Laleh Atashi

As a prominent figure in the history of painting, Pablo Picasso has bestowed upon the world his uniquely striking paintings in different styles, the most revolutionary of which being his Cubist art. The representation of women occupies a significant space in Picasso’s Cubist works. While the painter’s style is highly revolutionary, rejecting the accepted principles of painting, the subject matter does not change as such: nude women are objectified with a cubist look. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity which examines the roots of naturalized concepts of gender, has been applied to Picasso’s representations of women in his cubist paintings. This research examines the way naturalized definitions of gender have found their way into Picasso’s paintings. By applying the Butlerian concept of gender performativity to a number of Picasso’s cubist artworks, we try to indicate how stereotypes of gender linger in the discourse of modernism. Analyses lead to the conclusion that alth...

Given the fact that girlhood is a new area of investigation which intriguingly demonstrates various ways through which girlhood is structured by different social and cultural codes, the authors intended to examine girl characters in The Red Queen collection as it was the New York Times Best Selling series. This investigation revealed the ways cultural and social norms prescribe specific gender roles and shape different versions of girl characters in this series. To find girl stereotypes in the collection, such girlhood theories as Girl Power, Reviving Ophelia, #LIKEAGIRL, Girl Effect and Girl Up had been taken into consideration. Various depictions of girlhood are represented through characters who have different ethnic and social backgrounds. This implies that the formation of girl identity has a lot to do with social, economic, political and cultural structures. However, identity formation is an ongoing process and can change in the course of an individual’s self-development.

Az in Baagh-e Sharqi: Nazariyehaye Naqd-e She’r-e Kudak-o Nojavan (From this Oriental Garden: Critical Theory in the Studies of Poetry written for Children and Young Adults) by Parvin Salaajeghe offers readers a variety of rhetorical approaches to interpreting poetry for young audience. The book won Iran’s Book of the Year Award in 1386(2007). Poetry is treated in this book as a branch of literature requiring its own critical approaches. Much theoretical rigour is sacrificed to rhetorical criticism in this book. The writer expresses her idealistic view of literature and criticism in the first chapter of the book: “this young and green offshoot [Children’s Literature] has been born whether we like it or not. But it is supposed to be more beautiful and greener after being made-up and trimmed by criticism” (p.24). Conceptualizing the function of criticism as beautification has led to the exclusion of most contemporary perspectives such as feminism, marxism, new-historism, cultural stud...

Children in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth 2015, represent many symbolic concepts, such as the dominant ideology of the Elizabethan era. This research study explains why the source text has undergone many changes regarding the representation of child characters. Kurzel has added new child characters to the original story to signify his concern for the young generation of our contemporary time. Contextualization and the socio-historical events will explain the reason behind the abundance of children in the film adaptation. Robert Stam’s model of intertextual dialogism helps to understand how Macbeth 2015 relates to real physical and psychological damage to contemporary children by war. The adaptation is in constant dialogue with the reality of violence and war in the turn of the century. Child soldiers, grieving and revengeful parents and children, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are serious contemporary dilemmas. These traumatic events are a consequence of the pursuit of power by people...

Nasir Khosrow embarks upon a seven year journey in order to come to terms with his spiritual crisis. The quest is the inevitable outcome of the tensions and conflicts between Nasir and the institutionalized forms of power and knowledge. The tensions lead to the formation of a series of binary oppositions-verbal and nonverbal-within the text of his travelogue. The researchers have analyzed the text of Nasir's travelogue with a semiotic approach and have unearthed the binarized structure that underlies Nasir's report. The world around him is in contrast with the world he idealizes in his subjective mind, he draws a boundary line between the transient nature of his journey and the timeless journey he would undertake after death, the civilized cityscapes mark a sharp contrast with the savagery of the desert in which he has to reside temporarily. Another binary is formed when Nasir distinguishes his dietary habits from those of bedouins. The pictorial appeal of Nasir's painti...

This article examines an intermedial adaptation, focusing on the potentials of two different media in the presentation of conflicting ideologies in Iran: Tabar (“Axe”) (1980, dir. Ahmad Arabani), a silent animation, and the picture book of the same title, by Shekoofeh Taqi and Manoochehr Dehqan, published in 1985. The two works have been chosen because they were both published at a time when Iran was tackling serious internal and external tensions after the Islamic Revolution. The ideological content of both the picture book and the animation can shed light on the discourse of didacticism that prevailed in Iran during the 1980s. Both works feature deforestation as a threat, but patriotism is the theme of the animation, whereas female resistance against male oppression is the message of the picture book.

Justin Kurzel’s film, Macbeth (2015) demonstrates a large number of Christian symbols and images. This comparative study seeks to explore the relation between the Protestantism discourse of the Elizabethan era, and the religious visualizations and images used in Kurzel’s movie including the Cross, paintings, costumes and mise-en-scene. By applying Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation to exploring the film, the meaning of these images can be found through contextualization. How Kurzel creates a new way to visualize the main socio-historical ideas of the original text will be examined. Stam’s model of intertextual dialogism helps a better understanding of how these images relate to the original setting. While Kurzel features an authentic medieval Scottish setting, he employs new visual ways to convey the socio-cultural context of the Shakespearean Macbeth. Concerning Macbeth (2015), it could be argued that there are still similar examples of the justification of violence and war in o...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel versucht, Angela Carters Kurzgeschichte The Werewolf im Lichte der Lacan’schen Psychoanalyse zu interpretieren, und betrachtet die Reise des kleinen Mädchens in dieser Geschichte als einen Übergangsritus, dessen Ende der Imaginäre Orden ist. Die Initiation des Mädchens als Frau/Mutter findet nicht in dem Moment statt, in dem sie in die symbolische Ordnung eintritt, sondern als sie ihrer Großmutter nachfolgt. Der Werwolf hat starke intertextuelle Verbindungen mit Rotkäppchen. Die archetypischen Verweise auf die weibliche Natur in der Kurzgeschichte können als Versuch Carters interpretiert werden, die Grenzen im Märchen zu verschieben, um eine verschlingende Weiblichkeit– in alten Geschichten gezähmte – wiederzubeleben und sie im Werwolfmotiv zu reinkarnieren.

The story of the loss of paradise has been read and interpreted in different ages. Commentary on Milton's Paradise Lost is not limited to verbal texts; painters and illustrators have contributed greatly to the poem by presenting their own time-bound readings and interpretations of the poem through their illustrations that are far beyond mere decorations. John Martin, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, deletes the Father and the Son from his illustrations. Only angels such as Raphael are the representations of deity and are as powerless and tiny as Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, after the Fall seem as small, powerless and as subjugated to the natural surrounding as they were before the Fall. Satan is the only powerful figure in his elegant palace. Through a new historical outlook, the researchers aim at exposing the workings of ideology and dominant discourses that informed John Martin's pictorial reading of Milton's poem in the early 19 th century. When Foucault put forth the idea of episteme in 1950s and rejected the idea of the progressive movement of history, a new perspective took over in the humanities. He argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system and that each text must be located in its proper context in order to be properly understood. The new perspective replaced the universals with time specific events. As a result, the old notion that human history is moving along a continuum seemed no longer valid. Shifting the point of view to the historical context was the contribution of historicism which held that all questions must be settled within the historical, political, social and economic context in which they have been raised. This school of thought is known by the name of New Historicism.