ژان فرانسوا لیوتار در نوشته‌های خود به پست مدرنیسم و شرایط و خصوصیات آن پرداخته‌ و ویژگی‌هایی را برای فرهنگ، آثار و ا ندیشه‌های پست مدرن برشمرده ‌است. از جمله ویژگی‌هایی که پست مدرنیسم را از سایر دوره‌ها و مکاتب ادبی و فرهنگی متمایز می‌سازد، بر افتادن و فروپاشی روایت‌های کلان است. بر این اساس می‌توان گفت آثار ادبی تا آنجا که روایت‌های کلان را به زیر می‌کشند و بنیاد آن‌ها را سست می‌نمایند، به سوی پست مدرنیسم گام برمی‌دارند و خود را به درجات کم‌تر یا بیش‌تر در میان آثار پست مدرن جا می‌دهند. مطالعه حاضر بر آن است تا سه اثر برگزیده مارتین امیس را از منظر ساخت و واسازی ابر روایت ها مورد بررسی قرار دهد و نشان دهد چگونه ادبیات و فلسفه شانه به شانه هم اضمحلال گفتمان‌های متصلب را به تصویر می‌کشند و در وانفسای ناامیدی ها، امکان بروز و ظهور گفتمان یا روایتی جدید را ممکن می دانند. روش پژوهش حاضر مطالعات بین رشته ای است که به صورت کتابخانه ای انجام گرفته است. تفاصيل المقالة

Textbooks have a chief standing as an essential element of language teaching; therefore, analyzing and evaluating them is imperative to guarantee their efficiency and consistency with the objectives set and expected in language classes. Hence, this study utilizing a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) model, examined Cognitive, Communicative, and Creature potentials of three Iranian recently published junior high school English textbooks, called Prospect Series. The results showed that the intended books aiming at following the CLT approach failed to satisfy communicative, cognitive, and creative potentials sufficiently and some crucial ingredients of CLT, such as strategy instruction, use of authentic materials, and skills integration. Additionally, the over-emphasis on Iranian culture caused sociocultural aspects of CLT to be relatively neglected in this series, and foreign cultures are roughly avoided. Although the development of the Prospects is surely a step forward toward designing high-quality Iranian English textbooks in Iranian schools, progressive modifications on textbooks are always needed to reach their greatest formats. The findings of this study have useful implications for the Iranian stakeholders in the field of teaching English as a foreign language and the authors of the Prospect series in terms of revising and modifying activities to achieve the highest congruency with CLT tenants. تفاصيل المقالة

Course books play a crucial role in educational process and are believed to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching. Every new textbook needs to be analyzed in order to reach its best. Hence this study aims to analyze three Iranian English course books to reveal how various cultures are shown via the course books characters’ race, nationality, gender, and intercultural communications. The inspection of the course books revealed unequal cultural representations with the dominance of white and male characters. Furthermore, regarding the intercultural interactions, most examples included conversations among Iranians in a superficial level of cultural engagement. It was also found that males’ roles are more highlighted throughout the series. Hence, in some cases, the leading ideology floating in this series is prototyping the Iranian-Islamic culture and values by means of English. Overall, this series seemed to suffer from biased embedded ideologies in terms of presenting cultures, races and genders. The findings of this study are of great help for language teachers, language learners, textbook developers, and curriculum developers to adopt an international position toward education. تفاصيل المقالة

At the heart of freedom, justice, politics, power, and the differend in Lyotard’s philosophy lies the question of linkage, a creative tackling of which makes the real difference since it is the space in which phrases, discourse regimens, and finally metanarratives form to give power a chance to be both exerted and resisted. In The Information, Martin Amis makes novel choices of phrases and also of the way he links them together so that new implications come to the fore concerning interpersonal power relations on a small scale and metanarratives on a large scale whose determination is the main objective of this library-based study which can boast of a question few studies, if any, have posed so far and also of a novelty apparent in its detailed, palpable depiction of simple, single events like taking a photo or travelling by air to the status of a little narrative that challenges such metanarratives as Marxism and capitalism. The story of two authors as rivals stands at the heart of Amis’ novel, working as a link that relates micro-components to macro-structures to show how a single move at a local level can disturb titanic structures and also how the position of such enormous structures leaves its definite footprints on the tiniest local components. تفاصيل المقالة