A Comparative Analysis of the “Hegemonic Other” in the Plays The Island by Athol Fugard and Parvarbandan by Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi

IntroductionOne of the functions of American school in Comparative Literature is the possibility to equalize literary works from different geographic regions that do not share any historical grounds. In fact, this school gives us a platform to go beyond the limits of the French school as a condition of historical confrontation. This study uses this cross-border thought approach to conduct a comparative analysis of two literary works by Athol Fugard and Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, both of whom compete over the concept of other. In fact, both authors seek to focus on the binary interactions existing in society regarding the idea of other. On the other hand, colonization has changed, and it does not appear as a direct governing system or a puppet ruler as it once did. Instead, in today’s world, it appears with a different approach and as silent domination. The plays The Island and Parvarbandan attempted to react to the social and cultural change and conflict they were faced with accordingly. This common ground makes these works worthy of comparative analysis. Therefore, with regards to the textual capacity and the atmosphere of both plays that portray domination and hegemony, their consequences on characters, and the reaction of the oppressed other and using the comparative approach, this study attempts a postcolonial reading of the plays. In fact, this study seeks to analyze these texts in cultural and deconstructive frameworks as well as the characters’ reactions and the narrative direction of the plays.A historical examination of postcolonial studies' roots reveals the traces of one of the field's pioneering thinkers, who first defined the notion of “the other” in the conflict between colonialists and colonized. Frantz Fanon addressed the question of “the other,” particularly in the case of blacks, by using the theoretical potentials of Hegel's discussions in phenomenology as well as Adler's theory on individual psychology. Inspired by Hegel's key theories on master-slave dialectic, he regarded the colonized as an” other” who could not embrace the role of “self.” In his paper, “Racism and Culture,” Franz Fanon defines race as the issue of “the other,” for example, superior/inferior racial relationships, in the context of the struggle between indigenous and colonial cultures. Racism, according to Fanon, follows a solid and immutable logic. A living nation, in his perspective, gets its essence from the exploitation of other people and, as a result, reduces those people to inferiors (see Fanon, 1972: 63).The representation of “the other” as an imperfect “self” in Bhabha's discourse implies not just the colonists' oppressive or proprietorial characteristics but also a more complex desire. In this case, the colonizer is subjected to these forms of representation in the same way that the colonized is, and he or she is simply caught up in the game of desire and fantasy established by the colonial context (see Mills, 2003: 159). In his book, The Colonizer and the Colonized (French: Portrait du colonisé, précédé par Portrait du colonisateur), Albert Memmi delves deeply into the mimicry-based relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. He argues that placing oneself in the shoes of another is an unconscious deed made by colonized people in an attempt to better their status. When a colonizer receives all advantages, profits, and credits and possesses wealth, honor, authority, or technical facilities, even though he has violated the colonized people's rights and has held them in servitude, he is seen as a unique role model for the colonized. The colonized imitates this role model to such an extent that his identity becomes entwined with that of the colonists, and he, therefore, ignores his true self. However, over time, the colonized understands that colonial culture had consistently put him in the position of a humiliated colonizer and that by accepting colonial values, he had actually signed his own conviction. Such a person not only does not benefit from the advantages of colonial society but his identity is gradually resolved in the relations of such a society. The colonizer gives in to his role model's demands and praises him, but the colonizer also finds a way to humiliate him, and that is ridiculing the colonizer's clumsy imitations. This is the point at which the colonized revolt against the "other" and his acts, hoping to get rid of him as quickly as possible; so, he rejects the colonizer, and the roles are reversed. The colonized people’s earlier desire for the colonizer and self-rejection turns into the colonizer's rejection and return to the actual self, their infatuation changes into extreme hatred of the outsiders, and they pursue self-detection. According to Memmi, the colonized cannot avoid this multi-stage colonial relation, as though each step is a prerequisite for the colonized to go to the next level and, eventually, achieve his freedom and deliverance (see Memmi, 1972: 155-158).  Methodology This study was conducted using a comparative analytical method, and its data were collected through a desk research approach. Through a postcolonial and cultural studies lens, we examine Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi's play, Parvarbnadan (cattle fatteners, Fatteningly ), and Athol Fugard's drama, The Island, to conduct a comparative study of the concept of "the other" in both literary works.  Discussion The Island is a manifesto in which two men are sent to Robben Island for opposing apartheid and its brutal policies. This play, however, is also a statement on theater, asking, "What is the point of drama in a society founded on antagonism and repression?"  According to the play, humanity will continue to suffer in the most inhumane ways unless they can find a meaning for their suffering and express it (see Walder, 1984: 76). Sa’edi's play, on the other hand, is a prod against an indifferent society, and the playwright used the metaphor "lamb" to portray the indifference of such a society and describe the current hegemony. Here, the author is a concerned person who, like the repressed characters of an island, must remain in exile and lose his identity and humanity, a point that Fugard also accentuates in his work. The main characters in both plays are oppressed and imprisoned for fighting against the government and for having resistant morale.  