deal with realities. So what is all about these historical novels and how do you see them? Do they bear any significance for historians as well?

Dr. Hassani: Novels, as a literary genre, are production of human societies and have their own specific social and historical contexts which give birth to them. So, they are regarded as historical events. Nevertheless, because of being imaginary in most of their parts, they are not historical narrations and their authors are not historians. They are literary scholars who, from my point of view, could be regarded as unintended historians, because, novelists are affected by social situations and have effects on them in a social network, even historically. So they themselves and their works are considered to be historical events.

Threshold: In the Safavid dynasty, we witness a large number of literary works translated from Persian to English. What was so special about the Safavids that made this possible?

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Dr. Hassani: Those translated texts were not written or produced by the scholars of the Safavid period. Those were the reports and works of delegations and travelers, which belonged to or were about the poets and scholars of earlier eras of Iranian Islamic society and the kings and religions of old Persia, like Cyrus the Great, Zoroaster, Avicenna, Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Nezami, Sa’di, Hafez etc. From this period, the characteristics of Shah Abbas the Great, especially his attitudes towards religious minorities, were very interesting and impressive for European thinkers and writers. There are some books written on this subject, which I think can be of benefit to the students and readers of Threshold. The books like Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History written by John D. Yohannan, Le Legendes et Contes Persans dans la Litterature Anglaise des XVIIIe et XIXe Siecles Jusqu’en 1859 written in French and translated into Persian by Kokab Saffari (nee Suretgar), and L’Iran dans la Litterature Francaise written by Djavad Hadidi.

Threshold: Thanks again, Dr. Hassani!

Dr. Hassani: You’re welcome!

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Army of Letters

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Two Famous Poems Translated

بگذار تا بگريم چون ابر در بهاران کز سنگ ناله خيزد روز وداع ياران

هر کاو شراب فرقت روزی چشيده باشد داند که سخت باشد قطع اميدواران

با ساربان بگوييد احوال آب چشمم تا بر شتر نبندد محمل به روز باران

امت چشم گناه کارانبگذاشتند ما را در ديده آب حسرت گريان چو در قي

ای صبح شب نشينان، جانم به طاقت آمد از بس که دير ماندی چون شام روزه داران

چندين که برشمردم از ماجرای عشقت اندوه دل نگفتم الا يک از هزاران

سعدی، به روزگاران مهری نشسته بر دل بيرون نمی توان کرد الا به روزگاران

ح اين قدر کفايت باقی نمی توان گفت حتی به غم گسارانچندت کنم حکايت، شر

سعدی

Like showers in springtime, let my tears flow, even rocks bitterly cry when lovers depart and go Who has drunk the poison of separation, knows, for those who hope against all hope, the same goes Tell the caravan leader the tale of the deluge in my eyes, that he might not take the camels out under such skies My eyes burn with the searing tears of desire, like sinners burning in inferno’s fire O long-awaited morning of night souls, I’m drained, as are fasting believers whom the long day has pained I seem to have said much about your love’s tale, compared to the unsaid, though, those said will pale

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Sa’di! Your heart’s gift of love was given you by Time, to stop it living is a height only Time will climb How much more shall I say?, what I already have, will do, the rest may not be told, even to those who ever with love rue

از تو ای دوست نگسلم پيوند ور به تيغم برند بند از بند

ما صد جان وز دهان تو نيم شکرخند الحق ارزان بود ز

ای پدر پند کم ده از عشقم که نخواهد شد اهل اين فرزند

پند آنان دهند خلق ای کاش که ز عشق تو می دهندم پند

من ره کوی عافيت دانم چه کنم کاوفتاده ام به کمند

ای جان به دام تو در بند: در کليسا به دلبری ترسا گفتم

ای که دارد به تار زنارت هر سر موی من جدا پيوند

ره به وحدت نيافتن تا کی ننگ تثليث بر يکی تا چند؟

نام حق يگانه چون شايد که اَب و ابن و روح قدس نهند

لب شيرين گشود و با من گفت وز شکر خند ريخت از لب قند

ا مپسندکه گر از سر وحدتی آگاه تهمت کافری به م

در سه آيينه شاهد ازلی پرتو از روی تابناک افگند

سه نگردد بريشم ار او را پرنيان خوانی و حرير و پرند

ما در اين گفتگو که از يک سو شد ز ناقوس اين ترانه بلند

که يکی هست و هيچ نيست جز او وحده لا اله الا هو

هاتف اصفهانی

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I won’t let go of you my friend, whatever the price, even if my enemies threaten to dice and slice Our lives in hundreds are worth nothing indeed half a sweet smile from you will make all our hearts bleed Your advice on love, father, are so many words wasted love is a vice to which I’m glued and pasted O let them go and offer their wise advice to those who would see me separated from my sweet vice I know what road is safe and what is not but I am trapped by love, can’t fight my lot In a church I set eyes on a Christian doll and let her know that she has me in thrall You to whose Christian girdle is tied fast my every hair strand, first and last, Enough of this scandal of trinity ! when will we experience love’s unity? How come the one and only God’s name is split into Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit? To speak to me, she opened her sweet lips, her sugary smile trickling in drops and drips “You know all about the mysteries of unity how would you accuse me of irreligion with impunity? The timeless Beloved unveiled Himself in three mirrors other notions are simply nothing but errors Silk will not become three, it will be silk, whether you call it this, that, and other things of the same ilk” We were hotly pursuing this conversation that we heard notes of the church bell’s tintinnabulation:

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There is only the One, and none but He He is the one, the only God to Be

Translated by

Dr. Alireza Jafari English Literature, Assistant Professor, SBU

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راهی به سوی پيراستن جان از اين آلودگيها

تقوا

که عشق به حق و » بند و باری«دارد، » بند و بار«است، او » پروا«، يعنی »تقوا«چنين انسانی دارای و » بندگی حق«حق است، و همين » بنده«کامل، » آزادی«او در عين . حقيقت بر او نهاده است

او با هر کار و . و آزادگی او از بندگی و بردگی ديگران استاوست، که ضامن حفظ آزادی » عبوديت«هر صحنه که رو به رو شود، نخست به اين نکته ميانديشد که آيا اين کار با رضای حق سازگار است و

.مايه خشم او نيست

او نارضايتی و خشم هر کس ديگر را ميتواند تحمل کند، ولی نارضايی و خشم حق برايش ، اين »ميپرهيزد«از هر کاری که بيم آن رود که مايه نارضايی و خشم او شود .قابل تحمل نيست

.است» تقوا» «بند و بار داشتن«و » پروا«و » پرهيز«

انسان با تقوا را نه با تهديد ميتوان تسليم کرد و به گناه و زبونی کشاند، نه با تطميع، تطميع به زر يا که قرآن آن را تنها ملاک و معيار ارزشيابی انسانها نقش تقوا چنان حساس است. شهوت يا رياست

:شمرده است

».گراميترين شما انسانها پيش خدا کسی است که تقوای بيشتری داشته باشد«

آری تنها انسان پاک و مسلط بر خويشتن است که کرامت دارد و کرامت بيشتر در سايه .بيشتر به دست ميآيد» تقوای«

باره تقوا فراوانند و اينک برای نمونه ترجمه قسمتی از خطبه آيات و روايات اسلامی دردر زمينه تقوا ايراد » هَمام«که بنا به درخواست يکی از ياران پاکدلش ) ع(معروف حضرت علی

:فرمود، ميآوريم

پرهيزکاران اهل فضيلتها هستند، گفتارشان راست است، و لباسشان متوسط، راه رفتنشان ... «از آنچه خدا برايشان حرام کرده است چشم ميپوشند، گوشهای خود را بر شنيدن دانش با فروتنی است،

خدا ... سودمند ميگمارند، در هنگام گرفتاری و مصيبت بدانگونه اميدوارند که در هنگام رفاه و آسودگی ...چندان در اعماق جانشان بزرگ جلوه کرده است که هر چيز ديگر در نظرشان ناچيز است

رهيزکار در دينداری پايدار و نيرومند، و در عين نرمش دورانديش است، ايمانش انسان پدر حال بينيازی ميانه رو است، در ... به دانش اندوزی شوق ميورزد،. محکم و با يقين همراه است

عبادت خدا خشوع دارد، حتی در حال تنگدستی هم آراسته است، در سختی شکيباست، در جستجوی خواهشهای ناروا در او مرده ... و در راه هدايت پر نشاط، از طمع سخت ميپرهيزد،روزی حلال است

ناسزا نميگويد، ... و خشم خود را فرو خورده است، همه به خير او اميدوار و از شرش در امانند،در . گفتاری نرم و ملايم دارد، کار ناپسند از او ديده نميشود، آنچه ديده ميشود همه پسنديده است

رابها آرامش خود را از دست نميدهد، در آسايش سپاسگزار است، اگر کسی را دوست داشته باشد اظطبا نامگذاريهای زشت و نسبتهای ناروا ديگران را ناراحت نميکند، به ... به خاطر او به گناه نميافتد،

خود را به همسايه آسيب نميرساند، خودش را به زحمت مياندازد، اما مردم از دست او در آسايشند،خاطر سعادت آخرت به رنج و تلاش مياندازد، اما مردم را از دست خود آسوده ميگذارد، اگر از کسی دوری ميکند به خاطر وارستگی است و اگر با کسی نزديک ميشود برای مهر و محبت است، نه دوريش

»...از روی تکبر و خود خواهی است، نه نزديک شدنش به خاطر فريب و کلاهگذاری

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تقويت ارادهدر بخشهای پيش به اين نتيجه رسيديم که انسان در حرکت تکامليش قبل از هر چيز بايد از درون خويش

شکفتگی نيروهای درونی يک انسان به دو چيز بستگی فراوان دارد، يکی به قدرت اراده، . نيرو بگيرد .ديگر به خودآگاهی و روشن بينی

يکی از نقشهای ارزنده و . و تمرينهای مناسب استفاده کرد برای تقويت اراده بايد از ورزشهاموثر تکاليفی که در هر مکتب و مرام بر عهده انسانها گذارده شده همين است که آنها را به صورت افرادی متعهد در ميآورد و در آنها نوعی عادت ريشهدار به رعايت اصول و ضوابط درست زندگی پديد

ای برای اراده آنهاست تا در برابر خودخواهيها، هوسرانيها و گرايش به بی ميآورد که پشتوانه ارزندهدر اسلام هم خواندن نمازهای روزانه در پنج وقت و مراقبت . بند و باری مقاومت کنند و تسليم نگردند

از پاکی لباس و بدن و غصبی نبودن لباس و مکان و رعايت قبله و وقت و غيره يا روزه داری و داشتن برنامه مخصوص در مدت يک ماه، به آدمی احساس مسئوليت، عادت به نظم در زندگی و نيروی يک

. پايداری ميدهد

١٩١خطبه -فرازهايی از نهج البلاغه

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A Way to the Purification of the Soul from the Impurities

Piety Such a man has “piety”, i.e., “fear”. He has a “concern”; a “concern” that the love to the right and reality has set upon him. Yet he has the complete “freedom”, he is the “servant” of the right; and such a “subjection to God” and to “his thralldom” is the guarantee of his freedom`s protection, and his freedom`s subjection to the others. By encountering every action and every scene, he first thinks that whether this work is compatible with God`s pleasure or not; whether it is the source of God`s wrath or not.

He can stand the displeasure and the wrath of anyone else, but the displeasure and the wrath of God are unbearable for him. He would “abstain” from each action that it is feared to be the source of God`s displeasure and wrath; this “abstinence”, “fear”, and “concern” is “piety”.

The pious man can be neither surrendered and be brought to the sin and despicable action by threat, nor by enticement; enticement of the gold, lust, or presidency. The role of the piety is so sensitive that Quran figures it as the sole criterion and standard of the mans` evaluation:

“The noblest among you in the sight of God is the most god-fearing of you.”

Verily, the pure self-possessed man has the dignity; and the more “pious”, the more dignified.

There are many Islamic verses and narrations about piety; and here is as the sample, the translation of a part of Imam Ali`s (peace be upon him) famous sermon regarding piety that was delivered upon the request of “Hamam”, one of his kind- hearted companion:

“… The righteous are of virtues; their speeches are true; their clothes are normal; their walks are with humility; they relinquish of whatsoever that God has forbidden to them; their ears gain benefit from listening to the science; at the time of the plight and sufferings, they are as hopeful as they are at the time of welfare and convenience… God has been seemed to their hearts so great that everything else is negligible in their eyes…

The righteous man is constant and powerful in religiousness; he is prudent besides his flexibility; his faith is strong, together with certainty; he is eager for gaining knowledge… He is moderate during his neediness; he has

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obedience towards worshiping God; he is spruce even when he is distress; he is patient in difficulties; he is looking for the lawful wealth; he is sprightly in the way of guidance; he abstains avarice strongly … The illegitimate desires are dead in him and he has overcome his wrath; everybody is hoping for his good and everybody is safe of his evil… He doesn`t swear; his speech is mild; he doesn`t do any bad works; what can be seen from him is all acceptable. He doesn`t lose his comfort in worries; he is thankful in comfort; if he loves someone, he doesn`t fall into sin for her… He doesn`t discomfort others by ugly appellation and illegitimate attributions; he doesn`t harm his neighbor; he runs himself into troubles, but the people feel at ease from him; he suffers himself for the happiness of the hereafter, but let people be comfort from him; if he avoids someone, that is because of piety; and if he nears someone, that is for the love and affection; neither his avoidance is upon arrogance and selfishness, nor his nearness is upon deception and cheating…”

The Strengthening of the Will In the previous discussions, we have resulted that man, before everything, should be enforced from his inward in his evolutionary movement. The amazement of man`s inside forces depends strongly on two things: One is the strengthening of the will, and the other is consciousness and clairvoyance.

For the strengthening of the will, the exercises and suitable practices should be used. One of the worthwhile and effective roles of the exercises that has been put upon man, in each school is to make them committed; and is to create a kind of deeply rooted habit in observing principles and criterions of the correct life in them; which is a worthwhile support for their will; in order to resist against selfishness, sensuality, and a tendency to a self-indulgence, and do not resign. In Islam also saying the daily prayers in five times, taking care of the purity of the clothes and the body, not using the clothes and also the place of others without their consent for saying prayer, observing Qiblah, the prayer time, and etc., or fast, and having a special program during a month gives man responsibility, the habit to have discipline in life, and the resistance force.

Nahjul Balagha, a Part of Sermon 191

Translated by

Mojgan Salmani Translation Studies, MA, Allamahe Tabataba’i University

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The Raven Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.” Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore.

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And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating “Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;— This it is and nothing more.” Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore— Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;— "Tis the wind and nothing more!” Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door— Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door— Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

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Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as “Nevermore.” But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered— Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said “Nevermore.” Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore Of ‘Never—nevermore’.” But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking “Nevermore.” This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er, But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er, She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

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“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!— Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted— On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore— Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore— Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” “Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting— “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!

