Literature

This paper is an attempt to investigate the type and amount of lexical/phrasal and external modifiers employed in the English e-requests of Iranian EFL postgraduate students (nonnative speakers of English) to their professors during their education at Islamic Azad University, Najaf Abad Branch, Isfahan, Iran. To that end, the study employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate 60 English e-mails composed by the participants. More specifically, Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper's (1989), Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's (1984), and Edmondson's (1981) classification of requests was employed for coding the modification of the collected electronic requests. Findings from the study reveal that the Iranian students’ e-mails are not overly adorned with politeness modification. This paper argues that such e-mails fail to create e-polite messages to faculty and therefore capable of causing pragmatic failure.

Graham Greene is a colossal figure in twentieth century literature. He is a prolific writer and has proved to be one of the main literary experts to the English speaking world. His writings are not just pieces of entertainment. They have more profound meaning and significance. Greene’s childhood seemed to be unhappy. From the events and influences of Greene’s early life readers can gather evidence of “flight, rebellion and misery during those first sixteen years when the novelists is formed.”1 Being a sensitive boy, Greene felt cramped in the environment in which he was placed. From his book of essays, The Lost Childhood and from his autobiography, A Sort of Life, we get an idea of Greene’s feeling of a sense of emptiness, boredom and lifeless depression during his early years.

This study argues for a third wave feminist interpretation of Daughter of Fortune and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende as two significant texts that take multiple feminist perspectives into consideration and oppose certain patriarchal systems. As will be argued, the problems faced by the female characters that relate to their personal feminism cannot be explored sufficiently by assuming that they are tossing aside their liberties. Rather, the characters and their stories are best examined by exploring how each woman can work through her problems in ways that allow her to maintain her feminist position.

As a progressive and studied writer, Dionne Brand takes into her hand the responsibility of dealing with all the issues confronted by men and women and children of the Black community being not only the members of the proletarian class, but also because of belonging to the Black race. Right from the sufferings of the Blacks during slavery down through the periods of feudalism, early capitalism, the colonial period, the neo-colonial period and also globalisation-ruling currency are subject matter in her works. As a member of the Black community, she is committed to the task of unravelling the exploitative past and present of her people. She does it with panache and power.

The attempt has been made in the paper to analyze the predicament of dalit woman in Geeta Nagabhushan’s Kannada novel Dange (Mutiny1997) from the feminist perspective. The novel explores various facets of the Indian dalit woman and depicts the social and cultural status of dalit women and portrays intricate human nature, graveness, sufferings and inhuman male oppression to highlight and thereby aims to create an awareness of certain social evils. The novel explores the emotional world of dalit women, revealing an awareness of varied forces with dalit feminine sensibility. The author concentrates on mute miseries and helplessness of Durgi, a dalit woman who is tormented by high castes and openly discourses her inner conflict.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the realm of gender-bound language. A myriad of studies in this area are devoted to different speech acts. To expand the scope of speech act studies, the present contribution highlights the gender differences in frequency of utilizing five most common gratitude expressions ranging from least affective to most affective in Persian language. To this aim, the data employed includes a corpus of 40 naturally-occurring gratitude exchanges, 20 for men and 20 for women of academic context, collected through giving participants a researcher-made 20 items questionnaire. The results revealed that there is a meaningful difference between men and women in using these gratitude expressions, in the way that, contrary to the men, women tend to use more affective ones.

John Bunyan's The Pilgrim’s Progress, is one of the most important religious texts ever written in English. There are several important factors that have made for the perfect and excellent structure of this seventeenth century work of English literature. What follows is an attempt to analyze these elements in detail in order to find how such a masterpiece has been created and why it has gained such importance in realm of religious writings that has been given the title of Second Bible.

A novel depicts a wide range of imaginary characters concerning the behaviour of human beings in real life. An individual who takes delight in interpreting novels can gain knowledge and obtain worldly wisdom. Also, since the reader is exposed to several situations, most of them being real-life circumstances, he/she gets an opportunity to acquire and enhance the soft skill sets required for both personal and professional lives. What is resolutely believed by the employers and colleges these days is that a student of technology must possess few most important identities of soft skills which cannot be overlooked, especially the soft skills like communication skills, leadership qualities, time management, interpersonal skills and presentation skills. Offering training in soft skills through children’s literature facilitates the students in putting up their behavioural skills in a superior style.

The astonishing research on the nature of students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning in the 1980s by Horwitz paved the way for a multitude of investigations into this topic. There have been different studies focusing on the beliefs of EFL learners but the focus on students who learn English for their major field of study is lacking. This study aimed to address this gap and examined beliefs about learning a foreign language held by 90 Iranian female university students majoring in Theology and Islamic sciences. The present inquiry addressed beliefs held by the beginners and intermediate learners in order to assess which areas of beliefs were commonly shared by the two groups of learners and which areas contained considerable differences in beliefs hence finding the cause for their weakness in English. This study employed a questionnaire based on Horwitz’s (1988) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) as a research instrument, with some modifications to be appropriate to Iranian context. Statistical analysis detected three items where opinions of these two groups of students were significantly different and a pattern derived from the beliefs of both groups in Iranian context and in relation to English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

This paper entitled A Study of Placelessness in V. S. Naipaul’s Life and Works focuses and analyzes with great sovereignty how the fire of getting a place fulgurates repeatedly in V. S. Naipaul’s own life and his works. This theme, directly or indirectly, has been smeared by him in some of his fiction and non-fiction works. The paper analyzes uselessness, rootlessness, placelessness, selflessness and unsuccessfulness of his characters. Place becomes burning issue in his own life also. In Naipaul’s works, his characters deliberately get staunch support by him as they personally feel a lack of a suitable place to affirm and confirm their presence in the mundane world. This paper is an attempt to give answer why is called Naipaul rootless despite of having his good roots not only in Trinidad but also in the other countries of the world and why his characters feel suffocation and seem taciturn. Naipaul gave vent to his accumulated anguish or grief through his characters in his works. Naipaul, a noted raconteur, to what extent remains successful in his endeavors with regard of the concept of place, is the key concept of this paper.