In The Island, two black prisoners, John and Winston, are detained in the notorious Robben Island prison off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, for their political stances against the government. On the flip side of this study is Fatteningly, whose protagonist (Meem) is a well-known activist and writer now serving a temporary prison sentence awaiting trial. Here, it is necessary to examine the discursive and ideological forms of the two plays. This enables us to determine how colonialism establishes its subject positions via representation. In this respect, Steven Sloman presents a diagram in his article "The Struggle for Postcolonialism" that is beneficial for comprehending the complexities of this issue: Diagram 1. The Semiotic FieldThe diagram above depicts colonialism as a system of power and dominance from left to right. The line “A” symbolizes the numerous beliefs regarding how colonial oppression is carried out via direct political and economic control. The lines “BC” and "DE" indicate several notions connected to the ideological regulation of colonial people or subjection through establishing consent. Theories that highlight colonialism's efficiency, which we observe moving along the line A, are fundamentally "direct political" theories or theories based on colonialism's "brutal coercion." In other words, these theories deny the fundamental assumption of resolving social conflict via the intentional development of concepts about the "self" and their internalization or "actualization" by subordinated subjects. On the other hand, theories that depict colonial power primarily along line BC - which embodies the ideological stance of economic colonialism along with line A - highlight the structural strength of state apparatuses in the formation of colonial relations. In his play, Fatteningly, Sa’edi uses lamb fattening as a metaphor and narrates the same sequence. This structure adheres to line "BC," according to which controlling ideology promotes instinctive desires so that colonized people may focus only on these things while neglecting current political-ideological concerns. As a result of such a policy, a society in which everyone thinks alike is formed. On the other hand, these herds are uninformed that cattle fatteners' ultimate focus in fattening ignorant animals is to transport them to the slaughterhouse. Totalitarian regimes do this by slaughtering and eradicating the personality or identity of human herds. On the other hand, this connection may be seen as suggesting that the government, by duping the masses and legitimizing racial discrimination, sends dissidents like John and Winston to a secluded island to live as enslaved people doing subordinate labor.The crucial point is that the process of otherness is characterized by intricate representational power processes; power is essentially oppressive. It deals with human subjugation and seduction via a variety of, at times contradictory, images. Another character in this drama is a lady who uses lures and cooks fatty meals to fatten and castrate Meem.In The Island, government authorities attempt to assign tasks to two convicts in order to transform them into animals or to remove the last traces of humanity from them. Furthermore, this task serves as both a shield and a sword for both prisoners. In other words, this task may be used for both self-defense and action and warfare against the colonizers (i.e., the state). Theater, in fact, is the instrument that these two characters use to avoid alienation.The body serves a particular purpose in both plays. In The Island, the human body narrates the anguish of oppressed individuals who have been banished because of their protest and whose body endures unending oppression in the process of "becoming other," which has pushed them to perform meaningless and dreadful tasks. The island evokes the setting for a tragic play in a tiny, lonely place, which is a metaphor for the country's terrible situation. People are condemned to the worst penalties in this country, and the state humiliates the spirits and bodies of the people by forcing convicts to do complex and meaningless actions, punishing them or turning them into obedient slaves.  If we consider locations such as the small world of postcolonial society, we observe how characters are treated and how they are compelled to live a passive, submissive life. All of the activities performed against Meem's character in Fatteningly are performed in order to transform him into an obedient character. As a result, actions such as edacity, castration, and physical punishment are examples of behaviors that are applied to the body, and governments use these activities to accomplish colonial aims in the process of "otherness." 4-Conclusion   One objective of the comparative literature approach is to investigate the conceptual and methodological biases in various territories without considering the historical context of the relationships between these territories. Based on comparative literature methodology, we first evaluated the similarities of the concepts of " the other" in two dramas (Fatteningly and The Island) and then attempted to analyze the dualities in these works through analyzing the dual system of "the self" and "the other." In the next stage, we tried to compare these works. As Fugard grew up in a colonial territory, he became interested in structures that arose from dual racial conflicts, such as white/black, which were finally internalized by the society. The issue of race and the problem of inferiority, implemented through white hegemony against people of color, is one of the most prominent keywords in Fugard's works. Most of Fugard's focus in his work was linked to this colonial theme. In terms of the typology of "the other,” since Sa’edi lives in a different culture than Fugard and has no experience living in the colony, he highlights the subject of autocracy in many of his plays rather than colonialism, which accelerates people's otherness process as a consequence of its hegemony. In fact, the hegemonic forces in these two works take a stand against the characters because they want these characters to go through a process of alienation during which the characters first get alienated but eventually resist and take an aggressive approach against colonialists or dictatorial powers

