پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان(پژوهش زبان های خارجی)

This article examines heterotopia as a multimodal frontier in Samuel Beckett’s play That Time (1976), defining the concept through a Foucauldian lens. The article investigates the text of the play as a critical site that accommodates internal and external modes of spatial criticism, introducing mnemonic and external heterotopic sites, respectively. The play transforms into a critical locus that enables the artist to reconfigure spatiality and temporal locationality of certain places in Ireland by revisiting them through three fragmented voices. The article argues that the play not only disrupts conventional modes of storytelling set against a backdrop of descriptively relatable places but also challenges the audiences’ relationship with how memorialized times and spaces can reshape the historicity of lived experiences. The reshaped place is neither pure fabrication nor a byproduct of real-time simulation, but a product of conscious re-imagination cast across space-time continuum. As such, time is stretched across spatial continuum as much as one's memory deems necessary. The synchronic entanglement of memory and temporality transforms That Time into a site of epistemic inquiry, and changes the conventions of temporal progression. The play, the article concludes, expands spatial and temporal horizons simultaneously by considering episodic memories as well as visceral experiences.

The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon explores the intersections of resistance, memory, and mortality in post-invasion Iraq from the perspective of Jawad, an artist who has become a corpse washer. In contrast to prior research that has examined the novel through trauma theory, existentialism, and postcolonial critique, this paper introduces necropoetics, a theoretical framework that connects Achille Mbembe's necropolitics (the power to orchestrate death) with literary aesthetics, to investigate how Antoon stylizes death as both a political act and a narrative story. The novel transforms Jawad’s grim vocation into a site of artistic defiance against the erasure of Iraqi lives by emphasizing the ritualized labor of washing corpses. This study contends that necropoetics, as a lens, demonstrates how Antoon’s prose resists the commodification of war trauma, instead portraying death as a subversive, intimate practice that challenges state-sanctioned violence and historical amnesia. The Corpse Washer is not merely a chronicle of loss; it is also a literary act of preservation and dissent, as a result of this approach.

Challenging the postcolonial studies focus on trauma, memory, and identity, this study instead draws on the concept of alienation in Marxist theory to analyze the ideological transformations of four representative soldiers in Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name (1995) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015). This paper examines the different forms of alienation experienced by selected soldiers within the context of North Vietnamese society and its military system. It aims to analyze how these experiences of alienation influence their decisions and actions, and how the soldiers respond to the oppression that caused the alienation. Using a structural analogy method, the paper applies Marx’s four aspects of alienation—the product of labor, the process of labor, others, and self—within the socio-political context during the Vietnam War and its aftermath. This study finds that those loyal, patriotic, and innocent Vietnamese soldiers, driven by a sincere desire to rebuild their state, were exploited by the political ambitions of Viet Cong leaders and shaped by the long-term indoctrination of Vietnamese communist ideology, which led to their gradual alienation from their ideology. By highlighting ideological alienation rather than trauma or memory, this research offers a new critical lens on communist military narratives and expands Marxist literary criticism within postcolonial studies.

This article examines how the narrative disruptions characteristic of literary Modernism—fragmentation, non-linear storytelling, and unreliable narration—are reinterpreted and extended through contemporary cinematic adaptations of literary texts. Drawing on canonical Modernist techniques, the study explores their resonance in films such as TThe Great Gatsby (2013), The Hours (2002), and Atonement (2007), which adapt both Modernist and non-Modernist literary works. It argues that these films mirror the Modernist rejection of linear coherence by employing fragmented, multi-perspective storytelling to address contemporary cultural concerns. The article situates these disruptions within the theoretical frameworks of Modernist literary innovation and media theory, highlighting parallels between early 20th-century narrative experimentation and present-day cinematic storytelling. These case studies illustrate the evolving forms of narrative subjectivity and temporality, reimagining Modernist themes of time, memory, and identity through cinematic techniques like rapid montages, anachronistic soundscapes, and subjective voiceovers. By demonstrating that Modernist narrative techniques remain relevant in contemporary film, this study calls for an expanded Modernist canon that includes cinematic adaptations, underscoring the enduring impact of Modernist aesthetics on contemporary culture.

