https://jor.ut.ac.ir/ پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان fa daily 1 Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0330 Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0330 https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106900.html This study examines two influential works: Wijhat Nazar (A Point of View) by Lenin Al-Ramly and Ihtebas Alasal (The Caged Honey) by Noha Sobhi. These texts critically redefine perceptions of blindness and address deeply rooted socio-cultural issues as a means of expressing the playwrights’ beliefs and perspectives, as well as of overcoming personal barriers. The failure to take proactive measures and to uphold the fundamental rights of blind people has led to widespread suffering. Accordingly, the two pieces provide keen social commentary through their portrayal of the struggles experienced by marginalized blind people. A fundamental concern of this investigation is to create independence in blind people through representation, advocacy, resilience, and collective action. Notably, the study highlights that blind individuals perform on par with their sighted peers in auditory examinations, thereby demonstrating their inherent capabilities. The well-meaning volunteers provide essential support across the globe. They guide individuals affected by blindness or low vision to receive the advice and information they need to continue with their day, which ultimately helps facilitate their ability to self-advocate and self-navigate. Furthermore, these programs and policies aim to raise awareness in society about the problems faced by the visually impaired people. Blind individuals chase their goals and ambitions; no stereotyped perceptions of a culture can hijack them. They challenge conventional narratives and re-found their own histories. The paper originates from a community of feeling shared by the blind and visually impaired people and focuses on their active participation in everyday activities and struggles. Through the meticulous collection and analysis of comparative data, the study aims to bridge the gap between the experiences of blind and sighted individuals, promoting full societal integration and recognizing blind individuals as valuable members of the community. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106816.html This paper examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through the lens of disability studies, employing Alison Kafer’s and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theoretical frameworks to reinterpret Yeong-hye’s (the protagonist) bodily refusal as a process of social disablement rather than psychological collapse. Yeong-hye actively refuses to consume animal products due to a dream and her determination which leads to her demise profoundly unsettles her family members. Shunned by everyone, she merely requests sunlight as her sole source of life and ultimately, she identifies as a plant. Kafer’s concepts of the curative imaginary and crip time illuminate Yeong-hye’s rejection of compulsory health, productivity, and futurity. Garland-Thomson’s theories of the normate and the spectacle of the extraordinary body clarify how the novel’s gaze disables Yeong-hye by turning her difference into visual excess. Together these frameworks reveal how Han Kang exposes the violence of normalization: Yeong-hye is expelled from the normate category, thus rendered a disabled individual, objectified through familial and medical stares, and temporally displaced into crip time. The study concludes that The Vegetarian reimagines disability as both a personal and a political resistance. Her rebellion is an ethical refusal of the curative imagination and an unsettling invitation to envision non-normative futures in a patriarchal, ableist societal structure. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106797.html This essay examines the sound as an originary object in Samuel Beckett’s play Nacht und Träume the presence or absence of which entails an aesthetic experience. The essay argues that the play’s minimalistic soundscape emerges as a dramatic plane that utilizes sound as an object whose engagement with the scene is broken, self-contained and never fully accessible. By drawing on Object Oriented philosophy, especially that of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, the essay explores the binary of sound and silence as extreme poles of such dramatic sonicity whereby through absence, presence, and repetition meaning, be it musical or non-verbal, is formed and then projected through character B as the phantom of a memory. Through an intermittent engagement with sound, music and silence, Beckett refutes the need for a linguistic dominance, and instead presents a non-verbal, sonic system to convey meaning, memories, and even characters. Such a system is irreducibly other when cast across language as the dominant system of signification. The new Beckettian communication system, however, exists within an alien phenomenological void that is independent of linguistic phonicity, where ideation, remembrance and even communication can take place through non-verbal structures of sound and music. The essay concludes by highlighting the strangeness of such sonic reality reserved for non-human. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106962.html This essay contends that Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is best read not as a parodic dystopia of “virtual reality,” but as a theory of digital urbanism, where space is administered by protocols and the self is manufactured as an interface. The “digital city” is treated here as an urban form, not as a decorative metaphor for online life. What matters, accordingly, is governance: how movement is routed, how passage is credentialed, how presence is made legible. On this account, the novel’s franchulated sovereignties, burbclave boundaries, logistical corridors, and regulated thresholds, visas, barcodes, access gates, do not merely furnish atmosphere. They reorganize mobility into a regime of permissions. Fragmentation, then, is not a free-floating postmodern condition or a mood one happens to inhabit. It is built. Identities become modular, role-bound, and readable only through the systems that sort, index, and route them. The Metaverse’s Street emerges as a second, continuous skin of the same city: it translates privatized property relations into frontage, visibility, and bandwidth, while intensifying surveillance and status into spatialized metrics. The essay further argues that the book’s comedic exaggeration is not an evasion of seriousness but a way of making these governing mechanics newly visible. Satire becomes diagnostic: it renders infrastructural power legible without allowing realist familiarity to normalize it. The paper concludes that the novel’s analytic value lies less in predictive accuracy than in its structural continuity with contemporary platform governance. Snow Crash illuminates a convergence, urban space, information control, subject formation, in environments where access, recognition, and agency are negotiated ceaselessly through code-like procedures. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106928.html This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague as a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. Drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters— constitutes an ethical mode of witnessing that resists narrative closure, insisting instead on the value of inhabiting unresolved historical absences as part of feminist remembrance. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106821.html This present article examines Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” through the critical lens of disability studies, with a specific focus on cognitive dissonance as an invisible disability. While Hemingway’s work has long been associated with themes of physical injury and hypermasculinity, this study explores how mental and psychological impairments, less visible yet equally debilitating, are embedded within the author’s minimalist narrative framework. Drawing on Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and the foundational insights of Lennard J. Davis on disability studies, the study argues that the protagonist Harry’s internal conflict, marked by regret and self-deception, constitutes a form of psychological impairment hidden beneath the more conspicuous signs of physical decline. By juxtaposing Harry’s gangrene with his deteriorating mental state, the analysis challenges traditional binaries of mind/body and visible/invisible affliction. The article further places Harry’s cognitive dissonance within the cultural pressures of Hemingway’s masculinist ethos, suggesting that the suppression of emotional vulnerability contributes to his spiritual and artistic demise. Ultimately, it should be maintained that this reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” offers a unique understanding of Harry’s identity as a disabled individual, and reveals how an examination of invisible disabilities can challenge the normative understanding of masculinity and artistic authenticity. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106866.html Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) constructs a restrained yet profoundly unsettling dystopian world in which human clones are produced and brought up systematically for the sole purpose of being organ donors. Beneath the novel's apparently low-profile narrative is a disapproval of the social processes through which specific groups are abjected and excluded from moral regard. The study deploys Imogen Tyler's theory of social abjection, where the definition of abjection is revised as being enacted by institutional, discursive, and spatial processes. The article analyzes in the first section how the clones are constructed as abject subjects. It is proposed that following abjectifying tactics such as linguistic, media, and spatial stigmatization materialize the abject position of the clones, enabling their exploitation to be both possible and unproblematic in an ethical sense. The second section investigates the narrative voice of Kathy H., whose reflective and emotionally textured storytelling subtly disrupts the systems that define her as less than human. Although overt resistance is absent, Kathy’s narration becomes a quiet form of subversion that reclaims subjectivity. By situating Never Let Me Go in social abjection discourse, this work illustrates how literature can reveal and push back against the ideological assumptions of marginalization.