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غراب

در نيمه شبی مغموم که بی رمق و ناتوان غرق در مطالعه ی مجلدی عجيب و شگرف از دانش های فراموش شده بودم،

و با گردنی خم شده در حال پينکی زدن بودم و تا به خواب رفتنم چيزی نمانده بود؛د گويی که شخصی به آهستگی بر در اتاقم می زند،ناگاه صدای زدن ضربه ای به در آم

."ملاقات کننده ای آمده است و بر در اتاقم می زند: "نجوا کنان با خود گفتم .تنها همين است و بيش از اين نيست

دريغا،به وضوح به خاطر می آورم که دی ماهی غم آلود بود،

.و هر اخگر نيم سوزی سايه اش را بر کف اتاق افکنده بود مشتاقانه آرزومند فرا رسيدن صبحگاهان بودم و به عبث در جستجوی يافتن راهی

،در کتابهايم برای رهايی از سوگ و اندوهم،سوگ از دست دادن لنور .آن دوشيزه ی بی مانند و تابناک که ملائک اورا لنور نام نهادند

. و ديگر نامی از او در اينجا نمانده است

و محزون و مردد هريک از پرده های ارغوانی رنگصدای خش خش ابريشمين مرا به لرزه می انداخت و مملو از دهشتی موهوم می ساخت که پيش از آن هرگز تجربه اش

.نکرده بودم آ ن هنگام، برای آرام ساختن تپش های قلب بی قرار خويش، ايستادم و زير لب تکرار کنان با

:خود گفتم ."د می طلبدميهمانی است که اجازه ی ورو"

.تنها همين است و بيش از اين نيست

:عنقريب قوت قلب گرفتم و ديگر ترديدی به دل راه ندادم و گفتم آقا يا خانم عذر مرا بپذيريد،"

اما حقيقت اين است که من نيمه خواب بودم و شما به قدری آرام بر در اتاقم زديد،تاق را تا انتها گشودم؛که شک داشتم صدايی شنيده ام و در آن هنگام در ا

.تنها ظلمت بود که بيناييم را می ربود و چيزی بيش از آن نبود

مدتی مديد ايستادم و خيره کنان به ژرفای تاريکی نگريستم، با حيرت، بيم و دودلی روياهايی می ديدم

که هيچ موجود فناپذيری پيش از آن جرات ديدنش را پيدا نکرده بود؛ .ت ناپذير بود و تاريکی هيچ نشانی از جنبنده ای نداشتاما آن خاموشی شکس

"لنور؟"تنها واژه ای که وجود داشت نجوايی بود از !"لنور"اين را نجوا کنان می گفتم و پژواکی از آن طنين انداز می شد

.تنها همين و نه بيش از اين

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به درون اتاق بازگشتم و گويی تمام جانم در آتشی شعله ور می سوخت،.صدای ضربه زدن را اين بار کمی رساتر از پيش شنيدم" می نگذشت که مجدداد

بی گمان چيزی در پس قاب پنجره است،: "گفتم بگذار دريابم که چه خطری پيش روست و پرده از اين راز بردارم؛

.بگذار برای اندک لحظه ای قلبم را آرام کنم و اين راز را دريابم !"ستشايد باد است و چيزی بيش ني

پنجره را با شتاب گشودم، آن هنگام غراب درشت و سياه رنگ،

يادگاری از روزگاران کهن با رفتاری موقر قدم به درون اتاقم نهاد؛ هيچ کرنش و تعظيم و يا حتی برای لحظه ای درنگ هم نکرد،

.دبه مثال امير يا بانويی در بالای درب اتاقم بر روی تنديس پالس فرود آمد و لانه گزي .فرود آمد و نشست همين و نه بيش از اين

آن گاه غراب با حيله گری خاص خودش و برخوردی سنگين و موقرانه تصور محزونم را به

.لبخند مبدل ساخت .گرچه تاجت را چيده و تراشيده ای اما بلاشک پرنده ای بزدل و ترسو نيستی: "گفتم

!ی تاريک سرگردان گشته ایای غراب باستانی، سهمگين و شوم که از کرانه ها "بگو نام شايان در کرانه های تاريک عالم زيرين چيست؟

."هرگز: "غراب لب به سخن گشود بسيار در شگفت آمدم که اين پرنده ی نا موزون چنين واضح گفته ام را می شنود؛

گرچه پاسخش چندان مفهوم و يا ارتباطی نداشت،تا به حال اين سعادت نصيبش نگشته که بايد پذيرفت که هيچ بشر در قيد حياتی

با چنين پرنده و يا جانوری که بر سر در اتاقش روی مجسمه ی نيم تنه نشسته است، ملاقاتی .داشته باشد

"!هرگز"با چنين نامی

اما غراب غريب و بی کس روی آن تنديس نشست و تنها لب به گفتن.ک کلمه خلاصه می کردآن يک واژه گشود،گويی که تمام جانش را در آن ي

چيزی بيش از آن بر زبان جاری نساخت، حتی ديگر پر از پر تکان نداد،پيش از اين يارانی داشتم که مرا وداع گفتند و روز :" تا اينکه با صدايی رساتر از زمزمه گفتم

ديگر او نيز مرا بدرود خواهد گفت،همانگونه که رويا و آرزوهايم پيش از آن از وجودم رخت."بستند

".هرگز: "آن هنگام پرنده گفت

من که از در هم شکسته شدن سکوت با چنان پاسخ شايسته ای به وجد آمده بودم،بلاشک، آن چه که وی می گويد برگرفته از دانش محدود اوست که آن را از استادی : "گفتم

محزون به وام برده،

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نجايی که بيش از يک سوار بر مرکب استادی که از بلاهای سخت روزگار پيشی گرفته، تا آ آوازش نمانده

".هرگز، هرگز"وآن نيز مرثيه ايست در سوگ آن آرزوهای برباد رفته از اما غراب هم چنان سراسر وجود آزرده ام را می فريفت و به لبخند مزين می ساخت،

.يک صندلی راحتی را رو به سوی وی،تنديس و در چرخاندم کيه زده، خود را غرق در خيالات ساختم،سپس به پشتی مخملين ت

خيال آن که اين پرنده ی شوم و باستانی، اين پرنده ی سهمگين، بد يمن، نزار و منحوس که به دور زمانی تعلق دارد،

دارد؟" هرگز"چه منظوری از تکرار کلمه ی

دوش نمی اين بود که نشستم و غرق دريافتن پاسخی گشتم، اما هيچ هجايی بار اين حس را بر.کشيد

حس رويارويی با پرنده ای که چشمان آتشين بارش اکنون چون پاره ای از آتش،اعماق سينه ام .را به آتش می کشيد

اين بار بيش از پيش بدنم را در صندلی رها کردم و سرم را در بالش مخملين فرو بردم،بالشی که کور سوی چراغ بر آستر حريرش برق می زد؛

.گرانقدر، ديگر نمی تواند بر اين بالش که در نور چراغ برق می زند تکيه کند اما او، آن يار !آه، هرگز

آن گاه بود که اين حس بر من استيلا يافت که هوا سنگين

و از مجمری نامرئی عطرآگين می گردد،مجمری که گويی ملائک مقربی که صدای گامهايشان بر روی فرش ضخيم اتاق طنين انداز

.را ميگردانند ميشود، آن پروردگارت به واسطه ی اين فرشتگان"،"ای مسکين : "فرياد زدم

اين مرهم را برايت فرو فرستاده تا بدان غم و اندوه فقدان لنور را از دل برهانی،ها،برخيز و جرعه ای از اين شراب فراموشی را بنوش و خاطرات لنور، آن يار از دست رفته

!"را از خاطرت ببر ".هرگز: "گفت اما غراب

!"ای اهريمن ذات"، !"ای پيام آور: "گفتم

!خواه بشارت دهنده ای باشی ،پرنده يا ابليس چه وسوسه گری تو را فرستاده باشد و چه

طوفانی مسيرت را به سوی اينجا اين سرزمين متروک وملک مخوف کشانده باشد،.از تو عاجزانه ميخواهم که لب به سخن بگشايی

!"اد مرهمی برايم هست؟بگو ،بگو،التماست ميکنمآيا در جلع ".هرگز: "و غراب گفت

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!خواه نويد دهنده باشی،پرنده يا اهريمن!" ای پيام رسان، ای شيطان صفت: "گفتم تو را سوگند به آسمانی که چون سقفی بر سر ماست وقسم به آن پروردگاری که هردو می

شته بگو، که آيا اين فرصت باز ميابد، که در آن بهشت ستاييمش،به اين جان که آکنده از اندوه گ دور افتاده آن دوشيزه ای را که ملائک لنور ناميده اند در آغوش بکشند؟

"آيا نشانی از آن بانوی زيباروی و تابناک که فرشتگان لنور ميخوانندش در آن حوالی هست؟ ".هرگز: "غراب گفت

!ست بگذار اين واژه نشانی از فراقمان باشدای پرنده يا ای دو:"برخاستم و فرياد زدم !هم اکنون به همان کرانه های عالم زيرين بازگرد

!هيچ پر سياهی که نشانی از دروغی باشد که روحت از آن گفت، از خود بر جای مگذار !انزوايم را ناشکسته رها کن

!از نيم تنه ای که جای گرفته بر سر اين اتاق پر بگير !"ن خنجری بر قلبم فرو برده ای، و آن وجود شومت را از اتاقم بيرون کنمنقارت را که چو

".هرگز: "غراب گفت و غراب ديگرتکان نمی خورد و همچنان بر تنديس پالس بر سر در اتاقم جا خشک کرده است؛

و چشمانش به مثال ديويست که خواب می بيند، نور چراغ بالای سرش سايه اش را بر زمين انداخته؛

.روح من از زير آن شبح که بر کف اتاق شناور مانده هرگز عروج نخواهد کردو ".هرگز"

Translated by

Elnaz Shomali English Literature, BA, Shahid Beheshti University

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The Burden

A challenge he’s going through,

A topsy-turvy set of horrid ideas He has,

To grapple with.

A cliff of rolling pictures,

He’s hanging from. A vacuum He’s

Striving to fill, to squeeze into, in his mind.

And still He’s drenched in a rolling river.

A horde of floating presages, roaring faces,

Are swarming him and he shivers,

Down his spine, down to earth;

Heavy a burden!

Yet it is it.

He still believes He'll rise again

Globes of mirrory mirages He’s juggling with...

Even vaguer than that:

Links of missing colors His eyes are blindly looking for...

Something that still smells of againness...

A call to drive his feet to sky.

That he forget shrinking.

A hollow hero.

Masood Farvahar Kalkhoran English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

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Subway Poetry

I managed to find it in the subway,

Where commuters jostled one another;

A young musician played his tunes for free,

The people passing by in grim faces;

An old man asked where he had to get on;

His pleading eyes never met a greeting;

A vendor begged for a glance at his objects;

There was no response but babbling silence;

A kid was crying after her mom in the crowd;

No one turned, neither did her mom’s head.

Meanwhile, I found it unedited for real;

It was poverty that has turned poetry.

Saleh Tabatabai English Language and Literature, BA, Shahid Beheshti University

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Secret Meeting in the Basement of My Brain

- So you wanna be a writer, eh?

- What just happened? How did you…? Oh my god, did you just become alive?

- Yes, you asked me and I came, now, do you want to be a writer or not?

- I think you're just in my mind. My mind is making all this up.

- Whatever, kid, just answer the question.

- Do I want to be a writer? Um…I don't know, maybe.

- Then you don't want to be a writer. If you do, you'd know for sure.

- That's probably true…I'm sorry, I'm just still a bit…a bit confused.

- You've come here to waste my time then? Is that right, son? You wanna waste my time?

- No, sir, I just don't… .

- You telling me I just came from the dead to be mocked, is that it? Is that what you are telling me, son? Because I'll break your arm if that's true!

- No, sir! I'm just a little bit confused, that's all. I w-want to write, but I'm not a writer.

- Now I'm a little confused. Are you trying to confuse me?

- Not at all sir, I just wanna say that- that I feel a little confused about life and how I should manage my troubles and how I can reduce my continuous sufferings and- and I find writing as the sole antidote I can get my hands on, so when I write my demons down on, I feel like a normal human again, and it bring the best in me for a while, it makes me a better person, and the only time I'm genuinely happy with myself and feel blissful with my sorrows - which rarely occurs - is after I've written a valuable paragraph or two about myself and the ones I love and the things I care about. So I write because I need to be myself once in a while. Without writing, I'm just a dot in the darkness. It is the only fire my heart; it makes me like other humans. They bore me, people around me bore me, but writing about them makes me like them, makes me feel like one of them, like I belong. If I don't write frequently, I see humans as some horrible unfathomable mystifying creatures who want to destroy me, who want to shatter my spirit and my dreams. I swear to god, sometimes I feel I'm from another planet. I can't even tell them about this, they'd laugh at me and think of me as a stupid man-child who is foolishly too passionate about everything. Maybe they're right I don't know, but the only thing I know for sure is that when I put these

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feelings down on a piece of paper, I kill those stupid feelings, and feel damn good about myself. This is how I was able to make through to here, by scrawling and scrawling and scrawling on papers, on sides of my books, and on walls. That's why I thought I was a writer, but I'm sorry if I'm not one.

- You idiot! You are a writer!

- I am?

-Yes! It's in your blood. Listen, you just got to sit behind the typewriter and bleed.

-Wow, that was…

-Now son, listen to me. All you got to do right now is to tell me the truest sentence you know.

- What do you mean?

- What do you know best that you haven't written about and lost? What do you know about truly, and care for the most?

- Um, okay, but this might take a while.

- Do not worry, you have written before and you will write now! Come on, son, tell me a true sentence as straight and simple as you can and then start from there. Hurry up.

- "I'm not a tree!"

- Well, you shouldn't write if you can't write, but you're sentence is fine, because it's a true sentence, you're not a tree and I'm not going to judge you, because as a writer you shouldn't judge, you should understand. In addition to that, I have always believed you shouldn't evaluate how fine your writing is till the next day, so you're going to continue this right now after I leave and read this again tomorrow night, alright?

- Sure, sir. I will.

- I have to go, son, can't stay here long, it's not too good for your health, you know? But remember: never stop being a tree, alright?

- I won't. Thank you, a lot. I won't ever stop being a tree.

- Yeah, whatever.

Mohammad Eghbali English Language and Literature, BA, Shahid Beheshti University

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Ice Age

− Your meeting with the head of business affairs office is set for 8 next Monday.

− Thanks for the arrangements. Do I have to…?

− Before I could finish my question, my phone started beeping, trying to tell me that my assistant is waiting for me to answer.

− Yes Jessica.

− Sorry Ma’am, but the court called and asked me to tell you that the time for delivering the list of witnesses for tomorrow’s trial is up. They want to know when you are going to send it.

− Damn it! I haven’t even called the three witnesses I have been planning to talk to.

− Horridly I said:

− Listen to me Jess, there is a phone book on my desk. Find the names of Brown, Johnson and Crown in it. Call them and say that you are talking on my behalf. Explain Ashley’s issue and ask them if they can come to the court tomorrow morning.

− Ok, But what shall I say to the court?

− Tell them that I will be there till 4. Tell them that I will tell them about the witnesses by then. Oh Jess, if any of the three guys you called didn’t answer or hesitated to attend, please tell me. Their presence is urgent. Try to make them come. If they don’t, everything will be a mess.

I put my cell into the silent mode. I ran to my brand new car, sat on the seat, fastened my seat belt and switched on the car, but it didn’t work. My day was made! It was broken! What the hell am I going to do?! I had a meeting with my new client in half an hour and the god damn car is broken. His office is out the town… I’m not going to make it! I know! I’ve already lost my best chance in years!

Like the most miserable woman on earth, I put my so heavy head after a night of late stay on the steering wheel, closed my eyes and started thinking what I was going to do. I could cry for ages but my eyes were so dry I couldn’t even blink. I had this feeling of a layer of dust and dirt under my eyelids. What was I going to do?

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As I was thinking, someone started knocking on the window. I pulled it down. A fat bearded man said:

− Sorry Ma’am, I can’t park my lorry. Could you move a little bit back ward.

− My car is broken. It doesn’t switch on. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with it.

− You need to call the car service. But if you pull the handbrake, it will move backward, because the street has an upward slope.

I pulled the handbrake and the car started moving slowly … I pulled it up again and it stopped. The lorry in front of me was all in colors. Pictures of Disney characters, Cinderella, Snow white, Micky Mouse etc. They were all in an Island of dreamy colors, with smiling trees and flowers and singing birds, with the girls siting in one of those pink, horse driven chariots and Cinderella pulling aside the small polka dotted curtain, and Micky driving the chariot along a very long way, turning around mountains and ending up in a very pink castle, shiny and giant, over which were puffy clouds, saying: Join the Happy Disney Family. You could see every single person you knew from your childhood cartoons there, on that small island, all my good memories, of the times I used to be a child came to me. I desperately wished I could be there, on that small island, was as big as the world my childhood.

I opened the door and went out, to the lorry, out of curiosity to see the world inside. The big bearded man was there, putting toy packages one on the other. There were many other strange creatures I didn’t know, like monsters, animals, aliens etc. moving from one side to another, he noticed me.

− Did you call the car service?

− Ohm… no… I was just curious about what is inside, you know, with all those pictures out there…just curious, you know”.

− [Smiling], he said: “world of kids.”

− Yes… [I said], searching for my old childhood heroes.

− Would you like one?

