A Review of Gentte's Zero Focus by Examining Bozorg Alavi's Short Stories. [In Persian]

Abstract

Our life is intertwined with narratives, or rather life itself is a narrative. All groups and classes of human being have their own narratives; The importance of narration has attracted the attention of researchers. This knowledge, which emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, has gone through three periods of "pre-structuralism, structuralism and post-structuralism" since its inception, and in each period, its method of research has undergone fundamental changes. The main subject of the present study is related to the second period of narrative-research, that is, structuralist narrative research. Gerard Genette from France is one of the great theorists in this field. He was the one who transformed the study of perspective, introducing the concept of "focalization" to show that "one who sees" is not necessarily the same as "one who speaks." "Focus" is a term that Gerard Genette first chose instead of "perspective" to distinguish the narrator from the narrator. He has divided the focus into three types, zero, internal and external, and has elaborated on them. In this study, the three types of foci in Alavi's stories have been studied by an analytical-descriptive manner, and a new look at genette's zero focus has been presented by criticizing the genette's method in dividing the types of foci. The results show that genette's criterion in this classification is heterogeneous and focalist and the depth of focus are intertwined; Also, his zero focus is in fact a combination of two external and internal focuses and can not be considered a new type. On the other hand, sometimes in the story, there are reports that do not fit into any of Genette's divisions; Like when the narrator interrupts the story report and provides information to the audience in various fields such as scientific information. In our opinion, this type of report should be considered as devoid of focus and the title of zero focus should be generalized to them.

Keywords

• Narratology
• Perspective
• Gerard Genette
• Short Story
• Bozorg Alavi