This essay revisits Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman through the prism of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, only to fracture the coherence of that figure within the colonial encounter. Elesin Oba’s suspended subjectivity is not a metaphysical lapse or a tragic misreading between cultural grammars; it is a colonial deformation of ritual legibility, where the sacred and the abject no longer oppose but cohabit. The British interruption of Yoruba ritual suicide enacts more than cultural interference: it inaugurates a “state of exception” in which the suspension of indigenous law reasserts imperial sovereignty. Yet Soyinka’s dramaturgy exceeds Agamben’s juridico-political logic. Elesin is not merely abandoned by law but saturated by competing orders of ritual cosmology and colonial biopolitics that overdetermine his body. His death, once a consecrated passage, becomes a foreclosure of sacrifice itself as a recognizable form. In staging this impasse, Soyinka does not illustrate Agamben’s paradigm; he displaces it. What emerges is a sacrificial subject fractured between ritual investiture and colonial apprehension, whose interrupted body is left neither sanctified nor redeemed, but suspended in the epistemic violence of imperial modernity.

This study examines Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) as a speculative representation of colonialism and resistance. The novella portrays a brutal encounter between Terran colonizers and the indigenous Athsheans, where colonialist exploitation threatens their identity, culture, and peaceful nature. Although existing scholarship on Le Guin’s work has explored ecological and feminist dimensions, this paper fills a gap in knowledge by examining other aspects, namely, colonial violence, dehumanization, and the process of decolonization. Through thematic and close textual analysis and drawing on the decolonial thought of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, the postcolonial critique of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and Amílcar Cabral’s modes of resistance, this paper reflects on the traditional colonial dynamics to subvert its claim of progress and expose it as an enduring system of exploitation. It further examines resistance as a multi-layered phenomenon that both challenges and replicates colonial power dynamics. While portraying how hybrid identity enables new forms of agency within the process of decolonization, this paper contends that colonial domination goes beyond physical violence and oppression to encompass epistemic violence, cultural transformation, and deformed identity. Ultimately, it underscores the continuing relevance of Le Guin’s novella in critiquing imperial legacies through its imaginative futuristic context that transcends traditional colonial structures.

This paper establishes Twitter literature as a born-digital literary genre shaped by the dialectical nature of cyberspace and its constraints and affordances, including enforced brevity, threading modularity, and algorithmic virality. It addresses the gap in studies on electronic literature and digital humanities, traditionally pivoted on studies of hypertext fiction, while pushing the literary potentials of microblogging to the margin. Synthesizing Hayles’s media-specific analysis, Levine’s genre theory, and other ideas on the dynamics of cyberspace, it argues that the constraints of Twitter do not overshadow creative forms of cultural critique, but, on the contrary, they create a space of tension between democratization and hierarchy. This paper contends that the constraints potentially democratize the production of literature through a highly social space of engagement and participation, yet the algorithmic systems usually preserve the hierarchies and attenuate the democratic potential. Through a genealogical analysis, the literary possibilities behind Twitter literature and its evolution are traced to pre-digital fragments, digital precursors, and key movements on Twitter. Analyses of two examples, including Jennifer Egan's Black Box and Teju Cole’s Small Fates, demonstrate how constraints foster aphoristic density, nonlinear narratives, and participatory meaning-making within the contested space. The paper promotes digital humanities by redefining twenty-first-century literariness and placing cyberspace as a potential zone for genre formation.

This essay undertakes a comparative study of metaphorical imagination in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Sohrab Sepehri, not to flatten their poetics into a single cognitive frame but to ask how differently embodied minds, inflected by culture, geography, and cosmology, render abstraction sensuous. Refusing the tidy predictability often associated with conceptual metaphor theory, the study reworks its premises through the friction of image schema theory, affective cognition, and the irreducibility of cultural embodiment. Metaphors here are not ornaments or mere vehicles of thought: they are perceptual infrastructures, felt vectors, spiritual gestures. In Whitman, metaphor dilates space and amplifies energy, crafting a porous, vibrating body politic immersed in the democratic weather of the cosmos. In Sepehri, the metaphoric pulse slows, roots downward, dissolves into vegetal time and translucent perception, a mysticism attuned not to ascension but to erosion, to the grain of sand and the drop of water. Each poet’s figurative lexicon stages a different negotiation between self and world, body and spirit, opacity and clarity. Reading across these metaphorical archives, the study advances no universal theory but a comparative poetics of situated cognition, one attentive to how language thinks through the body, feels through the environment, and believes through its figures.