− [I hesitated]. “Might be silly, but yes!”

− Which one?

− Don’t know. I don’t know any of these.

He looked around, went to the furthest point of the lorry, drew out a small thing and gave it to me.

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− Take this!

− But I don’t know him. Who is it?

− This is Scrat. It’s the funniest in my idea.

− I took the small creature, a squirrel I think, who was holding tight to a smaller acorn in between his smallest pews.

− I went back to the car, found my purse and went back to the bearded man.

− “Here…” He took the money, and gave me some back. While I was going back to my car, I remembered something: “by the way, what is the cartoon he is in?”

− “THE ICE AGE”.

Hanane Divanbeige Art Studies, MA, Shahed University

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Translation Challenge

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Profile

Mohtasham Kashani (Kamāl-al-Din Mohtasham Kāšāni (1528-1588) was a Persian poet of the Safavid period. Like many poets of the time, Mohtasham had mercantile origins. His father, Mir Ahmad was active in Kashan’s prosperous cloth industry and as a result, the poet had pursued the same occupation before a business setback led him to take up poetry as a full-time occupation. The poet himself suffered from a chronic debility of the foot, and though he occasionally expressed the desire to migrate to India, he remained in the city of his birth throughout his life. Shortly before his death, he entrusted the collection and arrangement of his literary works to the poet and literary biographer Taqi-al-Din Kashani. His tomb today stands at the site of his house in Kashan.

Mohtasham’s fame today rests almost entirely on a single poem—his elegy in twelve strophes on the martyrdom of Imam Hossein (peace be upon him) in Karbala. This poem achieved fame during the poet’s lifetime. The contemporary literary critic Awhadi Balyani writes that if his poetry were limited to this one work, it would be suffice to make him a canonical figure in the Persian literature. This judgment was prescient of Western comments as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, E. G. Browne praises the true pathos and religious feeling expressed in the extraordinarily simple and direct language of the poem. Recently, Karen Ruffle has pointed out how Mohtasham integrated the pre-Islamic Arabic tradition of “Marhia” into the context of the Moharram ceremonies that had received a new impetus under the dispensation of the Safavid state.

Mohtasham's major works are Sabayeeye, Shabayeeye, Shaybiye, Jalaliye, Lover’s Fable and The Riddles.

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Took My Beloved the World Took my beloved the world

And seized my sweetheart.

Ruined my dream palace,

Troubled all my life.

By flowing tears and casting dust on head

Before my eyes dug my grave.

Tears on one side and heartbreak on the other

Made all around me a tulip garden.

How took my tulip faced beloved,

If it gave me the tulip garden?

Buried my love and youth,

Sent to wind my patience and peace.

Poured my wine over the tomb,

Threw my prey before the hound.

Flung my wine cup on ground,

left me then with hangover.

I wept so bitterly and it just sneered,

In answer to my bitter cry.

I thought love spring rose but,

Life brought fall on my spring.

It was not life’s fault but my heart’s,

Who made my burden so heavy.

Yeah, I want this sinful heart

Be out of my bosom.

Nahid Jamshidi Rad

English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

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The Universe Took My Beloved Away The universe took my beloved away from me.

She purloined her.

She ruined my palace.

She roiled my affairs.

I cried and soiled to the extent

That I conjured my grave.

My tears and agonies

Made my graveside a garden of tulips.

If she gave me a garden of tulips,

Why did she take away my beloved, the tulip of my life?

She interred my love and youth.

She squandered my aplomb and peace.

She shed my goblet wine on apophrades.

She threw quarry to the dogs.

She filched my goblet

And ruptured my ecstasy.

After my unrelenting whimpers,

She answered with a smirking smile.

Although amorous verdancy had blossomed,

She made my verdancy deciduous.

The heart and not the universe wronged me.

It tormented me with burdens.

Finally, I decide to dispense with my life

And dispossess it from this sinful heart.

Hossein Mohseni English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

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The Universe Snatched My Beloved The universe snatched my beloved.

She filched her.

She made my palace desolate.

She jumbled my affairs.

I squalled and soiled till

I convoked my grave.

My tears and pangs

Converted my graveside a grove of tulips.

If she gave me a grove,

Why did she snatch my beloved, my life’s tulip?

She buried my love and youth.

She pillages my peace and halcyon.

She sloughed my chalice wine on the shrouded corpses.

She threw my game to the dogs.

She stole my goblet

And perforated my ecstasy.

After my incessant wailings,

She replied with a smile.

Although spring had effloresced,

She made my spring autumn like.

The heart and not the universe did me wrong.

It harrowed me with burdens.

At the end, I decide to renounce my life

And expropriate it from this sinful heart.

Nasrin Bedrood Persian Literature, AA, University of Yazd

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Next Issue

Translation

Challenge

چه شورش است؟ که در خلق عالم است نيباز ا

چه نوحه وچه عزا وچه ماتم است؟ نيباز ا

نياست؟ کز زم ميعظ زيچه رستخ نيا باز

نفخ صور، خاسته تا عرش اعظم است یب

از کجا؟ کزو ديباز دم رهيصبح ت نيا

کار جهان وخلق جهان جمله درهم است

از مغرب آفتاب کند یطلوع م ا،يگو

ذرات عالم است یکآشوب در تمام

ستين ديبع ا،يدن امتيخوانمش ق گر

عام، که نامش محرم است زيرستخ نيا

ستيملال ن یبارگاه قدس که جا در

غم است یهمه بر زانو انيقدس یسرها

کنند ینوحه م انيوملک بر آدم جن

اشرف اولاد آدم است یعزا ا،يگو

نينور مشرق ن،يآسمان وزم ديخورش

نيپروردهٴ کنار رسول خدا، حس

حتشم کاشانیم -

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Reviews

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Transference in Peter Shaffer’s Equus Ghiasuddin Alizadeh English Literature, PhD Candidate, Shahid Beheshti University

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‘As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere . . . there is transference (Lacan, 1979, p. 232).’ This was the definition which Lacan put forth of transference in his Seminar entitled The Four Fundamental Concept of Psychoanalysis. Regardless of the long history the term is supposed to have in Western thought – actually, Lacan dates it back to Plato’s Symposium (p. 231) – and regardless of the multiple mutations and transformations which it has undergone, I would like to commit myself, in this essay, to the above-mentioned formula, since I believe it is fully efficient in casting light on some of the aspects of Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus.

The relation between the subject and the Other is the cornerstone of the Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is in the field of the Other that desire is located, and it is only in taking stance against the Other that the subject’s relation to desire is modified. In a specific moment in the subject’s life, the subject comes to the belief that there exists a subject, in the realm of the Other, to whom all the doors of knowledge are opened, a subject who knows everything about him and about everything else. In this moment, the subject’s desire takes the form of the desire to know, a desire which is, in his opinion, fulfilled in the person of the sujet suppose savoir, that is, the subject who is supposed to know. And this is the moment in which Lacan locates ‘transference’:

Who can feel himself fully invested by this subject who is supposed to know? This is not the question. The question is first, for each subject, where he takes his bearings from when applying to the subject who is supposed to know. Whenever this function may be, for the subject, embodied in some individual, whether or not an analyst, the transference . . . is established.

Lacan’s significant addition to the meaning of the transference, especially to that conceived by Freud, is that he extends its range far beyond the analysis and the figure of the analyst into that of the ambiguous ‘some individual’. In other words, transference is at work whenever the subject invests an agent of the Other with absolute knowledge, be it in an analytic situation or not. And, no doubt, this conviction in the absolute knowledge of the Other leads, in the case of paranoid psychosis, to a threatening, suffocating presence of an unknown agent.

‘Experience shows us that when the subject enters analysis, he is far from giving the analyst this place (p. 233).’ This is the beginning of the analytic session (or simply any other instance before the subject’s investment of the Other with omniscience), where, as Lacan points out, the subject has not yet entered the transferential relation with the analyst. ‘So what is it all about’, Lacan asks, ‘this trust placed in the analyst? (p. 234)’ The answer, of course, is to be sought in the

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economy of desire. Freud postulated that transference is a form – if not the epitome – of resistance in the analytic session. The analysand, Freud maintained, transfers the characteristics of another person – often figures from his past without necessarily remembering them – to the analyst and invests him with feelings of either love or hate. The analyst is supposed to entangle the knot or by-pass it in order to move further in the analysis. Now the resistance, as it is well-founded in Freudian psychoanalysis, is an act of repressing the prohibited desires into the unconscious. At this point, Lacan’s genuine hypothesis clarifies the blind spots in his precursor’s theory. The subject’s resistance to give vent to the unconscious takes the form of a wish not to desire which itself is a desire: ‘the whole of analytic experience . . . shows us that not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing (p. 235).’ The subject’s desire not to know the desire is the other way of saying that the subject is in the field of the Other already, waiting for the analyst (or any other transferential object) play his part as the subject who is supposed to know:

In so far as the analyst is supposed to know, he is also supposed to set out in search of unconscious desire. This is why I say . . . that desire is the axis, the pivot, the handle, the hammer, by which is applied the force-element, the inertia, that lies behind what is formulated at first, in the discourse of the patient, as demand, namely, the transference. The axis, the common point of this two-edged axe, is the desire of the analyst.

No wonder Lacan’s theory once again bites its own tail: ‘desire is always the desire of the Other’. Transference, therefore, involves a process of desiring qua the Other, whereby he becomes alienated and fades out of subjectivity. It is here that the analyst should interfere and move the subject toward acknowledging his own desire, separating him from desiring as the Other. In this sense, transference functions in the symbolic order, paradoxical as it is to the imaginary relations of love and hate toward the alter-egos. Lacan manages to solve this riddle once again: in its symbolic aspect (repetition) it helps the treatment progress by revealing the signifiers of the subject’s history, while in its imaginary aspect it acts as a resistance.

Equus portrays transference in multiple layers, in the relation between Dysart and Alan as well as between Alan and Nugget. The first encounter between Dysart and Alan instantiates the imaginary aspect of transference, objectified in a feeling of hatred toward the analyst. Although as a resistance it apparently prevents the analytic procedure to proceed, yet it reveals the signifiers which, analyzed carefully, would lead the analyst to a discovery of the reason

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behind the psychical impasse. The repetition of the TV commercial songs is a convenient starting point for Dysart to home in his primary insight into the heart of the problem: Alan’s disturbed relationship with his father. Gradually, however, Alan’s relation toward Dysart is transformed. At first, it does not occur to Alan that Dysart would be an omniscient subject supposed to know; in fact, he denies Dysart any such knowledge:

Alan [belligerently, standing up]: She knows more than you.

[Hesther crosses and sits by Dysart. During the following the boy walks round the circle, speaking to Dysart but not looking at him. Dysart replies in the same manner.]

Dysart [to Alan]: Does she?

Alan: I bet I do too. I bet I know more history than you.

However, as the sessions increase in number, Dysart becomes more and more identified with the all-knowing subject. Alan’s feeling of hatred recedes; he becomes more attentive to the analysis; and his seeming desire to not to know takes the form of the desire of the Other to know.

Having said thus, it is now the time to focus on the most manifest instance of transference in the play, that is the countertransference which takes place between Dysart and Alan. It is well established in the analytic tradition that the analyst does not enter the session without his own biases or prejudices. In fact, it occurs sometimes that the analytic relationship between the analyst and the analysand works in the opposite direction than what it is primarily supposed to be, that is, it gives rise to resistance on the side of the analyst. As the name itself indicates, transference deals with the conveyance of the object of desire to the subject supposed to know. The neurotic subject, whose life is an endless pursuit of the object of his desire, transfers to the Other that which he believes would fill the essential lack at the core of his being. Indeed, this is nothing but a resistance on behalf of the subject as it was mentioned above, since whatever halts the chain of signification and creates the illusion of the fulfillment of desire is an obstacle on the way of the realization of the ontological incompleteness of the subject, that is, the fact that desire, by essence, can never be satisfied since the moment of its satisfaction becomes simultaneously the moment of its death. As Lacan, drawing on Alexander Kojeve’s reading of Hegelian dialectics, mentioned, desire is always a desire for death, meaning that desire’s desire to be unified with its object is in fact a desire for its own demise. However, Lacan’s insight into the function of the symbolic system of signification and the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier led him to the conclusion that desire,

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being a linguist construct in the first place, will continue its movement forever, since the irreparable lack at the center of the chain of signification renders it impossible for any completion to take place. In this manner, transference qua the conveyance of the object of desire to the Other, which creates the illusive hope of gaining the ultimate satisfaction, becomes the main hindering factor in the analytic session and it is only when sufficient light is shed on the true nature of its function that the session can move on towards its main purpose which is the encounter with the unattainability of object a.

In the course of the play, we witness a series of events which bring to the fore transferential resistance on Dysart’s part. For sure, Alan’s curious case of religious ecstasy and the wild nature of his experiences with the horses find their own correspondences in Dysart’s life. In the beginning of Act One, his soliloquy points to some facts regarding his life which can be revealing as to the nature of all that happens till the end of the play. Pondering on the question of the whereabouts of the horse’s desire, he says:

“You see, I’m lost. What use, I should be asking, are questions like these to an overwhelmed psychiatrist in a provincial hospital? They’re worse than useless; they are, in fact, subversive.

[He enters the square. The light grows brighter.]

The thing is, I’m desperate. You see, I’m wearing the horse’s head myself. That’s the feeling. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can’t see it, because my educated, average head in being held at the wrong angle. I can’t jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force – my horse-power, if you like – is too little. The only thing I know for sure is this: a horse’s head is finally unknowable to me. Yet I handle children’s heads.”

From the very beginning, one can feel frustration and despair in Dysart’s voice. His profession, as a psychiatrist, has opened his eyes onto the fact that he himself suffers from deep, psychical disturbances: he is ‘reined up’ in conventions, in the conventions dictated onto him by his social position; he cannot change the current of his life, since he is chained to his place by his ‘old language and old assumptions’ which forbid his jumping into ‘a whole new track of being’. His life is reduced to stasis and is characterized by a deep sense of lethargy and inertia due to the lack of what he prefers to call ‘his horse power’, that is, his basic force in life which he has been made to sacrifice for his entrance into the world of normalcy. Yet, the direness of his present is not created ex nihilo; rather, it has

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been latent there for years, deep seated in the unconscious, and it is only Alan’s case that shakes their root and renders them manifest and him conscious of their presence and of his own miserable condition:

“The doubts have been there for years, piling up steadily in this dreary place. It’s only the extremity of this case that’s made them active. I know that. The extremity is the point. All the same, whatever the reason, they are now, these doubts, not just vaguely worrying – but intolerable.”

In other words, Alan’s unorthodox and Dionysiac rituals have opened Dysart’s eyes onto the real of his existence, onto desires which he has unconsciously repressed. Dysart’s crucial role in society, that is, his job as the agent of the Other in subverting subjects to the Law of the Father, has made him forgetful of the deep desires which he has had throughout his life. With Alan’s ‘extremity’, these desires are once again bright back into life, rekindled as they were by the flame of the boy’s blazing vitality. In Alan, Dysart sees his failure in fulfilling his desires: he is deprived of ecstasy, due to his priesthood in the temple of Zeus:

That night, I had this very explicit dream. In it I’m a chief priest in Homeric Greece. I’m wearing a wide gold mask, all noble and bearded, like the so-called mask of Agamemnon found at Mycenae. I’m standing by a thick round stone and holding a sharp knife. In fact, I’m officiating at some immensely important ritual sacrifice, on which depends the fate of the crops or of a military expedition. The sacrifice is a herd of children. . . . On either side of me stand two assistant priests, wearing masks as well. . . . They are enormously strong, these other priests, and absolutely tireless. . . . It’s obvious to me that I’m tops as chief priest. It’s this unique talent for carving that has got me where I am. The only thing is, unknown to them, I’ve started to feel distinctly nauseous.

Alan’s entrance into his life has disturbed the entire process. Dysart consciously attributes this dream to the boy’s arrival as he later points out clearly to Hesther:

Dysart: . . . Anyway, all this dream nonsense is your fault.

Hesther: Mine?

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Dysart: It’s that lad of yours who started it off. Do you know it’s his face I saw on every victim across the stone?

