https://cls.uok.ac.ir/ Critical Literary Studies en daily 1 Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0330 Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0330 https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64487.html Reviewers of the Current IssueProf. Sasan Baleghizadeh, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, IranProf. Zohreh Ramin, University of Tehran, Tehran, IranDr. Marwan Abdi, University of Duhok, Duhok, Kurdistan Region, IraqDr. Mohammad Ahmadnejzad, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, IranDr. Golchin Amani, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, IranDr. Peyman Amanullahi, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, IranDr. Bahar Bahmani, Science and Research Branch, IA University, Tehran, IranDr. Ayoub Dabiri, Ab. C., Islamic Azad University, Abhar, IranDr. Meymanat Daneshvari, Mashhad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad, IranDr. Omid Delbandi, Semnan University, Semnan, IranDr. Razieh Eslamieh, Pa.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, IranDr. Mohammad Exir, Bushehr Branch, Islamic Azad University, Bushehr, IranDr. Issa Omotosho Garuba, Kwara State University, Malete, NigeriaDr. Bahee Hadaegh, Shiraz University, Shiraz, IranDr. Mohsen Khaleseh Dehghan, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, IranDr. Mohsen Hanif, Kharazmi University, Tehran, IranDr. Omid Ostad, University of Allameh Tabatabaii, Tehran, IranDr. Sussan Rahimi Bagha, Science and Research Branch, IA University, Tehran, Iran Dr. Hossein Rahmani, University of Payam-e-Noor, Bokan, IranDr. Fatima Sadat Yahyapoor, Urmia University, Urmia, IranMostapha Bagheri, PhD Candidate, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, IranEshagh Bezdodeh, PhD Candidate, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, IranAfsaneh Heidari, PhD Candidate, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, IranHamed Rezaeinejad, PhD Candidate, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran For the full information on the current issue, see the attahced PDF file on the right side of the page. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64489.html Critical Literary StudiesVol. VIII, No. 2, Serial Number 16, Spring and Summer 2026 The Coexistence of Contrasting Forces: An Analysis of Selected Poetry of William Carlos Williams through Chaos TheoryMohammad Reza Esfandiari Mehr, Ali Taghizadeh 1-18 Trauma and Power: A Caruthian–Foucauldian Reading of Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful TimesMaryam Soltan Beyad, Mahshid Mirmasoomi 19-37 Existential Death and (In)authenticity in Beckett’s Molloy: A Yalomian ReadingSamaneh Zandi, Zahra Jannessari Ladani 39-57 Abject's Time: Temporal Antagonism in Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of YouthSeyyed Mohammad Marandi, Zohreh Ramin, Maryam Moradi 59-74 Resisting and Empowering as a Result of Hybridized Identity Formation in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We WereHoda Shabrang, Zhaleh Laeli 75-90 Moral-Educational Teachings and the Issue of Cognitive and Emotional Standards in Children's Poetry: The Case Study of Latif Halmat’s Children PoemsFardin Hosseinpanahi, Arash Mehraban 91-113 Decoding Alienation: Semiotics and Consumerist Modernity in Paul Auster’s City of GlassMarzieh Zibaei, Abdolreza Goudarzi, Shahram Afrougheh 115-131 The Dialectics of Enlightenment and Its DiscontentsNawzad Jamal Hamafaraj 133-148 Mapping Unstable Selves: Existential Ontology and Narrative Multiplicity in As I Lay DyingSajed Hosseini, Sheereen Ahmadpour 149-165 Hybrid Lives, Wounded Minds: An Exploration of Trauma of Dislocation in Fadia Faqir’s Diaspora Novel, The Cry of the DoveZahra Ghasemi 167-180 Translation of Slanguage Items: The Case Study of The Catcher in the RyeMaryam Ghodrati, Shoja Neynava, Anahita Amirshojai 181-197 Translation Agents and Networks: A Case Study of the Persian Translations of Bakhtiar Ali’s Novels in IranMilad Miraki, Ahmad Moinzadeh, Saeed Ketabi 199-232 Abstracts in Persian 233-242 https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64313.html Chaos theory, as a branch of critical theory, has increasingly shaped discussions in the sciences and the humanities by emphasizing nonlinear, unpredictable, yet patterned systems. The present research applies this framework to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, whose deceptively simple verse resists conventional interpretation. It argues that Williams’ poetry, often seen as fragmentary or chaotic, embodies underlying structures of order and interconnection, revealing a coexistence of heterogeneous: ordinary details that disclose systematic patterns when viewed through this lens. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’ reading of chaos theory, the study closely reads three poems— “This Is Just to Say,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and “Classic Scene”— to show themes of creation and destruction, cyclical dependence, and complex dynamics beneath trivial scenes. By integrating chaos theory into literary analysis, the study shows that Williams’ work converts surface-level disorder into deeper coherence. In doing so, it offers a critical model for reading modernist poetry without reducing it to either pure fragmentation or rigid order. The conclusion reached is that Williams’ art affirms a modern aesthetic in which instability is not a threat to meaning but a generative condition for new forms of significance. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64329.html Elfriede Jelinek’s Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980) reconceptualizes trauma as a socio-historical condition which is produced and perpetuated by power–knowledge structures rather than experienced solely as personal or psychological suffering. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory and Michel Foucault’s concept of power–knowledge, this article argues that the novel vividly represents trauma as historically entrenched systems of ideological domination that shape individual and collective identities, cultural narratives and memory. The article offers a profound critique of postwar Austrian society by exposing how the intricate and dynamic interplay of power-knowledge generates the complicated discourse of trauma and foreclose any meaningful narrative recovery. Through a close and comprehensive textual and discourse-oriented analysis, the article demonstrates how the novel's fragmented structure serves as a significant literary critique which mirrors the unrepresentable nature of trauma and its resistance to forming a coherent narrative, while simultaneously exposing the dominant ideological power-knowledge mechanisms through which unresolved traumatic histories are normalized, reproduced and ultimately perpetuated. The novel’s depiction of trauma as a socio-cultural product rather than a private experience clearly demonstrates that individual agency is constrained by power structures. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64177.html This study explores Samuel Beckett's Molloy through the lens of existential psychotherapy, particularly the theories of Irvin D. Yalom. It examines the interplay between death, existential angst, and psychological defenses in Beckett's characters. By analyzing Yalom's existential psychoanalytical ideas, the study aims to understand how characters confront or transcend their existential anxieties to achieve existential awareness. This theoretical framework extends beyond traditional Freudian and Neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, focusing on the practical manifestations of human neurosis related to the ultimate concern of death. The findings highlight Beckett's portrayal of authentic existence and his characters' engagement with concepts such as the knight of resignation, ultimate man, and inauthentic Dasein. Additionally, the study delves into the psychological mechanisms employed by Beckett's characters to cope with their existential dread, exploring whether these defenses are ultimately successful or if they lead to a deeper understanding of their own mortality. Through this analysis, the research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how Beckett's work reflects and addresses profound existential questions, offering insights into the human condition and the ways in which individuals navigate the inevitability of death. The study also considers the broader implications of these findings for existential psychotherapy and literary analysis surrounding death and authenticity. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64178.html This article examines Tennessee Williams's reformulation of Gothic's central convention in Sweet Bird of Youth. Following the convention of American Gothic, this play dramatizes the return of the nation's repressed Other as a nuisance. However, Williams positions this abject figure as temporally disjunctive, that is, out of sync with the political figure who functions as the allegorical rendition of national time and History. Drawing on an expanded form of Julia Kristeva’s concept of “women’s time”, this article argues that the abject's circular and monumental temporalities place him outside the linear as well as teleological temporality of the nation. In addition to that, the abject's temporal conflict with the state runs parallel to his analogous conflict with the process of aging. These intersecting tensions expose how national time acts as a castrating agent akin to the devastating power of physiological time. By dint of temporal asynchronism and the final castration of the abject, Williams exposes the histories and identities that are otherwise doomed to dissolve in the homogenizing force of the national History.  https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64424.html This article employs Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theories in order to analyze resistance and hybridized identity formation in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). It examines the characters’ rejection of colonial mimicry and forced assimilation within the third space, exploring how Bhabha’s concepts of ambivalence and unhomeliness manifest as consequences of colonization. The article highlights how the pursuit of cultural hybridity can paradoxically lead to displacement, while Mbue’s novel critiques environmental injustices and the cultural marginalization of the colonized, underscoring the appropriation of ancestral landscapes vital to African identity. Through theoretical and textual analysis, this article identifies diverse forms of cultural and identity-based resistance. The female protagonist, developing a hybridized identity through migration, leads a movement against colonial exploitation. Indigenous characters also resist, reclaiming their homeland. The novel powerfully depicts characters shaped by colonial dynamics, offering insights into postcolonial identity and resistance. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how individuals navigate and resist oppressive colonial structures, fostering new forms of cultural expression and belonging within their ancestral lands. The article also emphasizes the critical role of reclaiming cultural heritage and identity in challenging external domination and asserting self-determination in the face of historical exploitation. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64430.html Children’s poetry, as a foundational component of children's literature, plays a significant role in conveying moral and educational teachings. However, the effectiveness of these teachings depends on their alignment with the cognitive and emotional capacities of the child audience. Neglecting such standards not only disrupts the communication process between the poem and the child reader but also undermines the primary aim of conveying ethical and educational teachings. Latif Halmat, a prominent poet of children’s poetry in Kurdish literature, pays particular attention to expressing and conveying moral and educational teachings in his poems. In the present research, we critically examine the children’s poetry of Latif Halmat, relying on the emotional and cognitive criteria and components within children’s literature and the extent to which the cognitive, emotional, and narrative components of his poems align with the cognitive and emotional developmental criteria of child audiences is critically examined. The findings indicate that while Halmat is notably attentive to developing educational themes—addressing issues such as environmental ethics, individual and social values, and literacy— his poems often fall short in several areas: incorporating children’s lived experiences, aligning with their cognitive and emotional development, maintaining an appropriate narrative structure, and avoiding a sermon-like tone. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64413.html Consumer culture, with its relentless emphasis on individualism and material possession, systematically erodes communal bonds, replacing authentic selfhood with identities constructed through consumption. This dynamic fosters a profound sense of alienation, a defining condition of modernity, particularly within urban landscapes where consumerist rituals dominate daily life. Paul Auster’s City of Glass first deciphers the alienating semiotics of food and drink, a critique that is then internalized and radicalized across The New York Trilogy, through the consumption of narrative in Ghosts and of another’s identity in The Locked Room, ultimately demonstrating that in late capitalism, the consuming self becomes the final, unfilled commodity. Employing Roland Barthes's semiotics to decipher the latent myths of consumer behavior, this study radicalizes its analysis through Jean Baudrillard's theory of the hyperreal, arguing that in a progressive consumer society, such mythologized signs detach from all referents to create a simulated reality where the simulacrum of satisfaction substitutes for authentic need. New York, a labyrinth of empty signs, emerges as a microcosm where consumerist promises dissolve into fragmentation. By interrogating semiotics, urban space, and late capitalism, this research implies how Auster's narrative exposes the hollowness of consumer culture, offering a critique of alienation that echoes beyond text. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64200.html On a broad scale, The Dialectic of Enlightenment re-conceptualizes the concept of enlightenment and its close association to mythical thinking. Through the meaning of Myth, Horkheimer and Adorno sought to challenge the mainstream meaning of enlightenment. However, why did The Enlightenment fall into the trap of mythical thinking again? Why does mythical thinking persist despite the ongoing progress of The Enlightenment ? The myth semantically includes a twofold connotation: the genre, and the dark side of rationality. The Enlightenment has a mythological foundation that manifests itself in control, exploitation, and destruction tendencies. The power-knowledge relations are foregrounded as long as the overcoming of fear is resolved. Additionally, rationality is reduced to a control instrument and a monopoly of power. This paper thus focuses on the significance of the authors' criticism of the hidden agenda of the Enlightenment. It also addresses the paradox and dialectical aspect of myth and enlightenment within the historical and sociopsychological framework. The study demonstrates the discrepancy between the edefinition of myth referred to in the arguement and F. W. J. Schilling's framework of thought, which is not explicitlymentioned in the text. The key findings are the contradiction between rationality and its outcome as a counterproductive force. The progress in human civilisation results in the self-reversion toward the myths. The Enlightenment was not thus the antithesis of myth, but a sub-category of myth.  https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64425.html This article examines William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through an integrated theoretical lens that reconceives focalization, stream of consciousness, and existential ontology as structurally interdependent mechanisms of narrative disintegration. Rejecting conventional thematic treatments, the study reframes these narrative techniques as philosophical agents that enact, rather than merely depict, the fragmentation of selfhood. Drawing on theories of narratology, the interiority models, and existential philosophy, the article argues that Faulkner’s use of narrative multiplicity produces unstable and recursive subjectivities. Through close readings of the Bundrens’ internal monologues, the article demonstrates how focalization destabilizes narrative authority, stream of consciousness dismantles cognitive coherence, and the novel’s form itself generates an existential crisis. The findings suggest that As I Lay Dying is not only a modernist text concerned with identity, but a philosophical artifact in which form functions as an ontological event. This approach contributes to Faulkner studies, narratological theory, and literary existentialism by offering a new model for reading narrative as an epistemological site of being and its disassembly. The conclusion suggests that fiction not only reflects but generates new ontological and epistemic modes of thinking. