Louis Althusser asserts that three elements are needed for interpreting a literary text. These three factors are problematic, overdetermination and symptomatic reading. Problematic refers to the system of thought that a writer develops. This system is developed during his lifetime. Overdetermination refers to this fact that every social phenomenon is a product of superstructure. Althusser believes that in every society base creates a superstructure and this superstructure has multiple levels namely, politics, culture, and social relations that affect each other as well as the base. These levels are politics, culture, and social relations. And finally symptomatic reading of a text elaborates on divulging the contradictory ideologies in a text. According to Althusser, a literary text is the product of the interplay of different levels of superstructure. Therefore, it presents the hidden ideologies of a society. Thus, to understand the problematic of a writer, it is necessary to study his or her biography must be studied. The historical, political, social and cultural context of a literary work must be studied in order to designate the overdetermination. And finally the symptomatic reading of a literary text reveals its hidden ideologies. Accordingly, this thesis intends to study Ahmad Mahmud’s Hamsayeha Ahmad Mahmud and Gorky’s Mother in order to discuss that Mahmud was a social realist vis-à-vis Gorky was a Socialist Realist. This study explores the two writers’ life and their context and claims that Mahmud had a better understanding of his society. He truly depicted the tragic life of lower classes of the society. Whereas, Gorky tried to propagate Socialism and encourage the readers toward revolution.

Abstract:
The claim of this thesis is an Althusserian reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. To this purpose, some concepts were derived from some of Althusser’s books including Reading Capital, For Marx, and Lenin and his Philosophy and others. It is obvious that the adoption of different concepts or literary instruments to analyze a literary work, brings about a different understanding of that work. However what is important is the fact that the instruments used should lend themselves well to the object they are applied to. In this study, the importance of production and reproduction as essential parts of a structured social formation is stressed and their role in the constitution of the subjectivity of individuals is stressed. The difference between individual needs and structural needs is clearly marked out and its philosophical and practical consequences are expounded. Infrastructure and superstructure, inclusion and exclusion, adequacy and inadequacy, dispensability and indispensability, and ideological and non-ideological are among some other conceptual pairs which were adopted to trace the events of the play and the development of its action. What we hope to have achieved is a new born experience of reading by using some Althusserian concepts which may be applicable in other social, philosophical, epistemological and literary readings.
 

The present study intends to investigate the post postmodern syndrome in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, using theories proposed by Raoul Eshelman and Nicoline Timmer in order to see the extent Life of Pi conforms to the views of metamodern theoreticians. Adopting a narrative psychology approach, this study seeks to show that the narrative structure of Life of Pi is based on self-construction rather than deconstruction. According to Timmer, characters in post postmodern novels experience difficulty in making decision, appropriating feelings and expressing feelings and sentiment. This thesis applies these characteristics to Pi, the protagonist of the post postmodern novel Life of Pi. Having elaborated on narrative psychology approach of Timmer, the research moves on to apply Eshelman’s theory of performatism i.e. the double frame and the twenty first century monism on Martel’s Life of Pi and compare it to the open narrative structure and the concept of pluralism of twentieth century postmodernism. In Eshelman’s theory, Performatist works are set up in such a way that the reader or viewer has no choice but to opt for a single, compulsory solution to the problems raised within the work at hand. Life of Pi is a prime example of performatism which is being discussed in this research. The study will end up with the outcome that a new sensibility in literature has been instigated which diverges from previous ages and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi belongs to this new era which no longer can be called postmodern.

The purpose of this research is to have astudy comparative study ofely two works from different cultures, the Persian work Shuhar-i Ahu Khanum and the English one The Mayor of Casterbridge. This study elaborates on the main ideological structures which have created these works in terms of some discoursesthe key issues like rights and position of women and that those of value judgements. This is an age when the dominant ideology is transforming the identity of a society and culture influenced by modernism. The literary critical approachcriticism approach used in this study is new historicism. In terms of this approach, these two masterpieces are not merely literary works written by individual authors, but pieces of texts like the other socio-cultural, political and historical textual records and productions. The relationship of these works with the other literary and non-literary productions of the time when these works are created, is given importance. These works, each one in its own historical span, is either produced or a product of the culture it originates from. This study, new historically, compares and figures out how Shuhar-i Ahu Khanum and The Mayor of Casterbridge play their roles as the participant phenomena referring to the main discourses of the time which lead to identity crisis in specific times. This study, also, shows that two literary works, different in authors and in places they come from but similar in their cultural contexts, can play roles somehow similar in formation of a critical culture. Thus, both works criticize the concept of change in terms of women’s position and rights and clash of values in order to show that they are parts of a dominant culture created by various discourses which have led to creations of such works, as well.