The procession stops as the mask slips off Dysart’s face and ‘the green sweat running down my face’ becomes visible to the eyes of the two priests. Enraged, they tear the knife off his hand. He wakes up! The significance of this dream cannot be pressed more: it is the harbinger of a change, of a transformation. As far as Lacanian psychoanalysis is concerned, the subject who is ready to serve as the agent of the Other is a pervert, and it is exactly this sense of perversion which becomes consciously felt after being in Alan’s presence. Thenceforth, Dysart becomes conscious of his own desires: of his desire to feel the ecstasy Alan has felt in his midnight reveries with the horse, of his desire to go to Greece and see all the grandeur which he has all his life seen only in black and white. And it is the boy who reminds him of his frustration, of his stifled and stillborn desires, of the emptiness which the absence of religion has left him with, of his unsuccessful marital relationship and professional career: “I feel the job is unworthy to fill me (p. 217).” In one of the sessions, which is certainly one of the most significant parts of the play, Alan questions Dysart as to his relationship with his wife:

Alan: Do you have dates?

Dysart: I told you. I’m married.

[Alan approaches him, very hostile]

Alan: I know. Her name’s Margaret. She’s a dentist! You see, I found out! What made you go with her? Did you use to bite her hand when she did you in the chair?

[The boy sits next to him, close.]

Dysart: That’s not very funny.

Alan: Do you have girls behind her back?

Dysart: No.

Alan: Then what? Do you fuck her?

Dysart: That’s enough now.

[He rises and moves away.]

Alan: Come on, tell me! Tell me, tell me!

Dysart: I said that’s enough now.

[Alan rises and walks around him.]

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Alan: I bet you don’t. I bet you never touch her. Come one, tell me. You’ve got no kids, have you? Is that because you don’t fuck?

Dysart [sharp]: Go to your room. Go on: quick march.

The resistance these questions produce in Dysart is noteworthy. All of a sudden, the analyst, the subject supposed to know, is himself left in the presence of a question which puts him face to face with his own lack, with the question of his identity:

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! The boy’s on the run, so he gets defensive. What am I, then? . . . . Wicked little bastard – he knew exactly what question to try. He’d actually marched himself round the hospital, making inquiries about my wife. Wicked and – of course, perceptive. Ever since I made that crack about carving up children, he’s been aware of me in an absolutely specific way. Of course, there’s nothing novel in that. Advanced neurotics can be dazzling at that game. They aim unswervingly at your area of maximum vulnerability . . . Which I suppose is as good a way as any of describing Margaret.

The resistance, however, soon fades and gives its place to a painful sense of reality: for all his words about his wife and their troubled relationship, Alan is right. Alan confronts Dysart with his shortcomings and, thereby, makes him aware of his lack as a subject of desire. Till now, his desire has been silenced by his devotion to his job as the Other’s agent in turning back the astray to the state of normalcy. Now, he sees in Alan his own desires: the boy’s poignant yet true claims about his marital state face him with his unfulfilled desires. His comments on his relationship with his wife are revealing:

Do you know what it’s like for two people to live in the same house as if they were in different parts of the world? Mentally, she’s always in some drizzly kirk of her own inheriting: and I’m in some Doric temple – clouds tearing through pillars – eagles bearing prophecies out of the sky. She finds all that repulsive. All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean – from that whole intuitive culture – are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labeled Sally and Peppy.

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In fact, Dysart’s infatuation with Greek culture is, in some respects, a substitution he has made with religion. Life in a civilized culture, in a technological background, turns out to be quite stifling, since it requires its subjects to behave according to its symbolic predicaments. In other words, social life heads for a complete denunciation of that forbidden pleasure which Lacan calls jouissance: the pleasure one experiences in the ruptures of the symbolic. For the subject to bear the requirements of the Law there should be a sense of jouissance functioning in his psychical economy albeit a limited and castrated one. Like the Borromean knots, the three orders are necessarily to be tied to each other and the untying of any knot will surely lead to the collapse of the whole thing. In a society, with all its symbolic laws and rules, there should be a place for the real as well, whereto the subject could escape from the stifling pressures of the requiring Other. And it was religion which always proved to be such a haven for the subjects. With religion being discarded from the life of the modern subject, the only place at the margins of the society has been lost and the subject is turned into a total subject of the signifier, with no sense of individuality and essence of humanity left of him. Dysart is an example of such a subject. What he is in need of is a bit of his lost horse-power, that is, he needs an experience of jouissance:

“I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say ‘Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus – no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, certain chip shops, if you like, and slate roofs – just as of certain frowns in people and slouches’ . . . I’d say to them – ‘Worship as many as you can see – and more will appear!’ . . . If I had a son, I bet you he’d come out exactly like his mother. Utterly worshipless.”

In this sense, Dysart can no longer be the priest he has been his entire professional life. His yearning for the Dionysian ecstasy, so much reminiscent of the Nietzschean superman, makes him a renegade at the temple of the old dead gods ‘with names like Zeus’. He wants to worship not certain deities, rather he desires to experience the limitless, even more to go beyond the limits, to be one with the gods, with the ‘Geniuses of Place and Person’. Reason does not give him the thrill he needs to thrive and survive the requirements of the society. He finally sees the heart of Alan’s problem, and the thousands of Alans whom he has created, baptized, castrated, and made subjects to the temple of Zeus. Thus, his

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dream is nearly realized. His conversation with Hesther sheds more light on this issue:

Dysart [quietly]: Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?

Hesther: Worship?

Dysart: Yes, that word again!

Hesther: Aren’t you being a little extreme?

Dysart: Extremity’s the point.

Hesther: Worship isn’t destructive, Martin. I know that.

Dysart: I don’t. I only know it’s the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He’s a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist. He lives one hour every three weeks – howling in a mist. And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee worship! . . . Many men have less vital with their wives.”

In fact, one can see Dysart behind each word he utters; however, with the difference that he does not possess as much as Alan either: he also is a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist, yet, unlike Alan’ he does not even live ‘one hour every three weeks’. Dysart lacks the worship; he too needs to kneel to a slave who stands over him his master and cry out: ‘With my body I thee worship!’ He belongs to the group of those men who have less vital with their wives. And that is exactly the reason behind the counter-transferential process at work in the play. Alan’s ‘extremity’ gives halt to the normalcy of Dysart’s life. In Alan he sees the incarnation of his desire, a return into the bosom of Dionysus. With Alan he sympathizes, and with Equus he yearns to embrace. This makes the opening scene of both Acts quite another meaning: ‘With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces’. The pronoun, in fact, is as empty as any other shifter: to whom does it refer? To Alan? To Dysart himself? Indeed, it can refer to both, no need to limit the choices. The concluding conversation between Dysart and Hesther seals this argument:

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Hesther: The boy’s in pain, Martin.

Dysart: Yes.

Hesther: And you can take it away.

Dysart: Yes.

Hesther: Then that has to be enough for you, surely? . . . In the end!

Dysart [crying out]: All right! I’ll take it away! He’ll be delivered from madness. What then? He’ll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! . . . My desire might to be to make this boy an ardent husband – a caring citizen – a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!

And what is this if not a complete rejection of the entire establishment of psychiatry? One hears the resonance of Lacan’s censure of the so-called ego-psychology, that Anglo-American establishment that sought to glue the split ego of the subject together, to re-attach his feelings like plaster and stick it on to other objects we select. Dysart has realized that the establishment dries individuality in the veins of the subjects, so much the same duty he has practiced for many years, turning them into ghosts bereft of any characteristic features of their own. Psychoanalysis has had the responsibility of saving the society by means of creating ‘types’ at the cost of sacrificing individuality: types who are ardent husbands, caring citizens, and worship one abstract and unifying Other/God. This is the formula of civilization Freud pointed out. Through Alan Dysart comes to see the reality of such formulas which have functioned by means of him and his likes. His description of the process is most revealing:

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eye – all right. It is also a dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills – like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also – beyond question – I have cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this God, in both his respects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful Gods. And at what length . . . Sacrifices to Zeus took at the most, surely, sixty seconds each. Sacrifices to he Normal can take as long as sixty months.

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Beyond the good smile in a child’s eye Dysart discerns the dead stare in a million adults. Assisting the children by subjecting them to the servitude of the Normal God has created an adult multitude who desperately seeks pleasure in adult movie houses, away from the eyes of this God. This is the discontent which civilization brought to the life of the individual. The subject of the Symbolic order transfers a good amount of his pleasure to the account of the Other as the fee of initiation, and thus accepts castration. The Father of the primal horde requires his share of jouissance, bereaving the son of rights and pleasures which he might have rightfully cherished under another’s authority. Human’s life is always tinged by this dark shade of possibility: there might have been a possibility to enjoy one’s life more than what one does at the present; however, this possibility is always-already lost: it exists only by virtue of the fact of its non-existence. And here is the point where Dysart goes off the track once again. Analytic session, Lacan argued quite emphatically, should never end in the promise of finding an ultimate and final object of desire for the subject. In other words, objet a is essentially and irredeemably lost, and there is no possibility of recovering it ever. Desire can have no object which would satisfy it, since phallus is nothing but a signifier, an empty space which can be filled by various things ad infinitum. Phallus is the object of desire and at the same time is its cause, following a circular logic which makes it bite its own tale. This is what Lacan famously formulated as the final goal of analysis, a traversing of the fundamental fantasy and a moving beyond the rock of castration which for Freud constituted the analytic impasse never to overcome. Dysart is still in the illusion that his desire can be fulfilled in such and such a way and that is exactly what makes his relationship with Alan a transferential one, because transference is, first among other things, a resistance and a barrier in the way of analysis. Equus is the phallus in so far as it does not exist in the first place: it is nothing but a signifier which sets Dysart’s desire in motion, only to remind him of the impossiblity of its achievement, and Dysart’s realization of this impossiblity will be the purpose of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

References Shaffer, P. (1982). The collected plays of Peter Shaffer. New York: Harmony.

Lacan, J. (1979). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis 1964–1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin Publishing.

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The Value of Art

Arash Rahmani English Literature, PhD Student, Shahid Beheshti University

“…that the beautiful is as useful as the useful, more so perhaps...”

- Victor Hugo

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty-- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

- Keats, “Ode on the Grecian Urn”

“Nature has formed creatures only. Art has made men.”

- Schiller

Discussions regarding the value of art have been divided into two different groups. One group, the so-called proponents of the extrinsic quality of art, ascribe the value of art to something outside the work. A good example might be didactic art, or art as a means to the fulfillment of some moral good. This group of critics focus on the influence of the work of art on an individual when, for instance, it evokes emotions in the reader. On the other hand, the second group of critics, the so-called practitioners of the intrinsic evaluation of art, value art in itself rather than considering it as something instrumental. The intrinsic approach is mostly associated with such writers as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde as well as the French Symbolists, who propagated the following slogan: “art for art’s sake.” The aforementioned individuals and groups believe that art should be studied per se, i.e. as an end in itself; moreover, they posit that the only justification that art needs is its own existence. They are in favor of putting aside all interests and fallacies in favor of an interest in the work itself.

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Nevertheless, these are not the only two groups. Between the two extremes of extrinsic and intrinsic evaluations lie other groups of thinkers who wish to take the middle way. They believe that the audiences or critics should appreciate works of art in themselves, but also that from this appreciation we might get something with independent value. For instance, we read a literary work and enjoy it on its own; however, the enjoyment also has an effect on our life. It enriches and broadens our perspective on life.

In addition, it should be noted that such discussions of art should also take into consideration the notion of taste because perceiving a work of art, in general, and, for instance, reading a literary work, in particular, is primarily a subjective process. It is actually our taste, alongside our faculty of judgment that help us regard some works of art as worthy of our attention and discard the rest as unworthy. These are the faculties of which we partake in order to ascribe numerous adjectives to different works of art.

Before delving into the main concern of the present paper, one intriguing point should be mentioned, and it is the fact that critical discussions of a work of art can be categorized into the following groups: “Interpretive” and “Evaluative.” Each group has its own “aesthetic terms” such as:

• Affective Terms: moving, frightening, disturbing… • Terms denoting emotional qualities: Sad, Lively, Mournful… • Terms regarding the expressive or representational content: Comic,

Tragic, Ironic…

Therefore, while discussing a work critically, most critics resort to their respective resources of aesthetic terms in order to explain the qualities they find in a given work of art.

Any discussion regarding the value of art should pay attention to the two qualities that almost all works of art possess, i.e. what the work of art expresses, and how the audience responds to it. Therefore, such discussions tend to be twofold. What the work of art expresses, a problematic issue mostly because it is very difficult, if not downright impossible, to determine what the artist had in mind during the process of the work’s creation, is analyzed in the works of such writers as Croce. Croce, alongside other writers such as Tolstoy and Collingwood, who are associated with the Expressivism movement, believes that art is not only about expressing the right emotion, but also about finding the right “outlet” through which this emotion can be best expressed. In his work, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, Croce argues that “order-less stimuli is frustrating and painful,” (Croce & Ainslie, 1922, p. 92) therefore, a form should be imposed on it so that the audience can understand it. His best example is when we feel frustrated because we cannot find the proper words to express a feeling or an emotion; in the same manner,

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artists also feel frustrated when they cannot find “the final stroke” that brings about the unity of their work. Evaluating a work of art cannot be done without taking into account these issues and points. However, it should be noted that causing an emotion should not be confused with expressing an emotion. A painting, a piece of music, or a literary work might be about a happy family, but because of the subjective associations evoked in one particular audience, it might cause that person feelings of sadness, loneliness, and depression. Discussions on the value of a work of art should consider this side of the coin, as well as the responses elicited in the audience when the work of art enters the public sphere because evaluating a work based solely on the artist’s self-expression is a fatal mistake, and the responses of the audience should also be taken into account; this is because the enjoyment we derive from works of art and their enlightening qualities are significant criteria based on which one might label a work good or bad. Therefore, our evaluation of art is an effort to bring the two sides of this coin together.

As Leo Tolstoy has maintained in What is Art?, evaluation should not be the analysis of what is expressed and what is evoked, but rather a combination of the two. He says,

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands onto others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them… The value of art doesn’t lie in the pleasure of individuals, taken as individuals. We are social creatures, and art connects us to each other. (Tolstoy & Maude, 1899, p. 43)

The bond that is created between the audience and the artist is also one of the criteria in evaluating the success and popularity of a work of art.

Having talked about the ways by which works of art are evaluated, it is time we turned to enumerating different kinds of value that they hold. According to Michael Findlay, in his book The Value of Art, all works of art potentially possess one of the following kinds of value: commercial; social; and essential value. For Findlay, the “commercial” and the “social” values of art are related to extrinsic evaluations carried out by critics who are concerned with the external factors whereas the essential value of art, which belongs to intrinsic evaluations of art, is carried out by investigating the artistic object in itself irrespective of any influence it might have had on either the commercial aspect of its distribution process or the social sphere from which it has emerged. (Findlay, 2012, p. 3).

Findlay remarks that the commercial value of works of art focuses on the commercial success that they achieve when they are distributed, regardless of the content. For instance, a film may not be rich in its content, but because it is

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alluring to a special kind of audience, or a special group, it turns out to be a big hit in the box office. This, for Findlay, is the least valuable kind of value. To cite an example from contemporary pop art, movies like Avengers lack valuable content, but they become successful in the box office because teenagers or comic book geeks are attracted to them.

Social value analysis considers the milieu in which the work has been produced and distributed, and it evaluates the work based on the social influence in can exert on the society, not to mention its role as the preserver of history. Examples abound. One such example is the fashionable styles, or catch phrases that become popular after a movie, TV show, etc. Friends, which was an American sitcom had tremendous influence on its target audience during its ten-year run. The Rachel hairstyle and the overuse of “so” were two among many of its effects. Another instance could be different paintings that depict a momentous historical event. The level of penetration, as well as the permanence of the influence are crucial criteria based on which critics can determine the social value of a work of art.

Finally, Findlay asserts that the essential value of art, which follows the “art for art’s sake” slogan, is “the most important of the three and also the most difficult to determine” (Findlay, 2012, p. 93). One of the difficulties for this kind of value is the fact that works of art cannot, and must not, be studied in a vacuum. They should be studied in relation to other works of art to which they bear some resemblance.

