Sunday, April 5, 2020


A segmental draft of a Novel

What is happening to us as the inhabitants of the Earth?

Will we survive the self-inflicting maladies driving us toward full stupidity?

Mordi gets interested in Hasta and prepares a scene to rape her and flees. Icarus starts a conflict with him and chasing him to bring back to law. Mordi comes to Icarus one night to confess that he was trained by the system to soil the dissidents this way to discard them as infamous characters to block them from turning into hero. Icarus murders Mordi in a challenge and flees. He tries to find a way out of the earth as a refugee in the Mars. 
He gets there and finds something unexpected.

Here is a list of my original books on literary criticism and literary translation (novels)

http://www.ketab.ir/BookList.aspx?Type=&Code=&pageIndex=1&pageSize=10

Saturday, March 28, 2020

My New Translation of Notre Dame de Paris which had already been translated into Persian from English, but this time I translated it from French into Persian.
 نوتردام پاریس


 ۴۵۶ صفحه - رقعی (شومیز) - چاپ ۱ - ۱۰۰۰ نسخه  ISBN: 978-622-6124-06-5 تاریخ نشر:۹۸/۰۸/۰۴  قیمت :۱۲۰۰۰۰۰ ریال
كد دیویی:۸۸۳.۰۱
  زبان كتاب:فارسی  محل نشر:قم - قم

Friday, March 27, 2020

CELTA

Three out of four English language teaching jobs require a CELTA qualification

CELTA - the most widely recognised English teaching qualification in the world

CELTA is the most widely recognised English teaching qualification in the world. It’s the qualification most often requested by employers; three out of four English language teaching jobs require a CELTA qualification*.
Whether you’re a new teacher looking for their first teaching job, or you want to prove to employers that you have the teaching skills with a recognised certificate, CELTA is the qualification you need.
Mission Statement

Majid Jafari Saray


Mission Statement: “Search, Learn, Think and Make a Better World for Living”
Vision Statement: Think and Learn to Love and Tolerate to Build a Real Utopia out of the Current Dystopia. The staff should help solve the essential challenges of the 21st century through:
_ Accelerating international leadership various disciplines.
_ Strengthening students to fulfill their academic and professional passions in their fields.
_ Boosting and supporting dynamicity dedicated to guiding, teaching, mentoring, researching, and
Creativity in science and arts.


چهارمین کنفرانس بین المللی پژوهشهای کاربردی در مطالعات زبان

۵ آذر ۱۳۹۵Text Box: 1               

Exploitation of Language in Orwellian Dystopia through Foucauldian Power
Majid Jafari Saray

ABSTRACT
This article attempts to focus on language as a Foucauldian power tool which has mostly been employed by totalitarian and despotic regimes to dominate their subjects not only physically using military force but also mentally and even spiritually through manipulation of their minds and self-policing. The best tool for mental dominance over the masses in a given society is language which has direct relationship with the mentality of the individuals and their mental abilities. George Orwell reiterates this idea which comes in line with Foucauldian power notion which categorizes language and discourse as one of the power tools. Analysis of the novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, yields a good substantiation to claim and supports the hypothesis of this research which considers language as a sensitive and complicated power tool used in totalitarian societies.

Keywords: Orwellian Dystopia, Foucauldian Power tools, Language, Nineteen Eighty Four, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Ingsoc’