Representation of Semantic Concepts of Motion Verbs in Sorani Kurdish: A Cognitive Approach

According to Leonard Talmy's “force dynamics” schema, as is observed in natural events, the flow of force is also reflected in linguistic structures, and in this respect, languages ​​are divided into two groups: “verb­-framed” and "satellite-­framed". In the first group, the events related to force dynamics are represented through the verb and in the second group, in the form of a satellite around the root of the verb and through the satellite. The aim of the present study is to explore the linguistic representation of motion events in Sorani Kurdish dialect within this semantic category. The data of this study was obtained through face-to-face interviews with twenty normative speakers. In cases where there were several forms of speech to express motion verbs, its citation form was recorded according to Mardukh's dictionary. Analysis of 260 motion verbs out of 300 speech pieces showed that patterns (motion + method) and (motion + path) are the most frequent patterns in the verbs of this dialect. Also, the 65% statistic representing the semantic concepts of the path through the satellite showed that the Sorani dialect is more inclined towards the satellite-­framed languages

Essays on typology of Iranian Languages Trends in linguistics., 328./ Alireza Korangy, Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari.

In English.Includes bibliographical references and index.The Iranian languages are one of the world's major language families. With an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers, these languages constitute the western group of the larger Indo-Iranian family, which represents a major eastern branch of the Indo-European languages. Geographically, the Iranian Languages are spoken from Central Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the West to Pakistan and western edged of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China in the east. Iranian languages have long been among the major interests of the philologists and general linguists, and European scholars have made tremendous contributions to the study of this language family. In light of such efforts, now we know that the Iranian languages can be historically divided into three phases, that are old, middle and new Iranian languages, and the new Iranian languages may be generally grouped as Eastern and Western. In recent years, the orientation towards typology has led to the appearance of somewhat more ponderance on the subject but the work has not included description of some of the very important languages of the Caspian, and or of the religious minorities (such as those of the Zoroastrians or the Jewish community), of the four-fold Central Plateau dial.Comrie, Bernard -- Scheucher, Bernhard -- Lazard, Gilbert -- Stilo, Donald -- Borjian, Habib -- Haig, Geoffrey / Adibifar, Shirin -- Gadilia, Ketevani -- Völlmin, Sascha -- Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, Behrooz / Rezai-Baghbidi, Hassan -- Eilam, Thamar -- Korangy, Alireza -- Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Iranian languages and linguistic typology / Ergativity in New West Iranian / Aspect in Iranian two systems: Persian and Pashto / Loss vs. expansion of gender in Tatic languages: Kafteji (Kabatei) and Kelāsi / Mazandarani: A typological survey / Referential Null Subjects (RNS) in colloquial spoken Persian: Does speaker familiarity have an impact? / A typological study of (in)definiteness in the Iranian languages / The quotative marker in Gilaki / Plural marking in the New West Iranian languages and dialects: a historical and typological approach / A typological sketch of the Jewish Iranian dialects / Epilogue / Index1 online resource (vii, 183 pages