Bibliography Croce, B. & D. Ainslie. (1922). Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic.

London: Macmillan.

Findlay, M. (2012). The value of art. Munchen: Prestel Verlag.

Tolstoy, L. & A. Maude. (1899). What is art? New York: Crowell.

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A Review of A Man for All Seasons’ Adaptation in Tehran

Nahid Jamshidi Rad English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

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A Man for All Seasons (1960) written by Robert Bolt is a classic work with a simple story. There is no specific complex or novel way of narration yet the work is well written and has such attractive characters and themes that would not let the reader leave it.

The story narrates Sir Thomas More’s inauguration as the Lord Chancellor of King Henry, the eighth. For coagulating his position, More should predicate that he is let be out of "The King's Great Matter", which was the King's conflict with the Pope over his desired annulment from Catherine of Aragon. However, Henry is not satisfied with this, and he is determined to have a blessing of his marriage to Anne Boleyn from Sir Thomas. More, however, is a devout Catholic, and he believes that Henry's annulment from Catherine was not valid, and his morals will not allow him to bless the King's marriage. In hopes of forcing More to agree with him, the King administers an Oath claiming that he is the supreme head of the Church in England, and that Anne Boleyn's children would be the heirs to the throne. Sir Thomas refuses to sign the Oath, and, after spending almost 2 years in the Tower of London, finally by a false testimony at his trial he is sentenced to death for High Treason.

To be a man in all seasons is an action of heroism that not everybody can achieve. Sir Thomas More was such a man; the man who was "the King's good servant, but God's first". He lived in a period of perennial dishonesty, corrupt and mundane intentions that “when one attempts to be human they are considered as heroes.

Bahman Farmanara’s version of A Man for All Seasons is almost a faithful performance of the original play, thanks to the worthy translation of Farzaneh Taheri. Almost all of the characters portrayed in the play suffer from a sort of flaw and fail to be truthful and faithful to their “conscience”. The only true one in this regard is Sir Thomas More, played by Reza Kianian, who heroically stands for his “conscience” and does not give up. He is the main character to whom the other characters owe their presence. His family including Alice; his wife, Meg; his daughter, and Roper once Meg’s boyfriend and then her husband are better than the Common Man, portrayed and performed by the single actor Siyamak Ansari, and the typical Kings servants; Cromwell, Richard Rich and Duke of Norfolk. Yet they can’t understand More’s behavior partly due to his keeping quiet but mostly because they are not that much concerned with his care for conscience.

Reza Kianian who poignantly plays More’s character is a good choice for representing Sir Thomas More. He presents a lifelike character on stage though because of his famous presence in the Iranian movies it is difficult for the audience to see him in that guise. However, his great talents provide the audience

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with a figure that when they push Kianian’s fame to background is quite real to believe him as Henry’s Lord Chancellor.

More is at heart of the play and other characters owe their identity to him. They are there to help make a better representation of More’s personality, his noble soul, his rigid morality, and his loyalty to his King. More is cut between a dilemma to choose between God and his King. He can’t leave one side for the other hence keeps quiet in order for avoid betraying any of his masters. He is persuaded by everyone, his family and his friends as well as King’s men, to leave God for King, his conscience for his concerns since his disconformity against King would jeopardize his life. However, he can’t be such a base person to behave in a chameleon fashion. He is a humble and loyal servant for his King; when the Spanish ambassador delivers the Spanish King’s message of support, he refuses his offer. He prefers to stay with his own wayward king than betraying his country.

More’s family, mostly Lady Alice, love and respect him a lot but expect him to behave as a normal statesman; to obey blindly whatever King demands him in order to show his loyalty and hence preserve his situation and even if possible improve it. Lady Alice is performed as a lovely classic English wife; a gentle, dutiful, obedient pious wife. Lady Alice whose conventional mind can’t understand More’s behavior- tries to make him change his mind through kindly advices or reproaching criticism. However at the end-when they pay a visit to More at prison-she gives up and they reunite.

More’s daughter, his lovely Meg that he believes is the only one who understands him, played by Behnaz Ja’fari can’t fully touch his mind too and at some occasions she does criticizes him just like her mother. Her presence is not that much colorful in the play and we can’t say much about her. However, Ja’fari’s performance creates a sense that she is a playful lass loved by her father. Meg like any new generation has some conflicts with her father – she is in love with William Roper; a Lutheran young man, however she does her best not to stay against her father’s will because of her love and respect for him and of course her partial understanding of his ideas. Meg’s presence in the play is mostly that of a source of solace and comfort for More: she has a better understanding of More’s behavior and thoughts and she tries to appreciate More and his decision to keep quite.

The Common Man who plays the role of the narrator as well as most of the lower-class characters: More’s steward Matthew, the boatman, the publican (innkeeper), the jailer, the jury foreman, and the headsman (executioner) is common and simple as his title implies. Siyamak Safari makes a great job at representing the Common man as Mathew and as narrator, he is humorous and ironic. Safari’s’ exemplary performance reminds us of the Shakespearean joker.

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His witty comments under their funny mask are sharp truths about man’s ways. The Common Man cares only for his own concerns and does not bother himself with anyone else even if this is Sir Thomas More who “has been a kind master to them”. He does not attempt to hurt him but when it comes to money and his duties-the paid ones of course, not his moral duties-he readily betrays More when he is jailor or when he becomes a jury man; he acts without asking any question. He has no malice and evil intention but cares only about his own concerns and he honestly confesses to this weakness of his personality over the course of the play.

However, in his other roles especially the jailor, the jury foreman and the headsman, Safari is not that much successful to perform a life like character perhaps due to lack of as much space for these roles as was for the earlier ones. However, the characters that Common Man is the general title for them all become more and more guilt-ridden as play approaches More’s doom. In the end, the Common Man silences his guilty conscience by finding solace in the fact that he is alive. He ends up implying that most people do the same thing.

The statesmen are of two types; the good and the bad natured ones. The good one is the simple hearted and good natured Duck Norfolk who does his best to keep his loyalty to his friend Sir Thomas and his king simultaneously though at the end he dares not stay for More and leaves him at mercy of fortune. However, Rich is an example of a bad natured statesman. Once a low-level functionary, at the close of play Rich appears as the attorney general for Wales; an office granted by Cromwell to him in exchange for his false testimony at More’s trial. Richard Rich to fulfill the connotation of his name acts as a foil to Sir Thomas More. He uses any Machiavellian method to achieve his ambitions to be a great statesman. He forsakes More’s advice to find a teaching occupation and sacrifices his conscience for his ambitions: to climb up the ladder of political accomplishments and become a man of fame and fortune. Unlike More whose ultimate value is morality and conscience, his only desire is worldly progress and changing his social class to that of a member of the nobility and gentry. And he is quite successful; at the last scene he is introduced by Cromwell as Sir Richard Rich the attorney general of Wales! Rich is true to his type, a perfect representative of a man who desires more and to achieve that is ready to do any sacrifice including his own conscience and other people’s life.

Cromwell is yet another bad statesman who is as dangerous as Rich. Cromwell is the classic villain character; the antagonist who does anything to disgrace and destroy the angelic More. His problem with More is not just matter of duty and loyalty to king, but he develops a grudge, a malicious enmity against him. The reason behind his behavior apparently lies in his evil nature. However, psychologically speaking, one may think that the great respect More receives

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from King and the public derives his jealousy and motivates him to do anything including forging evidence and bribing witness; Richard Rich, so that he facilitates More’s downfall. Cromwell is a man of law, a lawyer but when he gets frustrated with legal means to capture More he moves to illegal ones, persuading Rich to have a false testimony at More’s trial leading to his execution.

And to sum up, Kianian was great and his performance was almost out of flaw yet there were few problems with the way play was performed in general that damaged the perfectness of Kianian’s performance and the other actors’. Dialogues though strong sometimes failed to be delivered perfectly. The tone, and rhythm of the actors’ speech occasionally lacked enough liveliness and energy to impress the audience; e.g. the scene of conversation between Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, some of the scenes of Richard Rich, and the last scene in which Sir Thomas is executed which failed to show that dramatic moment as deserved Sir Thomas More, the man for all seasons! Yet, thanks to actors’-especially Kianian and Safari- natural talent the overall performance was almost perfect.

Besides, the simple and practical decoration and lighting helped a lot to convey the atmosphere of the 16th century England with the least objects possible. Costumes, colors and artful non-inclusion of music also added weight to the actors’ performance. And Farmanara’s team enjoying the rich repertoire of natural talent and great experience of its members in spite of all the difficulties of producing an English classic play with the least facilities and ample limitations made a monumental performance that created a lively and lovely picture of Sir Thomas More for the Iranian audience.

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A Reader-Response Reading of “Araby”

Hossein Mohseni English Literature, MA, Shahid Beheshti University

This description could be considered as an equivalent for this statement: a literary work would be like the proverbial tree that makes no sound when it falls because there is nobody there to hear it. It means that in reader-oriented criticism, the spotlight turns on the reader, without whose attention and reaction the text would be inert and meaningless. In other words, readers are expected to shake off its deference to the authority of the text and become an active participant in the creation of meaning. As a result, the text shows us what little power texts have to achieve their intended purpose. A text, as a piece of art, acts as a stimulus in order to arise certain responses in readers. Being largely the product of our belief and desires within an interpretive community (Bressler, 1994, p. 88), these responses will form the final outcome of our speculations, our interpretation of a literary text. Because all reader-oriented critics agree that the individual reader creates the text’s meaning, reader oriented criticism declares that there can be no one correct meaning for any text; instead, many valid interpretations are possible. What the reading process is and how readers read are major concerns for all reader oriented critics.

Permitting the whole range of responses generated by the text to enter into the center of awareness depends on the materials the reader selects and weaves while assessing the literary work of art. A given text is not always read in the same way. Instead, readings vary with the purpose, needs, experiences, and concerns of the reader, who adopts a “stance” toward a text, an attitude that determines what signals to respond to so that certain results can be achieved. As Louise M. Rosenblatt expresses, the two opposing stances are the “efferent” one, in which the reader concentrates on information to be extracted from the writing, and the “aesthetic,” which involves senses, feelings, and intuitions about “what is being lived through during the reading event (Dobie, 2006, p. 132).

The ancient Greek orators and rhetoricians, with their concern for how to move and persuade an audience, could be called the literary ancestors of today’s reader-response theorists. Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of the power of words to stir or convince people, though they did not hold the same opinions about the impact of doing so. Whereas the former had serious misgivings about using literature to arouse people’s emotions, the latter recognized in it the capacity to quiet and strengthen an audience, as, for example, a tragedy can affect

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a catharsis that cleanses people of debilitating feelings and attitudes. Aristotle also explored the many ways in which an argument can be made convincing to listeners. He thereby influenced Longinus, Cicero, Quintilian, and other rhetoricians to this day in making choices about organization and style so that what they have to say will appeal to a particular group of people (Bressler, 1994, p. 76).

Many reader-response critics, such as David Bleich and Stanley Fish emphasize the reader’s role in the overall creation of a text’s meaning. These critics argue that the subjective position of each reader alters the objective facts of any text and that instead of ignoring these personal intrusions, a complete reading of any text should actively incorporate them into the act of criticism. Unlike more conventional modes of reading, such as New Criticism, a reader-response-driven criticism of “Araby” allows us to see that the ultimate “meaning” of Joyce’s story is not something that can be pinned down conclusively, but is instead a moving, evolving activity of participatory reading (Freimarck, 1970, p. 367). It is the story of a young boy journeying to bazaar in hope of winning the favor of an idealized girl. During his brief visit to the bazaar, he discovers that there is no place in the adult world for his dream of love. His physical condition is similar to the moment when he earlier reacted too intensely to the brief encounters with his idealized beloved. In this point, he regrets for having invested so much of himself in his vision and the discovery that it may exist only in dreams leaves him desolate.

As we are going to have a reader oriented reading of Joyce’s Araby, we should keep in mind that each of the fifteen stories in James Joyce's Dubliners presents a flat, rather spatial portrait. The visual and symbolic details embedded in each story, however, are highly concentrated, and each story culminates in an epiphany (Freeborn, 1973, p. 9). In Joycean terms (Morse, 1978, p. 130) an epiphany is a moment when the essence of a character is revealed, when all the forces that bear on his life converge, and we can, in that instant, understand him. Each story in the collection is centered in an epiphany, and each story is concerned with some failure or deception, which results in realization and disillusionment. "Araby" follows this pattern. The meaning is revealed in a young boy's psychic journey from first love to despair and disappointment, and the theme is found in the boy’s discovery of the discrepancy between the real and the ideal in life. The narrator’s epiphany at the end of “Araby” illustrates the fact that the ultimate meaning of experience is found at the crossroads between empirical facts and the way our individual perceptions organize those facts into nuggets of meaning.

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Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

This final realization is the product of two separate but interrelated aspects of the narrator’s life. First, it is a realization concerning a conventionally accepted truth about reality. Evidence from our own lives tells us overwhelmingly that the actual workings of the world rarely live up to the idealistic imaginations of youth; empirical experience makes us aware that the world does not play out like a fairy tale. Although in state of dreaming (in which we could place our imaginations) the reality could be perceived in an ecstatic essence, away from any kind of defection, our world works as a foil towards this reality, obliging us to accept blemished, undesirable facts. The epiphany in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the ugly and the worldly is brought to its inevitable conclusion: the single sensation of life disintegrates. The boy senses the falsity of his dreams and his eyes burn "with anguish and anger." (Blythe, 1994, p. 18) Second, the narrator’s realization at the end of Joyce’s story is the product of his own private experience of that empirical reality. He reaches his conclusion only after the empirical evidence of the world has been filtered through his own perceptions and desires. This deeply personal quality is one reason the story’s ending retains such power. Thus the theme of the story-the discrepancy between the real and the ideal-is made final in the bazaar, a place of tawdry make-believe.

Convinced that the Dublin of the 1900's was a center of spiritual paralysis, James Joyce loosely but thematically tied together histories in Dubliners by means of their common setting (Barisonzi, 1991, p. 518). Each of the stories consists of a portrait in which Dublin contributes in some way to the dehumanizing experience of modem life. The boy in the story "Araby" is intensely subject to the city's dark, hopeless conformity, and his tragic yearning toward the exotic in the face of drab, ugly reality forms the center of the story. On its simplest level, "Araby" is a story about a boy's first love. On a deeper level, however, it is a story about the world in which he lives-a world inimical to ideals and dreams. This deeper level is in-traduced and developed in several scenes: the opening description of the boy's street, his house, his relationship to his aunt and uncle, the information about the priest and his belongings, the boy's two trips-his walks through Dublin shopping and his subsequent ride to Araby.

The houses are imperturbable in the quiet, the cold, the dark muddy lanes and dark dripping gardens.

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With metaphoric description of this street as being blind, a dead end, with its smugly complacent inhabitants and the houses reflecting the attitudes of the inhabitants, the first instance of situational irony is depicted amply for us as a person who is not spiritually sleep, feeling oppressed and endangered by North Richmond Street. Such setting reflects people (like us) who are well intentioned but narrow in their views and blind to higher values; as a result, the total effect of such settings permeates with stagnation and isolation, deepening through a sense of dead past the spiritual and intellectual stagnation of the present into this atmosphere of spiritual paralysis the boy bears (Freeborn, 1973, p. 8).

Having a reader response reading of the text, we could identify a series of subtle religious references in the story which make conscious, methodical critique of the deceptive and idealized facades inherent to Catholicism, and the boy’s experience can be read as a cautionary tale about the dangers of any type of extreme religious idolatry. Even if the “implied reader” does not understand all these religious allusions, however, Joyce fills “Araby” with more easily recognizable patterns of imagery and language that guide the reader to an understanding of the story’s central tension between idealized image and actual reality.