The purpose of this thesis is to do a comparative study of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Farhad Jafari’s Cafe Piano, using Greimas’s semiotic square and his actantial model. Greimas proposes his semiotic square based on Claude Levi-Strauss’s model of studying myths in which he claims the structure underlying every myth to be a four-term homology that correlates one pair as opposed to another pair. Likewise, Greimas’s semiotic square is based on the notion of binary oppositions, with their negations also taken into account in the process of meaning-making. Greimas’s actantial model is also another tool used in this thesis so as to make possible the comparison of the two works’ relationships between actants and their respective oppositions and contradictions. For the sake of interpretation, these relations are studied in the light of Michel Foucault’s notion of subjection to different discourses of the society and Pierre Macherey’s symptomatic reading of literary works that emphasizes the contradictions inherent in ideology that are manifested in a literary work. In the thesis, general postulations about the total meaning of the novels are brought on the semiotic square and the relationships that follow the novels’ thematic movements are studied so that the points of contradiction between what seems to be their initial promises and the social and cultural restraining elements that are at stake when they enter the literary form as a process of meaning-making are brought into light. The significance of this study is that it shows the extent to which two texts, though distant in time and space, are different treatments of similar subject matters and follow similar patterns.

This thesis is an attempt to study Judith Butler's performativity, and Althusser's interpellation to carry out a comparative feminist study of Zoya Pirzad’s Cheraghha ra man khamush mikonam and Alba de Cespedes’ The Secret Diary. According to Butler’s performative view of identity, gender identity is not natural, but is realized through the repetitious acts of the subject. Althusser uses the term interpellation to describe the 'hailing' of a person into her or his social and ideological position by an authority figure. Bringing together Butler’s performative view of identity and Althusser’s view of interpellation of the subject, this thesis studies the performative gender roles of the main female characters, Clarisse and Valeria, to see how they are discursively formed by the interpellation of others within the novels they appear. Methodologically, scenes where there is an interaction in the form of conversation between Clarisse and other characters, and between Valeria and other characters, or the monologues of the protagonists are chosen, analyzed and compared. The similarities and differences between the female characters, Valeria and Clarisse with regard to the applied performativity and interpellation were highlighted and analyzed in seven different parts as Refusing categorization , Performative gender, A name and different layers of nicknames, Lack of strong identity, Isolation, Performativity in the form of fear of loss, and Performativity handling. It is argued that in all parts the act of performativity and interpellation have had the same results on the protagonists except the way they handle their own identities at the end of the stories

This thesis has two broad purposes: first, to investigate the relationship between rhetorical narrative theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism; second, to apply rhetorical narratology for the study of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003). To this end, a brief review of the history of narratology from its birth in the narrative poetics of Russian formalism to the heyday of French structuralism is provided. This phase is often labelled as classical narratology, and is contrasted with postclassical narratology. While classical narratologists attempted to find a universal grammar under which one could presumably subsume all narratives, postclassical narratologists resist any centripetal approaches and are open to various centrifugal influences, including, cognitive sciences, media studies, postcolonialism, feminism, rhetoric, and narrative ethics. Among the many offshoots of postclassical narratology, rhetorical narratology has been adopted as the most applicable approach with regard to The Kite Runner because of the significance of ethical issues both in rhetorical narratology and the novel. Rhetorical narratology conceives of narrative as a communicative act involving ethical implications. Rhetorical narratology as delineated by James Phelan can be divided into (1) ethics of the told, (2) ethics of telling, (3) ethics of production, and (4) ethics of reception. This thesis studies only the first two. Here, ethics is conceived as meta-ethics, that is, the ethics of otherness. However, since ethics is a much controversial term, I borrow Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism as to refer not only to the formal heteroglossia of the novel, but also to the dialogic relationship between self and other. Thus, dialogism is reinterpreted as a philosophy whereby existence is always preceded by the other. The ethical implication of such a philosophy is to underscore the priority of active response to other in ethical encounters. Integrating rhetorical narratology and dialogism, I then turn to a detailed analysis of ethics of the told and the telling in The Kite Runner. Ethics of the told, or the representational level, refers to the character-character relations and is analyzable through the narrative progression of the text. Ethics of the telling, or the narrational level, refers to the narrator-character relations, and is analyzable through the speech representation of the text. In the end, it is argued that while the representational level of The Kite Runner underscores responsibility for the other, thus dialogic approach to the other, its speech representation suppresses the voice of the other, thus monologic approach to the other. This conflict is considered as the main theme of the novel.

This study deals with the negative effect of reading literature in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Jim is inspired by some works of literature which are enchanting and didactic, but these literary works can delude the readers and entice them to try the fictional event of the narrative in their real lives. Startlingly, presenting the fiction into reality may trigger a disastrous impact upon its readers. The victim of literature which this thesis tries to illustrate is Jim. Jim is a young man and he makes an irrevocable decision to become a hero and embody the values of heroic deeds in real situations like the way he reads them in literature. Unaware of the practicality of these notions in literature, Jim propels himself to reverse fiction and change it to reality. This study is an attempt to prove that literature has a negative effect on Jim by applying Reader-Response approach.

This research intends to study the concept of Theodor Adorno’s culture industry in three pre-revolutionary Persian novels, namely Love’s Sad Shoes written by R. Etemadi, Ziba by M. Hejazi and The Story of Javid by E. Fasih. “Adorno is a great German scholar after the Second World War who is famous for his bitter criticism of modern society. I argue that the products of Culture Industry have similar subject and structure patterns: First, they are escapist in that the reader does not need to make any real effort to get the main idea. Second, they embody sentimental subjects, love, adventure and the like. Third, they are predictable. The reader can easily predict what is going to happen throughout the work, among other patterns.