Effects of the Syntactic Complexity on Speech Dysfluency of Stuttering Persian-Speaking Children and Adults in Conversational Speech

Background and Aim: Recently, researchers have increasingly turned to study the relation between stuttering and syntactic complexity. This study investigates the effect of syntactic complexity on theamount of speech dysfluency in stuttering Persian-speaking children and adults in conversational speech. The obtained results can pave the way to a better understanding of stuttering in children andadults, and finding more appropriate treatments.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the participants were 15 stuttering adult Persian-speakers, older than 15 years, and 15 stuttering child Persian-speakers of 4-6 years of age. In this study, first a 30 minute sample of the spontaneous speech of the participants was provided. Then the utterances of each person were studied in respect to the amount of dysfluency and syntactic complexity. The obtained information was analyzed using paired samples t-test.Results: In both groups of stuttering children and adults, there was a significant difference between the amount of dysfluency of simple and complex sentences (p<0.05).Conclusion: The results of this study showed that an increase in syntactic complexity in conversational speech, increased the amount of dysfluency in stuttering children and adults. Moreover,as a result of increase of syntactic complexity, dysfluency had a greater increase in stuttering children than stuttering adults

Comparison between Phonological Priming and Semantic Priming in the Short Verbal Memory Span in Male 18-25

Background and Aim: The short-term memory (STM) has been studied to a great extent so far. Using some strategies and techniques to help the subject to access to his/her memory is important for Speech pathologist. Priming is a process that increases the chance of accessing to some information of memory by means of some simulations. So, primings are some words which facilitate the retrieval of the target words. The purpose of this study is comparing phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span.Materials and Methods: The research was conducted on sixty-four 18-25 year-old male students in Tehran University of Medical sciences. Due to some distortion factors, including bilingualism, stutter-ing, and articulation problem, that can effect the reaction time, were determined as exclusion critenia. In additiion, subjects with difficulty in Wepman auditory discrimination were ruled out. The test was performed via the second version of programmed DMDX software and reaction time was recorded.Results: Semantic tasks and rhyming tasks were retrieved faster than the other tasks in lexical access respectively. There was a significant difference between the semantic and rime tasks but there is no significant difference between alliteration and unrelated tasks.Conclusion: The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than the other levels and the phonological level is activated right after that. The alliteration level is the last level that activated. It has some similarities with some other investigations on the reaction time in phono-logical tasks

Comparison Study of the Stuttered Words Type in Stuttering Children and Adults

Background and Aim: Since knowing the mechanisms which evoke non-fluency is the first step in the treatment of stuttering, and there are very few researches in Persian which consider the role of the linguistic factors behind stuttering, this study is an attempt to provide answers to some of numerous questions about stuttering by comparing the stuttered words` type in stuttered children and adults. Materials and Methods: In this study stuttered people were divided into 5 age groups as follows: 3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 13-16, and older than 17 years old. Each group had ten participants. Forty-two of the 50 participants were male, and the youngest person was 3 years old and the eldest one was 32 years old. The study method involved recording at least 5 minuets of spontaneous speech of every one who was diagnosed of suffering from stuttering by two speech and language pathologists. The percent of non-fluency on every word's type was determined where a content word was followed or preceded by a function word (Function-Function-Content words and Function-Content words contexts). Then these findings were analyzed by Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. Results: The results of this study show while function words are dominantly more stuttered than content words in children less than 13 years old in Function-Function-Content words context, we consider more disfluency on content words and second function word by getting old. We consider more stuttering on function words in children less that 13 years old in Function-Content words context too and increased non-fluency on content word by growing up. Results also show meaningful differences between the fifth group and others in the amount of stuttering on second function word in the Function-Function-Content words contexts and also between the first group and the others in amount of non-fluency both on function and content words in Function-Content words context. Conclusion: People who stutter from Farsi speakers populations exhibit almost differential patterns of disfluency in different ages. Young speakers who stutter are predominantly disfluent on function words. There is an exchange of disfluencies from function to content words as speakers get older. Disfluencies on both function and content words are so rarely in Function-Content words and Function-Function-Content words contents. These findings support the view that stuttering on function words in children is a way of getting time to complete the next content word's plan. These exchange findings are similar to what is found in English and Spanish languages and explained by the EXPLAN model