In terms of my own reading of “Araby,” however, I have to admit that there are also many points in the story where I am reminded of other stories of childhood and maturation I have read. In other words, all texts refer readers to other texts, reminding them of their earlier literary experience; as a result, they are encouraged to either corporate this newly perceived literary experience into an older one, making a new literary experience; or they could establish totally a new structure in their mind. (Of course, this newly established experience still depends to the former literary experiences.) The narrator’s maturation process in “Araby,” for instance, follows a pattern similar to that of Stephen Daedalus in two of James Joyce’s other novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses (Bruto, 1967, p. 67). The future life of the young boy in “Araby” could very well play out much as Stephen’s life did, with shattered dreams of greatness and a hatred for the machinations and responsibilities of adulthood. When the narrator of “Araby” notes how his constant daydreaming tested the patience of his schoolmaster, turning his face “from amiability to sternness,” it was hard for me not to think of the adult Stephen Daedalus who, once his dreams of artistry are gone, becomes a schoolmaster himself and scolds his students for being academically unprepared.

When the narrator of “Araby” goes up to the attic of his house to escape from the adult world of time I thought of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (Dobie, 2006, p. 148). Like Araby’s narrator who pictures himself as a modern-day Lancelot searching for his love “through a throng of foes,”, the

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protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye has idealized dreams of escape. Both Holden and Joyce’s narrator want to escape the adult world of time and responsibility and live in the eternal world available to them through their imagination. All of these other works have helped shape my personal understanding of “Araby” to a great degree. Although I understand that the narrator’s realization at the end of “Araby” is a deeply personal one, these intertextual influences allowed me to think of his experience in a more generalized light, suggesting that his epiphany is simply a unique manifestation of a larger theme common to many stories about childhood. It is also characteristic that in many of these works, the protagonists have to come to terms with disconcerting new knowledge concerning the world around them. All of these works suggest that the transition from childhood into adulthood is rarely easy and that more often than not, it is a process fraught with pain and heartache. In this regard, the young boy’s realization about the ultimately empty content of his wild daydreaming in “Araby” makes Joyce’s story a prototypical example of the coming of-age tale.

On one level, the narrator’s experience in “Araby” resembles the experience contemporary readers undergo when they attempt to make meaning out of a text, trying to fill in the gaps; not a generation gap but a gap in the spirit, in empathy and conscious caring, resulting from uncle’s failure to arrive home in time for the boy to go to the bazaar while it is open, is depicted in this story. He has been no doubt been negligent and indifferent to the boy’s anguish and impatience (Burto, 1967, p. 67). Like the young boy’s attempt to make sense of Dublin’s mysterious materials, we as readers are constantly on a journey of discovery, encountering new (and sometimes strange) textual worlds that encourage us to construct meaning out of them. And just as the meaning of the young narrator’s experiences in “Araby” is a combination of the empirical facts of the outside world and the young boy’s personal perceptions of that world, a reader’s discovery of meaning is always a transaction between the reader and the text. The text provides us with empirical evidence—authorial devices such as diction, allusion, and imagery—that produces a particular range of rhetorical effects and guides our understanding of the story. During the act of reading, however, all this material is constantly filtered and processed through the perceptions of each individual reader and tinted by his or her idiosyncratic inklings, desires, and personal experiences. The ultimate “meaning” of a world or a text, then, is a combination of the two. It is a hybrid of the empirical and the personal, an ever-evolving transaction between the reader and the text.

Ultimately, “Araby” is a short story that should be familiar to almost any reader who has experienced the shattering of a youthful illusion about the world. For the more sophisticated reader, Joyce also includes elements in the story that turn the narrative into a deeper critique of religious idolatry. For the general

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reader, however, the story’s motif of blindness and the way Joyce draws a strong contrast between the magical world of childhood and the mundane world of adult responsibility demonstrate that the text is dealing with themes that are common to almost all stories of childhood. This does not make Joyce’s story an exercise in redundancy. Although the story that “Araby” tells is not new, Joyce’s concision of action and his compression of imagery make “Araby” a text that tells its familiar story in a new and compelling way.

References Barisonzi, J. (1991). Who eats pig cheeks? Food and class in Araby. JJQ, 28 (2), 518-

519.

Blythe, H. (1994). Diptych in Araby: The key to understanding the boy's anguish and anger. Notes on modern Irish literature, 6, 16-18.

Bressler, C. E. (1994). Literary criticism: An introduction to theory and practice. New Jersey: Upper Saddler, 1994.

Burto,W. (1967). Joyce's Araby. Explicator, 25, 67-70.

Dobie, A. B. (2006). Theory into Practice: An introduction to literary criticism. London: University of Southampton.

Freeborn, R. (1973). The rise of the novel. London: Cambridge University Press.

Freimark, M. (1970). Araby: A quest for meaning. James Joyce Quarterly, 7 (4), 125-132.

Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications.

Morse, D. E. (1978). Sing three songs of Araby: Theme and allusion in Joyce's Araby. College Literature, 5(2), 125-132.

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A Review of Noël Carroll's On Criticism

Saleh Tabatabai English Language and Literature, BA, Shahid Beheshti University

Introduction Criticism derives from the Greek word, κριτικός, ‘one who delivers a verdict.’ However, in a recent poll of practicing art critics, seventy-five percent of the respondents reported that rendering evaluations—their own personal judgment on artworks—was the least significant aspect of their job (Carroll, 2009, p. 15). The denial of the “model of taste” for critical judgment has brought about a clear retreat from evaluation in art criticism since 1960s. Therefore, most critics have seen their job primarily based on explanation and interpretation rather than

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evaluation. This, for example, holds good in the case of Arthur Danto,1 for whom an artwork is mainly an “embodied meaning” and, hence, the task of criticism is to identify the meanings of artworks and to explain how well their forms suit their content. He explains, “It is my view that whatever appreciation may come to, it must in some sense be a function of interpretation” (Danto, 1981, p. 113). Furthermore, in his opinion, there is little need to go beyond discussing meaning and significance and, finally, “there is not a lot to say by way of pronouncing value judgments” (Danto, 2008, pp. 46-7).

Nonetheless, Noël Carroll2 has lately challenged the retreat from evaluation in his book, On Criticism. He argues that criticism essentially involves evaluation, notably evaluation or appraisal grounded in reason and evidence. Other activities such as description, analysis or, particularly, interpretation are just components of criticism, but, in his view, they are hierarchically subordinate to the purposes of evaluation, articulating the reasons upon which sound criticism is based. However, he has in mind the alleged equation of evaluation with aesthetic judgments and with taste leading to the assertion that all evaluation is subjective. To evade this conclusion, Carroll offers an approach to criticism that sets aside the (aesthetic) experiences of the critic and of the public and argues on the basis of objective reasons. He pursues this approach across the four chapters of his book: (1) criticism as evaluation; (2) the object of criticism; (3) the parts of criticism; and (4) evaluation: problems and prospects. Quite a few reviews have already been written and published on the book, On Criticism, yet they are largely descriptive, e. g. Curtis L. Carter’s, brief review3. The aim here is to present relatively thorough review both to shed more light on objectively evaluative criticism, as construed by Carroll, and to outline his approach to the topic.

1. Arthur Coleman Danto (1924 –2013) was a renowned American art critic and philosopher.

2. Noël Carroll (1947- ) is an American professor considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Perhaps his most popular and influential contribution is in cinema studies, but he has also published widely recognized works on philosophy of art, generally. He has a Ph.D. in cinema studies (New York University, 1976); and his second Ph.D. is in philosophy (University of Illinois, 1983).

3. This review has been published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 67, issue 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 421–423.

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Criticism as Evaluation First of all, Carroll specifies that the topic of his book, On Criticism, is “art criticism,” by which he means “criticism of any work within a certain group of art forms, including literature, drama, dance, music, the graphic arts (encompassing photography), sculpture, architecture, and the moving image arts (film, video, and computer generated visuals)” (Carroll, 2009, p.11). Then, to put emphasis on the second part of “art criticism,” i.e. criticism, he clarifies the term as a genre of verbal discourse—either spoken or written criticism about artworks in the art forms cited above. Therefore, art criticism, in his view, is the verbal act of criticizing artworks. A question he poses here is what marks such criticism off from other forms of verbal discourse, particularly other forms of verbal discourse about artworks. In reply to the question, he asserts that the argument of his book, On Criticism, centers on the defining characteristic of the relevant form of criticism, that is, evaluative criticism. To prevent misunderstanding, he instantly adds that criticism, in his opinion, is not merely a matter of evaluating an artwork, but criticism can also include such activities as the description, categorization, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis of an artwork on the docket (Ibid, p. 13). However, he thinks of these other activities as undertaken solely for the purpose of providing the grounds for the critic’s evaluation (Ibid, p. 14).

Nevertheless, why should we think of evaluation as an essentially distinguishing feature of criticism proper? Carroll replies that that is because, otherwise, art criticism is not really distinguishable from other forms of discourse about art. For instance, in certain forms of historical discourse about art, such

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activities as description, categorization, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis can also be employed, but he asserts what differentiates the historical discourse from criticism, properly so called, is the evaluation of an artwork. Then, he gears up to a highly controversial assertion, saying that evaluation appears to be not only the feature that sets criticism off from comparable discourse but also the central aim of criticism to which other parts of criticism seem hierarchically subservient (Ibid, p. 18).

To put in a nutshell, Carroll articulates throughout the first chapter of his book that evaluation alone is a necessary condition of criticism, and, when conjoined with the other activities that go into criticism, evaluation is sufficient to differentiate criticism from its nearby neighbors in the realm of verbal discourse.

The Object of Criticism Having hypothesized that the role of the critic is to evaluate the artwork, that is, to discover what is valuable in it, Carroll argues that the object of criticism is what is valuable in the artwork, aka the artist’s achievement as displayed in the artwork. He calls this kind of value ‘success value’ since it is inextricably linked to what the artist achieves in the work. His view, then, contrasts sharply with the accounts that establish that the role of the critic is to instruct the audience in the ways to derive whatever positive experience of the work (that is, ‘reception value’). In fact, Carroll insists that the experience that the audiences are supposed to undergo is not whatever pleasurable aesthetic/positive experience, but rather their experience must be tied to the function of the work in such a way that they can see, normally under the critic’s expert guidance, whether and how the artist has succeeded in realizing what he or she had in mind. For Carroll, “the artwork is an artifact and should be evaluated as such—that is, in terms of what it is designed to do” (Carroll, 2009, p. 64). Critics should, then, evaluate artworks in terms of how well they fulfill their intended purposes.

By seeking the value of the work in the way that the artist has realized his or her intention in the final product, i.e. the artwork, the critic needs an impression of what the artist intended so as to evaluate what the artist has done. However, for most of the twentieth century and up to now, there have been repeated arguments against the resort to the artist’s intentions in appraising the artwork. These arguments include the inaccessibility argument, the circularity argument, and the achievement argument.

The inaccessibility argument presumes that intentions are in the artist’s mind and, thus, beyond the critic’s reach. Then, the circularity argument proceeds that since the artist’s intentions are inaccessible to us, the critic has to rely only on the work as his/her sole available means in order to guess the artist’s

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intentions. Therefore, the critic will have to infer that the work is exactly how the artist intended it. However, this is circular obviously. The third argument, the achievement argument, asserts that many artists testify that they frequently find their intentions unrealized in their final products, so the critic cannot bridge the gap between what the artist has intended to realize and what, in fact, he/she accomplishes.

Carroll swings into action to rebut these three arguments and their subsidiary implications. Regarding the assumption that the artist’s intentions are not available to the critic, Carroll considers it as too overstated since we spend our everyday life reading the minds of our companions, and an astounding number of our surmises about their intentions are correct. If we are so good at divining intentions in everyday life, why must we be so inept at guessing intentions when it comes to art? Moreover, the main access road to the artist’s intention passes through the recognized category/categories that artworks belong to. Different categories of artworks, of course, are subject to certain acknowledged artistic intentions.

In the latter counter-argument, Carroll is on his way to answering the circularity argument: if we can identify the artist’s intentions through such evidence as the category/categories to which the work belongs and/or the artist’s statement about his/her intentions, we will have clues, other than the work itself, for discovering artistic intentions.

The vulnerability of the achievement argument, as Carroll holds, lies in the misconception of the nature of the critic’s interest in the artist’s intention. It is not his/her intention that the critic is evaluating; rather, it is his/her achievement. Nonetheless, in order to evaluate what the artist has done, the critic needs an impression of what he/she has had in mind. Therefore, “the critic needs to comprehend the artist’s underlying intentions. In this way, the artist’s intentions are relevant indispensably to evaluation.” (Ibid, p. 78).

Having explained the weak points of each of the three arguments, Carroll comes to the conclusion that the artist’s intentions is relevant to critical evaluation, even though it is not the artist’s intention that the critic is supposed to evaluate. Instead, the critic should attend to what has been achieved by the work for the sake of evaluation.

Other Parts of Criticism Apart from evaluation, the other component operations that go into producing a piece of criticism, as noted earlier, include description, categorization, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis. The distinctions

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drawn between these operations are approximate rather than clear-cut. Furthermore, these operations are not totally independent of one another, but rather reciprocally related.

In the view of criticism advanced by Carroll, these six procedures function as grounds for evaluation.4 Yet, in his opinion, a piece of criticism does not need to contain all these operations, but it must contain, besides evaluation, one of them at least. This requirement follows from his notion that criticism involves grounded evaluation, i.e. evaluation based on reasoned grounds provided, at least, by one of the six operations.

By critical description, it is meant that the critic attempts to tell his/her reader something about what the artwork at hand is like. For example, if the work is a representational piece of visual art, the critic says what is depicted in the work and how it appears in terms of its coloring, its disposition of figures, its facture, etc. With works of narrative art, the critic usually begins at least with a paraphrase of the story. Even in cases where the artwork is well known to almost everyone, e.g. Hamlet, Carroll says that it is difficult to imagine that description can be evaded entirely since all the other parts of criticism will require that the critic specify something about the work, and, that specification will involve description. Although the thorough description of a work—in a such way that there is nothing left to say about it— seems impracticable in a vast number of cases; there are almost always some angles from which the work can be described.

Crucial to the task of criticism is placing the artwork in the proper category—genres, movements, styles, oeuvres, etc.—because once we make of the category/categories to which the work belongs, we come to specific expectations about it, and those expectations, in turn, imply the type of criticism suitable to be directed at the work. As to avant-garde art which seems to defy utterly any categorization, Carroll believes that there are genres and traditions recognizable in the original methods that avant-garde art applies, such as

4. At this point, Carroll adds in his footnote that these six procedures function as grounds for criticism, but evaluation at times comes in tandem with them. For example, the description of the work might be uttered in evaluative terms—e.g., the critic may say, “This is a superb example of the sonata allegro form” when classifying a piece of music.

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transgression5 and self-reflexivity;6 moreover, most avant-garde art can be classified into movements, such as Cubism, Photorealism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postmodernism, and so on.

Contextualization is a kind of external description, by which Carroll means the description of the circumstances—art historical, institutional, and, more generally, socio-cultural contexts—in which the work of art has been created. It provides a way for the critic to clarify the purpose(s) or the intention(s) behind the production of the work by situating it in its context.

By elucidation, Carroll means the operation of “identifying the literal meaning, narrowly construed, of the symbols, in the artwork” (Carroll, 2009, p. 108). Here the literal meaning includes all linguistic, semiotic, pictorial, and associative meanings of the symbols in the work. It follows that a proposed elucidation of a work can be controversial. In a rough distinction from elucidation, interpretation “unfolds the unity of an artwork through the discovery the overarching meaning or significance of its narrative, dramatic and symbolic components” (Ibid, p. 120). A critical interpretation attempts to tell us how the work says what is supposed to say. Interpretation accounts for the presence of elements in the artwork by explaining how they contribute to the significance or meaning of the whole work. That makes it clear how interpretation often serves evaluation: When the critic interprets the work, he or she actually evaluates its unity by showing that it is composed of consistent parts.

Finally, critical analysis is “an account of how the work works—of how the parts of the work function together to realize the point or purposes of the

5.Transgression in fictional literature is a term applied to works focusing on protagonists

who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressive fiction may seem psychopathic, anti-social, or nihilistic. The basic ideas of transgression in fiction are by no means new. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels, Crime and Punishment (1866) and Notes from Underground (1864), are well-known examples.

