Matn/Pizhūhī-i Adabī (Dec 2023)
A Study of the Narrative Construction of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni based on Text World Theory
Abstract
The reading of ancient Persian heritage, and especially historical narratives based on cognitive theories such as Text World Theory is necessary because new scientific approaches provide space for accurate identification and discovery of the hidden layers of texts. In this study, with the analytic-descriptive method, we applied the Text World Theory in the analysis and study of the narrative construction of the first volume of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni and figured out that the propositions related to character descriptions are more than preposition-related to scene descriptions, also because the deictic sub-worlds are smaller, so the reader does not travel much in the different temporal and spatial spaces in a narrative and thus does not experience and conceptualize the text worlds that differ from the original text world in terms of temporal and spatial variables. Temporal pointers are no more accurate than space pointers. The attitudinal and epistemic sub-worlds are scarce, and one of the reasons for this is the narrator's unchanging viewpoint. Jowayni reports narrations more than characters.Keywords: Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayn, Cognitive Linguistics, Text World Theory, Discourse World, Sub-world. IntroductionAncient Persian texts, especially historical texts, are precious treasures that refer us to the outside world; most research that has been done around these prose texts has been formalistic, and less effort has been made to look at these treasures from the point of view of being able to refer them to the outside world. That is why Shafiei Kadkani considers them to be "dark lights" (Shafiei Kadkani, 1381:15). that they are in our hands and we have not made the necessary efforts to light them because in order to light these lights, in addition to oil, which is lexical and rhetorical knowledge, we also need the fire of insight and new theories.In this research, we are trying to analyze the historical narratives from the first volume of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni from the perspective of the text world theory so that we can reveal its secrets, or, in the interpretation of Shafiei, turn on this light.Our main issue is how to describe the narratives in the first volume of this work, and to analyze this issue, we should use the text world theory and its elements. Literature ReviewText world theory using cognitive assumptions, and especially the category of cognitive poetics, was proposed by Paul Worth in 1999 in a book called Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse and by people such as Joanna Gavins in a book entitled Text World Theory: An Introduction was developed and expanded by Peter Stockwell in a book titled Cognitive Poetics. According to Paul Worth, investigating and identifying the cognitive processes that are the basis of any human communication, such as reading a book, performing a play, and even talking on the phone, etc., is possible through this psychological approach; therefore, the main focus of this theory is on examining human communication processes (Gavins, 2007:6).The main basis of the text world theory is that humans process and understand discourse through mental representations. Text world theory, which is a linguistic event, by putting the reader and the writer together as the two main participants of the discourse and expanding their mental space, seeks to achieve the worlds of the text and possible worlds through the mental representations of the participants of this discourse. "According to this theory, when humans communicate with each other, they depict the scene, the space, and the world in their minds." (Obergon. et.al, 2001:244). This theory is a discourse framework that is concerned with how a text is constructed and produced and how the content surrounding that text affects its production and acceptance. The theory of the world of the text consists of three conceptual layers: discourse world, text world, and sub-world, and by examining these layers, we will examine the narratives of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni based on these three layers. MethodologyOur research method in this article is the analytical-descriptive-documentary method based on the theory of the world of text.In this article, we intend to explore examples of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni narratives based on this theory and show how the mental representations and application of this theory are used in this work. Therefore, in the layers related to the discourse world and the text world, there are two narratives from each historical event, and to avoid repeating the content, it is enough to mention two examples.But in the sub-world layer, the elements related to this world are examined in the first volume of this work, and at the end of each topic, the frequency of the use of these elements is given.4.ConclusionIn the investigation of this historical work, two or three narratives from each historical event were considered and analyzed as narrative propositions, out of which narrative and narrative propositions prevailed. The world is the primary text of the Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni in the past tense, and temporal changes do not take place except in a few cases through the retelling of anecdotes that fit Jowayni's narrative; therefore, the dynamism and movement in the world of the text, which should be shown by continuous verbs, is not expressed in this historical work through the past tense. The limitation of epistemological worlds is the result of the limitation of the author's control over the characters in the narrative.In Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni, due to the small number of worlds included in the reference, the reader does not walk in different time and place spaces in the same narrative, and as a result, he experiences text worlds that are different from the original text world in terms of time and place variables. It does not conceptualize.Attitudinal and epistemological sub-worlds are less than one volume of Tarikh Jahangooshay-e- Jowayni, and one of the reasons for this is the lack of change in the perspective of the narrator. Each narrative is a world of text. Characters are not stable or part of a whole.By using attitudinal worlds, the author leads the reader to conceptualize the intellectual world of the characters in the story, although due to its historical nature and type of reporting, the use of these worlds is limited in most narratives, which causes a lack of representation of goal, wish, future, and imagination in this work. The sub-worlds are sometimes available to the participants of the discourse and, in some cases, only to the characters of a narrative. The abundance of attitudinal worlds; on the one hand, shows the frequent and continuous entry of the author into the intellectual world of the narrative characters and, as a result, the reader's conceptualizations of these intellectual worlds, and on the other hand, it shows how the attitudes and beliefs of the characters of this narrative are influenced in the shaping of events. Attitudinal sub-worlds are more than opinion sub-worlds; therefore, they are all available from the character type, and the reader cannot enter the world switches that result from the original text world.
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