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64426.html This paper examines the psychological trauma caused by dislocation in Fadia Faqir's The Cry of the Dove.  The analysis contributes to the field by focusing on the interrelation of trauma, gender identity, and culture in shaping a fragmented sense of self in a character who is faced with forced dislocation. It thus draws its insights from both postcolonial and feminist trauma theories. The narrative centers on Salma, a Muslim woman forced to flee her homeland after becoming a target of an honor killing. By exploring themes of exile, psychic wounds, and cultural hybridity, the study highlights how Salma's diasporic experience complicates her identity formation. Positioned at the crossroads of honor-based violence, gender oppression, and diasporic dislocation, Salma embodies the struggle of a marginalized Muslim woman navigating alien cultural terrains. Her narrative, marked by exile, memory, and identity crises, invites a deeper understanding of trauma's enduring effects on displaced subjects. The study demonstrates that the traumatic events of Salma’s life affect an incision on her psyche, and the forced dislocation which confronts her with an entirely new culture, language, and religion aggravates her double sense. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64311.html This paper investigates the translation of slanguage items, with a particular emphasis on taboo terms, which are widely recognized as posing significant and complex challenges for translators working across different cultural contexts. Focusing specifically on two English-to-Persian translations of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The present study adopts Venuti’s (1995) influential concepts of domestication and foreignization as its primary theoretical and analytical framework. The translations were carefully and systematically analyzed using a combination of contrastive textual examination through SDL Trados Studio and quantitative assessment via Microsoft Excel to determine the frequency, distribution, and patterns of different translation strategies. The results indicate a clear prevalence of strategies such as deletion, euphemism, taboo-to-taboo translation, and taboo-to-non-taboo translation, listed in decreasing order of frequency. While the translators generally followed a target-oriented approach, aiming to carefully observe and respect cultural expectations in the target language, a detailed quantitative analysis of the applied strategies, particularly the unexpectedly high frequency of domestication due to cultural differences between the source and target languages, reveals a more nuanced, complex, and layered reality than might be initially assumed. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64365.html The current study examines the agency of translators and publishers in the Persian translations of Ali’s Kurdish novels within the Iranian literary field, highlighting how decisions, motivations, and contextual constraints interact. The study adopts a qualitative case study approach, focusing exclusively on Bakhtiar Ali’s novels translated directly from Kurdish into Persian between 1997 and 2025. It draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven translators and six publishers, conducted until theoretical saturation was reached, alongside archival research, publication histories, and textual and paratextual analysis to trace patterns of decision-making and collaboration. The analysis is informed by Haddadian-Moghaddam’s tri-tier model of agency comprising decision, motivation, and context in tandem with Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The findings reveal that agency is unevenly distributed: early translations were driven primarily by translators’ intellectual and cultural motivations, whereas later translations reflect publishers’ increasing control, shaped by symbolic capital, market considerations, and the growing recognition of Kurdish literature. Translators’ agency is further constrained by political and institutional factors, including censorship, time, and language hierarchies, yet facilitated by enabling mechanisms such as literary awards, paratextual visibility, and the emergence of celebrity translators. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64501.html To see the abstracts of the articles of the current issue, please click on the PDF file on the right side of this page. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64343.html Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 is typically read as a postmodern celebration of multiplicity. This article argues that Auster uses postmodern strategies to achieve a philosophical conclusion that strains against the movement’s celebratory ethos. He stages a brutal process of identity formation enacted as a postmodern elegy, where the novel’s parallel lives represent not a democratic exploration of possibility, but a narrative survival-of-the-fittest contest in which three of the four protagonists are elegiac figures, defined by trauma and destined for termination. The survival of the author-surrogate, Ferguson 4, is thus a privileged outcome, and the novel’s metafictional conclusion becomes a dual act of memorialization and erasure: an authoritative execution where the victor forges his singular identity from the ghosts of his eliminated selves. This article ultimately reframes 4 3 2 1 as a dark meditation on the practice of creative writing itself. It argues that Auster theorizes a haunted postmodern identity: one that is fragmented and multiple not out of a celebration of fluid collection of possibilities, but because it is composed of the spectral traces of the lives it had to narratively destroy to exist. This reveals a darker, more hierarchical logic within the practice of postmodern fiction. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64391.html This study mobilizes Michael White’s Narrative Therapy and Cathy Caruth’s conceptualization of trauma in order to approach Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness as a literary embodiment of narrative healing in action. The novel reflects how storytelling, as a decolonizing act and reconstitutive imperative, can address the layered and inherited trauma caused by apartheid in South Africa. The novel’s polyphonic architectonics, dual narrative timeline, and character dynamics operationalize narrative’s deconstructive and re-authorial modalities in breaking silence’s hegemony in order to facilitate epistemic transition from disruption into coherence. Through its characters’ journeys from incomprehension to understanding by relying on emplotment as the orchestration of lived fragments into an agentic integrity, the novel not only critiques the enduring psychosocial pathologies engendered by apartheid, but also charts a route to personal and collective renewal. It will be argued that Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness employs historical layering and a pronounced emphasis on agency to offer a therapeutic re-envisioning of history and identity. Consequently, the novel serves as a significant narratological fulcrum within the post-apartheid literary landscape. Through this framework, Mda’s work demonstrates how narrative possesses an ontogenetic force which could restitute dignity and foster reconciliation, thereby cultivating the conception of preferred futures. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64410.html In Narrow Road to the Deep North, Edward Bond presents his distinctive, creative reading of the life of Basho, the seventeenth-century poet of haiku, to indicate that for him history is not a linear, coherent, and taken for granted narrative, but rather an arbitrary text that is capable of being a site of projecting one’s concerns for investigating into contemporary issues. In order to explore Bond’s distinctive approach to history, this study applies and merges two theoretical frameworks, namely theories of adaptation and new historicism, focusing on the way the playwright appropriates history to comment on the present. The main question of the study is to ask how Bond the playwright reflects and modernizes Basho’s life by taking into account the determinants of why, where and when. This study is significantly worth undertaking as it can expose the dramatic strategy that Bond applies in his historical plays including Lear, Bingo, and The Fool. Due to the playwright’s antifoundational reading of the past, it can be concluded that Bond’s adaptation of Basho’s life serves his subversive approach to the status quo.d https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64538.html In this article, the ideological plays of LeRoy Jones’ Dutchman and Gholamhossein Saedi’s Honeymoon are comparatively examined through the concepts of colonialism, ideology, identity, otherness, violence, and the ideology of fear. The study focuses on psychological-ideological approaches using comparative method of Slavoj Žižek and Frantz Fanon. LeRoy Jones (Amiri Baraka) was leading the black cultural movement as an attempt to expose the injustice of racist societies which has generally been met with violent reactions. Over the years, colonialism has spread hegemonic gaze on the Middle East and made the ethnographical investigation into modern colonialism. Accordingly, there is an attempt to examine the foundation of Western imperialist discourse from the perspective of Saedi, an Iranian psychiatrist, writer, translator, and playwright. Despite cultural differences, both writers share a commitment to portray human suffering under dominant systems of power and ideological conditions. To achieve this goal, the psychological opinions of Frantz Fanon and the ideological ideas of Slavoj Žižek have been used. Fanon explains how colonial oppression creates inferiority/alienation in colonized subjects, while Žižek explains how ideology reproduces fear and domination in society. This research attempts to ponder on the theoretical and comparative gap between postcolonial psychology and ideological critique. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64560.html During the era of transnational migration, diasporic women's narratives often get subjected to prevailing masculine paradigms, which inscribe themselves as the voice of the whole immigrants. This study challenges predominant victimization discourses in studies on Afghan migration. It demonstrates how Nadia Hashimi's When the Moon Is Low (2015) uncovers Fariba's transformation from subordination towards establishing a new home within a space of unbelonging. Using Gayatri Spivak's subalternity and strategic essentialism, the research brings forth the subaltern practices of Afghan diasporic women in some key scenes such as bath and prayer rituals, border crossing, and cultural negotiations with others, and makes significant theoretical contributions to reconceptualize how hybrid identity functions as a space of feminist resistance, enabling Fariba as an Afghan immigrant woman to recast her identity and reclaim her agency and subjectivity empowerment. Considering Fariba's strategic negotiations in cultural borders and her testimony in its social context, the research not only subverts the distorted historical narratives of the immigrant women and deconstructs homogenized representations of Afghan women's diaspora, but also reframes hybridity as a contested, fragile space of cross‑cultural exchange and tactical self‑recreation – not a successful escape from patriarchy, but a series of small, significant acts of resistance https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64561.html Anticipating many of the tensions associated with the contemporary refugee crisis, the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah examines refugees’ experiences and intelligibility within asylum regimes in By the Sea (2001). While existing scholarship on Gurnah has focused largely on migration, memory, identity, and postcolonial displacement, very little attention has been paid to the novel’s depiction of asylum governance through a Foucauldian framework. Consequently, this research theorizes the concept of the pastoral dispositif of recognition, drawing on Michel Foucault’s notions of pastoral power and dispositif. Through close textual analysis of airport architecture, asylum interviews, retrospective narration, narrative opacity, and post-recognition alienation, the novel presents refugee recognition as an evolving process of governance combining confession, care, surveillance, and social assimilation. Gurnah’s narrative structure resists this institutional demands through temporal disruption, narrative multiplicity, and opacity. Rather than presenting asylum as rescue or integration, By the Sea reveals the persistence of refugee governance even after legal recognition has been granted. By conceptualizing the pastoral dispositif of recognition, this study contributes to postcolonial and refugee studies by showing how literary narratives uncover the tensions between humanitarian care, institutional control, and refugee subjectivity. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64584.html The present article dwells on the portrait of the intellectual as an angry young man in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The study explores Hamid’s novel through the method of close reading to conduct a succinct examination of Changez, its central character. Edward Said’s categorization of the intellectuals form the theoretical foundation, and Key Saidian notions such as ‘professionalism’, ‘amateurism’ and ‘exile’ have been explored and contextualized in the novel. This research demonstrates that in Hamid’s hands Changez turns into a Saidian individual intellectual who traffics in ideas and becomes an embodiment of a peculiar angle of vision; this newly emerging Middle-Eastern young man forcefully speaks the truth against the silent American man. The research contends that the core of Hamid’s representation focuses on an angry young intellectual that dodges the old and the new with equal dexterity and struggles to ‘situate’ himself within the socio-political field to represent his own viewpoint concerning the socio-political crisis in post-9/11 world. The findings confirm that after being exposed to actual and metaphysical exile Changez abandons professionalism and turns into a Saidian amateur intellectual who develops critical consciousness and makes it his mission to emancipate and enlighten people from his background and beyond. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64604.html Conventionally , academic writing was encouraged to be objective and impersonal, ignoring the possibility that employing personal markers can reinforce promoting the authors’ visibly and stance. This study has attempted to examine self-mention markers in different sections of research articles in nine revered journals in applied linguistics published in 2000 and 2025. Hyland’s (2005) self-mention markers (the interactional subcategories) of ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘our’, ‘us’, ‘the author’, and ‘the writer’ were coded; with 'mine' and 'ours' being excluded. A quantitative comparison was carried out with a total of 360 articles, 20 from each journal per year. Frequencies were normalized to occurrences per 10,000 words to account for corpus size differences. Statistical testing (chi-square) was applied to compare those distributions. It was found that the personal marker ‘we’ was the most commonly used one (followed by ‘Our’ and ‘Us’), also more frequently observed in the method section in 2025 articles while it was mostly seen in the introduction section of the articles of 2000. Chi-square tests confirmed a significant shift in the distribution of self-mention markers across sections (p < .01). The paper sums up by highlighting the new finds for researchers in the discipline of applied linguistics. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64615.html The present study examines the role of silence in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World, demonstrating how collective silence functions as both political resistance and a practice through which collective identity is constructed under conditions of oppression. Employing a qualitative research design based on close textual analysis, the study draws on Foucaultian concepts of power and discourse and Butlerian theory of performativity to examine how Antônio Conselheiro and the Canudos community employ silence in response to marginalization and authoritarian control. Rather than representing passive absence, silence is interpreted as a strategic discursive and performative practice through which dominant power structures are challenged and destabilized. The analysis reveals that silence disrupts official narratives, fosters communal solidarity, and contributes to the performative construction of collective identity. The study addresses a significant gap in existing scholarship by demonstrating that silence functions simultaneously as a form of political resistance and a performative practice of identity formation. Ultimately, the article contributes to literary studies by offering a new perspective on the relationship between silence, discourse, power, and collective action in revolutionary literature. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64616.html This paper situates Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) within both the Gothic tradition and the cultural anxieties of the Victorian era as a means of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Interlinked motifs of madness and monstrosity lie at the heart of such an analysis, wherein Stoker's narrative serves symbolically to express social and psychological crises. Characters whose unconscious impulses disrupt rationality to embody the novel’s exploration of madness, underlining how precarious identity was within rigid codes of morality, gender roles, and social mores. It is monstrosity that best externalizes these fears, dramatizing the eruption of repressed desires and moral transgressions, a process perhaps best personified by Count Dracula and his brides. Utilizing Freud’s concepts of the id, ego, superego, defense mechanisms, and parapraxes, this study develops an analysis of how the characters’ behaviors reflect the Victorians’ own struggles with issues of sexuality, morality, and modernization. Dracula channels historical trauma and cultural transformation into Gothic symbols of psychological disturbance, offering insight into the unconscious turmoil of its era. The findings pointedly indicate that the novel remains relevant today as a masterpiece that continues to light up the hidden anxieties of society, revealing the power of Gothic fiction in uncovering these unconscious fears. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64622.html This article examines how Rick Riordan’s The Sea of Monsters reconstructs ancient myth for a contemporary young adult audience through a comparison with Homer’s The Odyssey. Drawing on Vladimir Propp’s narratology and Roland Barthes’s theory of myth, the study investigates the distribution of narrative functions and character roles in Riordan’s novel and their relation to the classical source text. The analysis shows that The Sea of Monsters preserves a recognisable Proppian structure while redistributing helper, donor, dispatcher, and villain roles across characters in ways that suit the logic of young adult fiction. It also demonstrates that Riordan’s retelling does not merely imitate Homeric myth but re-signifies it by translating heroic conflict, divine assistance, and moral values into a modern cultural context. The principal conclusion is that myth in Riordan’s novel remains structurally familiar yet culturally transformed, allowing classical values such as courage, loyalty, perseverance, and belonging to be conveyed in forms accessible to young readers. The study argues that this process of reconstruction shows the continuing adaptability of myth and the intertextual value of young adult retellings as mediators between classical literature and modern readership. https://cls.uok.ac.ir/article_64623.html Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights provides a profound feminist examination of the intricate struggles encountered by immigrant women as they navigate cultural, social, and political obstacles. Fastened on Hend, a single mother who leaves her restrictive Bedouin life in Egypt to settle in Brooklyn, the novel explores themes of violence and gender oppression while illustrating the broader realities of contemporary society. By analysing the novel through Patricia Hill Collins’s Matrix of Domination, this article demonstrates the rich complexity of race, gender, class, and immigration status in shaping the main protagonist’s life, Hend, in a diasporic context. Utilising the Matrix of Domination as a framework, this paper finds that Brooklyn Heights elucidates how the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power intersect to influence the experiences of Egyptian women as they assimilate to life in America. By foregrounding tensions between cultural inheritance and assimilative pressures, this study shows how Al-Tahawy critiques not only the oppressive structures of Hend’s own homeland traditions but also the dehumanising traits of Western consumer culture, offering multifaceted ways to understand authority that encompass economic as well as emotional and social dominance.