6. Self-reflexivity is a term applied to literary works that openly reflect upon their own processes of artful composition. Self-reflexivity is often regarded as an explicitly postmodern element, but its close equivalent can sometimes be found in earlier works such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

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work” (Ibid, p. 111). Therefore, analysis is a broad class of critical operations of which interpretation is a leading example but not the entirety of analysis.

Having reviewed the components of criticism, Carroll sets out to make it clear which role the artist’s intention should play in criticism. Since critical interpretation is devoted to discovering the meaning of the artwork, he poses the controversially repeated question whether the interpretation of the work should be related to the artist’s intention. He offers both counter-arguments against anti-intentionalism—the most influential stance in this regard in literary theory— and arguments in defense of his intentionalistic theory of interpretation, a modest form of actual intentionalism, according to which interpretation is aimed at revealing the actual intentions of the artist and the value of the work lies exclusively in the artist's success in fulfilling his or her intention.

Evaluation: Problems and Prospects The pivotal issue of the final chapter of the book is to address the question of how objective evaluative criticism is possible—“objective” means here something like “inter-subjectively verifiable” (Carroll, 2009, p. 34). It may be asserted that criticism is invariably subjective, a matter of taste, because there are neither laws of art nor generalizations about what makes an artwork successful. Carroll, however, attempts to weigh up the prospects for objective criticism against this objection.

He cites the claimed lack of general principles linking the properties of the work to critical evaluation as the main argument against objectivity. Then, he responds that, while there are no fully general principles that can provide reasons for evaluations across the arts, there are more local principles that stem from the purposes of particular genres, styles and movements, and even from the explicit statements of the artists working within them. Objective reasons must be sufficiently general, and these local evaluative generalizations provide sufficient generality.

Classification of artworks, based on the particular purposes that they pursue in their genres and styles, can well be objective, i.e. inter-subjectively verifiable, as Carroll claims. However, critics may disagree about the purposes of different styles and the value of fulfilling them. Carroll offers the standard answer that disagreement happens frequently in science without jeopardizing claims of objectivity.

To sum up, Carroll believes that a good critic should be fully aware of the history and categories of the art form about which he or she has chosen to specialize. The critic should be an art critic, but that is not enough. “Even though

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most workaday criticism is art criticism, narrowly construed, the critic-in-full of art cannot altogether shirk the responsibilities and risks of cultural criticism” (Ibid, p. 196) because the arts are not isolated enterprises but rather among the major channels for ideas, beliefs and feelings that form the warp and weft of a living culture.

Illustrative Examples Drawing upon his broad knowledge of the art world, Carroll often fleshes out his arguments throughout the book with illustrative examples or, sometimes, counterexamples— that could not be specifically addressed here— from performing, visual, and literary arts. No doubt it is of great advantage to provide the reader with a charming, vivid account of such a less accessible topic as the philosophy of criticism. However, this potentially helpful approach is sometimes flawed by inaccuracies as witnessed by the following examples:

Carroll says, “Scriabin6F

7, I believe, intended that the ending of his Victory over the Sun would occasion the end of the world.” (Carroll, 2009, p. 69). However, The Victory over the Sun (1913) is a futuristic opera by the Russian composer, Mikhail Matyushin (1861-1934), while, reputedly, Scriabin believed mystically that completing his unfinished musical work, Mysterium, would bring about the end of the world.7F

8 Clearly, Carroll has mistaken the opera by Matyushin for Mysterium by Scriabin.

Having stipulated that the critic’s elucidation should comply with the author’s specified intention, Carroll gives us an example: “We should accept the author, Buck Henry’s identification of Dr Strangelove as an allusion to Werner von Braun rather than to Henry Kissinger” (Ibid, p. 110). But, relying on filmography information, we have to state, pace Professor Carroll, that Dr.

7. Aleksandr Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915), Russian composer and pianist.

8. In her book, Neo-Mythologism in Music: From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb (2007), Victoria Adamenko writes: “Scriabin’s Mysterium was actually intended to cause the end of the world by transforming Matter into Spirit through incantatory music and to bring about the humanity’s reconciliation with the godhead.” (p. 16).

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Strangelove; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a motion-picture about Cold War paranoia and the nuclear arms race, is based on the novel, Red Alert, by Peter George (1924-1966), the English writer, and directed by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), the American motion-picture director;9 the motion picture and the story have nothing to do with the supposed authorship of Buck Henry (1930- ), the American actor, writer, and director.

Referring to Kafka’s posthumously published novel, The Castle, Carroll writes: “The literal opening line of Kafka’s The Castle—‘It was late in the evening when Joseph K. arrived’— does not require an interpretation…” (Ibid, p. 119-120). However, the novel actually opens with these words: “It was late in the evening when K. arrived.”10 As a matter of fact, Joseph (Josef) K. is the protagonist in another novel by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), i.e. The Trial (1925; English trans. 1937). Moreover, K and Josef K totally differ from each other in terms of personality and other dramatic characteristics (Gray, 2005, p. 150). At first glance, this may seem just a slip of the pen that has gone unnoticed during the editing process, but the very mistake recurs two more times in the book when Carroll erroneously mentions K. as the protagonist’s name in The Castle (Carroll, 2009, p. 116).

Conclusion On Criticism is not so easy to read. With so much repetition, it seems at times superfluous. Its lengthy sentences that the reader may sometimes stumble over require pruning here and there. Yet, Carroll, with transparency and panache, argues for his conception of evaluative criticism which revolves around the artist’s success in fulfilling the purposes of the category or categories that the

9. Writing in The Satirist (December 2011), Dan Geddes has suggested another unstated literary source for the film, Dr. Strangelove: “You wonder whether Kubrick and the co-screenwriter, Terry Southern, were influenced more by the novel, Catch-22, than by their acknowledged source, Red Alert, a serious thriller. Strangelove is full of Catch-22 absurdist moments.” Catch-22 (1961) is an absurdist novel by the American author, Joseph Heller (1923-1999).

10. Franz Kafka, The Castle, http://www.24grammata.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/07/frans_kafka_castle-24grammata.com_.pdf

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artwork belongs to. The cardinal value of his book is that it addresses disputable issues of paramount importance to anyone who is involved in the practice of criticism. The book attempts to cast light on the act of criticism, understood as evaluation backed by objective reasons that are provided at least by one of the six critical operations, i.e. description, categorization, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis. He opposes some of the well-trenched tendencies in the philosophy of criticism and presents a challenge to a number of renowned art critics and theoreticians such as Arthur C. Danto. At all costs, his endeavor does not stray into partiality and falsification but remains professional and clear.

References Adamenko, V. (2007). Neo-Mythologism in music: From Scriabin and Schoenberg to

Schnittke and Crumb. Hillsdale: Pendagon.

Carroll, N. (2009). On criticism. Oxon: Routledge.

Danto, A. A. (1981). The transfiguration of the commonplace: A philosophy of art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Danto, A. C. (2008). Ontology, criticism, and the riddle of art versus non-art in the transfiguration of the commonplace. Contemporary Aesthetics, 6.

Geddes, D. (2011). Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. The Satirist.

Gray, R. T. (2005). A Franz Kafka encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Publishing.

Kafka, F. (1926). The castle. Ware: Wordsworth Edition.

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A Short Review of the Introductory Session on "504 Words Quiz"

Kourosh Shahhosseini English Literature, BA, Shahid Beheshti University

A brief introductory session on the recently published Android application developed by Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim, Kourosh Shahhosseini, and Navid Eghbali was held on Tuesday, February 17th at the Faculty of Literature and

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Human Sciences at Shahid Beheshti University. This application, with the complete title of "504 Words Quiz", has been published through cafebazar.com, the main digital distribution platform for Android-based apps in Iran.

The session was hosted by Mehrdad yousefpoori-Naeim and Kourosh Shahhosseini, who were mainly responsible for writing and standardization of the questions in the app. The third member of the group, Navid Eghbali, who was in charge of the design and production of the app, was not present.

The goal of the session was twofold: to introduce the specifications of the app to the audience and to share the developers' experience with the interested individuals who might want to try their hands on similar projects concerning application development in language teaching/testing.

In the first part of the session, Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim first gave a short history of the book 504 Essential Words You Need to Know and mentioned its importance as a source material for many prestigious ESL tests, such as IELTS and TOEFL as well as the vocabulary section of BA and MA entrance exams in Iran. He emphasized the growing role of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) as a useful tool in the world of language learning today. He indicated that at first the team's goal was to publish the questions as a supplementary book to the original 504 words book, but since the idea was put to practice by two lecturers at the University of Tehran almost simultaneously, the

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team decided to publish their work in a different format, as a cell phone/tablet application.

Next, Mr. Shahhosseini explained how the team produced around 1000 questions from the words of the book. He emphasized 'originality' of the sentences and the presence of 'parts of speech' of the words as the highlights of their product. He explained that to guarantee the originality of the sentences and to reduce the bias of Farsi as their native tongue, the writers had used different corpora of the written and spoken English. He also mentioned COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), a unique corpus, which apart from its vast number of recorded text, had given them a chance to choose for the stem of the items not only from the written records of the language but from recorded speeches as well. He emphasized that in order to brighten up the serious topics of the original book, they tried to choose the more interesting sentences and topics which the young audience of the book might find more intriguing.

After writing appropriate stems for each question item and applying the common rules of multiple-choice question making, each question would then be checked, revised, and edited a few times. The team would next move to the parts of speech of each word, a trait that as Mr. Shahhosseini put it, is at times forgotten by the test candidates practicing the new vocabulary. After covering the words and their important parts of speeches, they would move on to the next unit. They also made a review pack for each 6 unit for more general practice. These

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extra questions, they mentioned, are not included in the present version of the app and might be added to the next versions as a purchasable option.

The presenters then gave some advice to the ones in the audience who were interested in making educational apps of their own. Mr. Shahhosseini first compared the process of publishing a work electronically with publishing it as a book. He stated that, based on his own experience, the time spent to see the results is considerably shorter in the case of apps. After mentioning the sad news of the recent drop in the number of copies for recently published books and the surprise the team got after having about 2000 users in less than a week, he suggested that it is possible to reach a wider number of customers in shorter time by publishing electronically, something which is more in accordance with the contemporary needs.

The next hint was having a good idea to make an application stand out in the main stream of similar products. Mr. Shahhosseini emphasized having a simple practical design for the product in which the necessary notifications, such as the notice of buying the full version, are placed where users can easily see them.

The developers did not recommend presenting apps as an adware, since they believe the revenue resulting from ad clicking is too meager to be supportive by any means. They instead suggested presenting a simpler form of the

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application with in-app purchase mechanism, which enables users to buy and download the full version.

In the next part of the session, Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim, using a simulator, gave a demonstration of the application and the features included in it. By starting up the app, the user can choose to take an standard test in a simulated manner using the time limit and negative scores or to produce his/her own randomly generated test by choosing to have a test from specific units. The start screen appears and the test taker will tackle about 25 questions within the time limit. Each question also has its own time limit. Upon exiting a quiz without finishing it, the app will notify the user of all unanswered questions and asks the user whether he/she wants to go back to those questions and finish the quiz or to exit to the average score page.

In the average score page, the score of the user is calculated based on testing standards and is shown through a round chart along with the number of correct and incorrect answers and unanswered questions. The user will next see the questions which he/she has covered and will see the color-coded answers (white, red, and green; unanswered, wrong, and right, respectively).

The user can choose the Statistics option from the main menu to get some helpful stats, including the number of questions answered from the time the application was installed, total time spent on quizzes, the number of right and

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wrong answers, and the units in which he/she has had the best and worst performance.

Another way of approaching the app is to choose the 'Make a Test!' wizard from the main menu. Using this feature, the user can define the difficulty of the test (which will affect the time that is required to answer each question and subsequently the whole test) , the number of questions (from 10 to 100) and the units from which he/she wants the questions to be randomly generated. This is especially useful to help users with the units in which they have had the lowest performance.

At the end of the lecture, the audience asked their questions from the developers. For instance, one of the participants stated that she would like to see the right answer to the questions instantaneously while she is taking the test and does not want to wait until all the questions are covered to see the answers. This, as Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim explained, would jeopardize the authenticity of the program because in the real world candidates will not have access to the answers during the test, and moreover, seeing that he/she has answered a question wrongly, could affect the test taker negatively and result in a poorer performance in the long run. It was finally agreed that making this function optional through the setting of the program might be the best practical and harmless way for the users. A few of the participants said that, instead of seeing the answers one by one at the end of the test, it would be better if the app generated a single sheet at the end of each test, enabling the user to instantly move through the questions which he/she needs to check. Dr. Kian Soheil, the Head of the English Department suggested that the team calculate the predictive power of the application in candidates' performance in the vocabulary section of the popular tests, MA entrance exams. This, the developers answered, would need a few years of careful sampling and analyzing the gathered data from exam papers.

The session ended after an hour around noon.

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A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory

By Jeremy Hawthorn / 416 Pages / Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic / ISBN-10: 0340761954 / ISBN-13: 978-0340761953 / Paperback / Publication Date: September 2001 / Price: $ 31.60

The clean, supple writing style of the glossary highlights the difficulty and contested nature of terms, some of which assiduously elude lexical clarification. It is indeed doubly helpful because it both defines terms and advises on next-step reading. It is really an indispensable book whether you are an undergrad getting your first exposure to theory in a literature course or an initiated grad student who needs clarification on specific points. The entries in the glossary are brief and accessible, but they are also incisive and usually broad enough in scope. (Source: Amazon.com)

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Fifty Key Literary Theorists

By Richard J. Lane / 272 Pages / Publisher: Routledge / ISBN-10: 0415338484 / ISBN-13: 978-0415338486 / Paperback / Publication Date: August 2006 / Price: $ 17.22

Covering over a century's worth of debate, thinking and writing about literature, this is a unique guide to the lives and works of fifty theorists who have left an indelible mark on literary studies. Featuring theorists such as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Edward Said, this accessible guide includes a glossary of terms, full cross-referencing for maximum ease of use and authoritative guides to further reading on and by each theorist. An essential resource for all students of literature, Fifty Key Literary Theorists explores the gamut of critical debate, from the New Critics to the deconstructionists, and from post-colonialism to post-Marxism and more. (Source: Amazon.com)

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Key Concepts in Literary Theory

By Julian Wolfrey, Ruth Robbins and Kenneth Womack / 208 Pages / Publisher: Edinburgh University Press / ISBN-10: 0748624589 / ISBN-13: 978-0748624584 / Hardcover / Publication Date: October, 2001 / Price: $ 22.02

Key Concepts in Literary Theory presents the student of literary and critical studies with a broad range of accessible, precise and authoritative definitions of the most significant terms and concepts currently used in psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial literary studies. The volume also provides clear and useful discussions of the main areas of literary, critical and cultural theory, supported by bibliographies and an expanded chronology of major thinkers. Accompanying the chronology are short biographies of major works by each critic or theorist, the new edition of this reliable reference work is both revised and expanded. Newly defined terms include keywords from the social sciences, cultural studies and psychoanalysis and the addition of a broader selection of classical rhetorical terms. (Source: Amazon.com)

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Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action (Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics)

By Caroline Tagg (Author) / 290 pages / Publisher: Routledge / ISBN-10: 0415524938 / ISBN-13: 978-0415524933 / Paperback / Publication Date: March 6, 2015 / Price: $ 42.70 The books take an innovative 'practice to theory' approach, with a 'back-to-front' structure. This leads the reader from real-world problems and issues, through a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns, before finally relating these practical issues to theoretical foundations. Exploring Digital Communication aims to discuss real world issues pertaining to digital communication, and to explore how linguistic research addresses these challenges. The text is divided into three sections (Problems and practices; Interventions; and Theory), each of which is further divided into three subsections which reflect linguistic issues relating to digital communication. The author seeks to demystify any perceived divide between online and offline communication, arguing that issues raised in relation to digital communication throw light on language use and practices in general, and thus linguistic interventions in this area have implications not only for users of digital communication but for linguists’ general understanding of language and society. Including relevant research examples, tasks, along with a task commentary, a glossary and annotated further reading suggestions, this textbook is an invaluable resource for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students taking language and new media, and language and communication studies modules within Applied Linguistics and English language courses. (Source: amazon.com)

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Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing: Principles and Techniques (ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series)

By Eli Hinkel (Author) / 256 pages / Publisher: Routledge / ISBN-10: 0415889995 / ISBN-13: 978-0415889995 / Paperback / Publication Date: March 5, 2015 / Price: $ 45.55 Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing sets out a clear big picture for curricular thinking about L2 writing pedagogy and offers a step-by-step guide to curriculum design with practical examples and illustrations. Its main purpose is to help pre-service and practicing teachers design courses for teaching academic writing and to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible. Bringing together the what and the how-to with research-based principles, what sets this book apart is its overarching focus on language pedagogy and language building. Part 1 examines curricular foundations in general and focuses on what is socially valued in L2 writing and pedagogy at school and at the college and university level. Part 2 is concerned with the nitty-gritty—the daily realities of curricular design and classroom instruction. Part 3 takes a close look at the key pedagogical ingredients of teaching academic L2 writing: vocabulary and collocations, grammar for academic writing, and down-to-earth techniques for helping L2 writers to organize discourse and ideas. The Appendix provides an extensive checklist for developing curricula for a course or several courses in language teaching. (Source: amazon.com)

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Comparing Teachers' Views on Grammar with Those of Their Students

By Mehrdad Yousefpoori-Naeim (Author) / 96 pages / Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing / ISBN-10: 3659641391 / ISBN-13: 978-3659641398 / Paperback / Publication Date: December 2, 2014 / Price: $ 61.00 There has always been a great deal of controversy over grammar and error correction in language teaching. Furthermore, teachers and students, coming from two separate populations, might have their own specific views on these controversial issues, which makes the need for various investigations in this regard even more evident. The present book has been written on the basis of the results of a survey study that compared teachers' views on the role of grammar and error correction with those of their students. (Source: amazon.com)

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Persian Abstracts

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»پادشاه و کنيزک«ان خوانش گريماسی از شعر مولانا با عنو

مسعود فروهر کلخوران

کارشناس ارشد زبان و ادبيات انگليسی، داشگاه شهيد بهشتی

چکيده مقاله پيش رو، خوانش گريماسی را از يکی از اشعار معروف مولانا، شاعر به نام ادب فارسی انجام

اکتور های سوزه، اوبزه، ياری خوانش ابتدا به جنبه های تحليلی مدل گريماس می پردازد و ف. می دهدبر اساس خوانش تحليلی . رسان، فرستنده، گيرنده و مدافع را به عنوان عوامل کنشگر معرفی می نمايد

اين برداشت نشان می دهد که تا چه . انجام شده، مقاله حاضر، برداشت هرمنوتيکی خود را بيان می دارددر . و سوی ساختارگرايانه به خود گرفته استحد، مدل گريماس از مدل پراپ متفاوت است و سمت

طی مقاله، از گراف ها و اشکالی استفاده می شود تا با کمک آنها بتوان ساختار پيچيده مدل گريماس را . بهتر در عمل نشان داد

گريماس، رومی، مثنوی، کنش گر، فرستنده، گيرنده، مدافع، ياری رسان، سوزه، اوبزه: کلمات کليدی

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مروری بر مفاهيم کلمه، تصوير و اقتباس سينمايی در سينما و ادبيات

فرگل پرهيزگار

کارشناس ارشد ادبيات انگليسی، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی

چکيده

بعد از ارائه تاريخچه . در مطالعه پيش رو، ارتباط ادبيات و موارد اقتباس شده سينمايی مرور می گرددمطالعه حاضر . تحولات سينمايی، تاثرات سينما و ادبيات بر يکديگر بررسی می گردد ای کوتاه درباره

تحولات تاريخی در تکنيک های سينمايی را به عنوان نشانه هايی در نظر می گيرد که بوسيله آن به منظور حمايت از فرضيه ها، تحقيق حاضر . ساختارهای استدلالی در سينما و ادبيات ايجاد شده اند

صاحب نظران به نامی بهره جسته است تا با استفاده تاريخی و فرهنگی از آنها بتواند رابطه قريب از .را نشان دهدبين ادبيات و سينما

اقتباس سينمايی، فيلم، سينما، رمان، ميان نوشته: کلمات کليدی

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اشارات حل نشده يک گمشده: غزليات مقدس و آهنگ های جان دان

نیمحس حسين

بهشتی شهيد دانشگاه انگليسی، ادبيات ارشد کارشناس

چکيده

غزليات مقدس و آهنگ های جان دان به عنوان موقعيت های فرهنگی شناخته شده اند که در آنها می چه ─ توان سرپيچی های عمده ای را از سنت مشاهده نمود و از اين رو، خوانش های نظری متفاوتی

در مقاله پيش رو، برخی از سنت شکنی های دان . آنها صورت گرفته است از ─مدرن و چه پسا مدرن در اين راستا، چند گانگی های احساسی غزليات مورد بررسی قرار می . مورد بررسی قرار می گيرد

چنين ديدگاه چند جانبه ای . گيرد و ديدگاه چند جانبه دان در قبال عشق دنيايی و خدايی مشخص می گرددبه طور کلی استعمال ملاک های . دنيايی و خدايی را بسيار کمرنگ جلوه می دهد مرز ميان عشق

عقلانی انتزاعی در خوانش اين مقاله به عنوان مفهومی شناخته می شود که نمی تواند پارادوکس های . غزليات و ذات چندگانه آنها را نشان دهد

ارکغزليات مقدس، دان، پارادوکس، سبک پتر :کلمات کليدی

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های گفتاری مستقيم وغيرمستقيم درمحتوای مجموعه ارزيابی کنش American Headwayهای کتاب

رضا جلالی

شهيد بهشتی کارشناس ارشد آموزش زبان انگليسی، دانشگاه

چکيده. پرداخت Headwayهای های گفتاری مستقيم وغيرمستقيم درمجموعه کتاباين مقاله به بررسی کنش

های گفتاری بردن به ارزش محتوايی اين مجموعه از منظر گفتارشناسی، انواع کنشقق برای پی محتمرينات . کتابِ کاروکتاب دانش آموز را بررسی کرد، مکالمه، گفت و گو ومصاحبه موجود در تمريناتِ

غيرمستقيم های گفتاری يافت شده به دوگروه اصلی مستقيم وکتاب بادقت بالايی موشکافی شدند و کنشنتايج به .های تصريحی، ترغيبی، عاطفی، تعهدی، و اعلامی می باشدتقسيم شدند که شامل زيرمجموعه

ها، نه تنها های اصلی و زيرمجموعهدست آمده ازاين تحقيق نشان داد که فراوانی وپراکندگی مجموعهنيزهماهنگ و وابسته به ی خاصهای مختلف اين مجموعه، بلکه درکتب مربوط به يک ردهبندیدررده

برابر سه های گفتاری مستقيمبراساس داده جمع آوری شده دراين تحقيق، تعدادِ کنش. يکديگرنيستترين علاوه براين کنش گفتاری عاطفی بيشترين و کنش اعلامی پايين. های گفتاری غيرمستقيم بود کنش

-ازفراوانی بالا وروند صعودی درزمينه American Headwayبا اينکه کتابهای . فراوانی را دارا بودهای گفتاری برخوردار است، نميتوان اين مجموعه رابه عنوان مکملی برای ارتقای سطح توانش ی کنش

.ارتباطی زبان آموزان درنظرگرفت

، کنش گفتاری مستقيم، کنش گفتاری غيرمستقيم، ارزيابی Headwayهای مجموعه کتاب :کلمات کليدی بمحتوای کتا

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های امتحان اهميت دانش واژگانی در کلاسهای آمادگی خواندن متن آيلتس

نوشين لقمانی خوزانی

شهيد بهشتی کارشناس ارشد آموزش زبان انگليسی، دانشگاه

چکيدهاين تحقيق جهت بررسی نسبت لغات تخصصی به لغات عمومی در متن هان خواندن امتحان آيلتس انجام

ت کتاب آماده سازی داوطلبان شرکت در آزمون آيلتس مورد بررسی، تجزيه و تحليل قرار هف. شده استنسبت لغات تخصصی به کل متن، حوزه های مشترک در متن های آکادميک و درصد لغات . گرفت

نتايج حاکی از آن است که به طور کلی نسبت لغات . تخصصی مربوط به هر حوزه مشخص شدبل توجه بوده و تمرکز اصلی متون بر روی موضوعاتی در ارتباط با محيط تخصصی به کل متن غير قا

بنابرين، اين تحقيق حاکی از آن است که بهتر است در کلاسهای آمادگی برای امتحان . زيست بوده استآيلتس، توجه و زمان کمتری به تدريس لغات تخصصی داده شود و کلمات عمومی و علاوه بر آن ليست

.مورد توجه قرار گيردلغات آکادميک

لغات تخصصی ،دانش واژگانی ،آموزش لغات ،درک مفهوم، خواندن ،آيلتس، واژگان :کلمات کليدی

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پربسامدترين هزار کلمه زبان انگليسی در ميان کتابهای سطح مبتدی

آموزش زبان انگليسی

رامين احمدی

بهشتیشهيد کارشناس ارشد آموزش زبان انگليسی، دانشگاه

چکيده

تحقيق حاضر به بررسی ميزان کاربرد اولين هزار کلمه پربسامد زبان انگليسی در ليست . در سطح مبتدی کتابهای آموزش زبان انگليسی پرداخته است) ١٩۵٣( Westسرويس عمومی

از انتشارات آکسفورد مناسب برای انگليش تايمکتاب های استفاده شده در اين تحقيق عبارتند ازاز انتشارات پيرسون تاپ ناچ از انتشارات کمبريج مناسب برای نوجوانان، کانکتدکان،کو

از انتشارات آکسفورد مناسب برای امريکن انگليش فايل لانگمن مناسب برای بزرگسالان،از فميلی اند فرندز از انتشارات آکسفورد مناسب برای بزرگسالان،امريکن هدوی بزرگسالان،

انتشارات کمبريج مناسب برای اينترچنج ويرايش سوم مناسب برای کودکان، انتشارات آکسفورداز تاچ استون انتشارات آکسفورد مناسب برای بزرگسالان، و انگليش ريزالت بزرگسالان،

نتايج تحقيق نشان داد که در کتاب های کودکان . انتشارات کمبريج مناسب برای بزرگسالاندر کتاب کانکت . س عمومی مورد استفاده قرار گرفته انددرصد لغات ليست سروي ٨٫٧حداقل

. درصد از لغات ليست سرويس عمومی کاربرد داشتند ٣٩که برای نوجوانان طراحی شده بود درصد از کلمات ليست سرويس ۴٣همچنين در تمام کتاب های مخصوص بزرگسالان حداقل

د کلمات ليست سرويس عمومی در هر البته تعداد کل کلمات و تعدا. عمومی پوشش داده شده اندبه عنوان مثال، کتاب های طراحی شده برای بزرگسالان و نوجوانان . کتاب متفاوت بوده است

نتايج تحقيق نکاتی را . تعداد کلمات بيشتری نسبت به کتابهای طراحی شده برای کودکان داشتند .رندبرای نويسندگان مطالب و کاربران کتابهای آموزشی به همراه دا

کتاب آموزشی، مبتدی، ليست سرويس عمومی، تعداد کلمات، درصد کلمات :کلمات کليدی

Threshold

207

مطالب فارسی فهرست سخن سردبير

ادبيات انگليسی

حسين محسنی/ لوهان هربرت مارشال مک :پرونده

مسعود فروهر کلخوران/ " پادشاه و کنيزک"خوانش گريماسی از شعر مولانا با عنوان -

فرگل پرهيزگار/ ری بر مفاهيم کلمه، تصوير و اقتباس سينمايی در سينما و ادبيات مرو -

حسين محسنی/ اشارات حل نشده يک گمشده : غزليات مقدس و آهنگ های جان دان -

آموزش زبان انگليسی

مريم عباسی/ لائرنس جون ژانگ: پرونده

رضا جلالی/ American Headwayهای ی مجموعه کتابهای گفتاری مستقيم وغيرمستقيم درمحتواارزيابی کنش -

نوشين لقمانی خوزانی/ های امتحان آيلتس اهميت دانش واژگانی در کلاسهای آمادگی خواندن متن -

رامين احمدی/ پربسامدترين هزار کلمه زبان انگليسی در ميان کتابهای سطح مبتدی آموزش زبان انگليسی -

کنکاش

مهرداد يوسفپوری نعيم/ حسنی. ااعطمصاحبه با دکتر

ارتش حروف

عليرضا جعفری/ دو شعر معروف فارسی: ترجمه مژگان سلمانی/ راهی به سوی پيراستن جان از اين آلودگيها: ترجمه الناز شمالی/ غراب: ترجمه

مسعود فروهر کلخوران/ ارب: شعر صالح طباطبايی/ شعر مترو: شعر

محمد اقبالی/ جلسۀ سری در انباری مغز من: داستان کوتاه حنانه ديوان بيگی/ عصر يخی: داستان کوتاه

2, Number 8Volume

208

چالش ترجمه

محتشم کاشانی: پرونده

ناهيد جمشيدی راد/ حسين محسنی/

نسرين بدرود/ بعد ۀشمار چالش ترجمۀ

و نظرگاهنگاه

الدين عليزاده غياث/ اثر پيتر شافر ايکووسورابری در نمايشنامۀ : نمايشنامه -

آرش رحمانی/ ارزش هنر :هنر -

ناهيد جمشيدی راد/ تهران در مردی برای تمام فصول اجرای بر مروری: نمايشنامه -

حسين محسنی/ نندهاز ديدگاه نظريۀ واکنش خوا» عربی«خوانش داستان کوتاه : داستان کوتاه -

صالح طباطبايی/ نوئل کارول دربارۀ نقدمروری بر کتاب : کتاب -

کوروش شاه حسينی/ نوئل کارول دربارۀ نقدمروری بر کتاب : سمينار -

قفسه کتاب

مقالات چکيده فارسی

گروه زبان و ادبيات انگليسی دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی صاحب امتياز

دکتر ساسان بالغی زاده لمدير مسئو

)موزش زبان انگليسیآدانشجوی دکتری (مهرداد يوسفپوری نعيم سردبير

)کارشناس ارشد آموزش زبان انگليسی(مريم عباسی : آموزش زبان انگليسی هيات تحريريه

) کارشناس ارشد ادبيات انگليسی( حسين محسنی: ادبيات انگليسی

AA Brothers Studio طراحی جلد

مريم مرندی سايت طراحی

صادق حيدربکيان با سپاس ويژه از

همکاران اين شماره مسعود فروهر کلخوران کوروش شاه حسينی رضا جلالی احمدی رامين

نینوشين لقمانی خوزا الناز شمالی ناهيد جمشيدی راد محمد اقبالی حسين محسنی صالح طباطبايی حنانه ديوان بيگی نسرين بدرود

مهرداد يوسفپوری نعيم مريم عباسی آرش رحمانی فرگل پرهيزگار الدين عليزاده غياث مژگان سلمانی عليرضا جعفری

هيات مشاور

دکتر جلال سخنور، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی شهيد بهشتیدکتر سيد ابوالقاسم فاطمی جهرمی، دانشگاه

دکتر کيان سهيل، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی ، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتیهروی دکتر شيده احمدزاده

دکتر اميرعلی نجوميان، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی دکتر محمدرضا عنانی سراب، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی

دکتر سارا کاترين ايلخانی، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی یدکتر عليرضا جعفری، دانشگاه شهيد بهشت

دکتر شهريار منصوری، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی علوم قرآن و حديثدکتر سوفيا کوتلاکی، دانشگاه

دکتر بهروز محمودی بختياری، دانشگاه تهران دکتر حسين ملانظر، دانشگاه علامه طباطبايی

انتشارات دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی چاپ

ونت امور دانشجويی و فرهنگیتحت حمايت معا -انجمن علمی گروه زبان و ادبيات انگليسی نمايه شده در پايگاه مجلات تخصصی نورمگز

تومان ٣٠٠٠ قيمت

تهران، اوين، دانشگاه شهيد بهشتی، دانشکده ادبيات و علوم انسانی، گروه زبان و ادبيات انگليسی: نشانی مجله threshold@mail.sbu.ac.ir: ايميل ٠٢١ -٢٩٩٠٢۴٨۶: تلفن