Exploitation of Language in Orwellian Dystopia through Foucauldian Power
Introduction
Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, focuses on Winston Smith, a middle-aged, Outer Party member working with the Ministry of Truth. Winston is, in effect, representing “everyman” in the middle social class in Oceania, one of the three countries that have divided the world among themselves. Winston’s main job is handling past paper news and adjusting them to the current requirements, thus, recreating and polishing the “Truth.” He hardly remembers his parents or the years he is in presently. Oceania, is a name given to one of the three nations stretching from the Americas to Australia, including the British Isles, which is under the rule of a mysterious “Big Brother,” a nigh-immortal, formidable, incredibly rational, wise, omnipresent, and omniscient politico-charismatic figure, visible to masses and party members merely through his giant posters gazing from every wall and building.
In Oceania, simply keeping a journal of events is an unforgivable crime which can lead to “vaporization” of any of the members, including Winston. Along with the total surveillance through telescreens, monitoring every action of the people, the ruling party endeavors to wipe out the historical memory from the mind of the society, replacing it with the preferred version of the events. However, throughout the story, Winston’s wish to keep a record of his current days, remember the truth and transmit it to the future generations turns out to bring the Party’s judgment and punishment on him in the end. One of the main targets of the ruling party in Oceania, as it is inferred from the context, in two other states as well, history and historical interpretations of the past events and stories are the same.
Power and its Sources
Power, like reality and fiction, is an abstract phenomenon that cannot be observed directly, therefore, “our evidence is used in indirect ways to establish [its] truth” (Morriss 145). As Bertrand Russell defines it, power is the “production of intended effects,” therefore the effects of power practice are the only evidences to prove its existence (Clegg et al. 72). For Rescher, “our observation is limited to performance, to what a thing (or person) in fact does in specific occasions. Its powers and their congeners do not lie open to public view” (181). This characteristic makes it more difficult and complex to give a clear-cut definition, though numerous definitions have been issued by various people, each depicting their own perception and understanding of power. Some take it as a solid, fixed, inflexible and unleashed phenomenon that intrudes into the remotest corners of the personal or public lives, natural or artificial, and obliges the effected subject to be driven into the desired way or state. Others see it as a dynamic and flexible abstract that does not equal the negativity of “force” but rather it usually plays a neutral role in its effect issuance. In the introduction to his book, Power: A New Social Analysis, Russell considers power as a dynamic phenomenon that is free from any kind of limited forms like wealth, economics, militarism, propaganda. . . . This recognition is similar to Foucauldian notion of power. Unlike militarists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the economists and socialists like Marx who considered military forces and economy respectively as the real form of power, Russell says that power cannot be restricted to any of these forms as its final and sole form, but rather, power can be witnessed in any of these outfits as its one form from a group of forms. This group contains pen of writers as one of the forms power can mold itself into. In this case, using language, a writer can work on the minds of his readers by influencing them to challenge or admit the proposed opinions. As stated above, this is one of the reasons that Plato banned poets from entering into his Republic.
The notion of “modern power” comes into existence through Foucault who distinguishes the traditional or “sovereign power” from the “modern” one in terms of some traits. In The Order of Things, Foucault believes that “in classical society power was fixed, visible, mappable,” however, “in modern society it is uncontainable, untheorizable, [and] productive” (During 119). Sovereign power is concentrated to be at the central part of the community where the head of the society, the king, resides, above whom God stands at the highest. Sovereign power is perfect at God’s site but decreases gradually descending hierarchically down through the layers of the society and nullifies at the outskirts of the communal colony (148-9). In particular, those whom E. J. Hobsbawm called “social bandits” (and who were to become what Henry Mayhew called “urban nomads”) lived outside the reach of the sovereign power (149). While modern power encompasses all the classes and layers of the modern society, both at the central or marginal positions.
For Foucault power finds meaning and applicability only within society and penetrates even into the backyards of the community. Foucault believes that
power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted “above” society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon action is possible and in fact ongoing. (1982: 222)
Nevertheless, by this statement Foucault does not mean that power is applicable only to groups and individuals within those groups nor is available in the group textures. For him power resides within individuals and focuses on individuals though it gains meaning in the “social nexus.” It can be used over subjects or groups without being limited to specific classes or individuals (Brannigan 48). Foucault recognizes that power is not controlled by individual subjects or groups but rather it is as general efficacy which is only discernible in particular events and actions. Foucault does not see power itself as an instrument mastered by individuals or groups. For Foucault power is capable to create a new order through some tools available within the society. Some of these tools have been mentioned earlier in this thesis and will be elaborated more in the following sections. Power for Foucault is an efficacy which “passes through, rather than emanates from, every possible relationship” (Brannigan 48). The relationship between a writer and his readers can also be of the power sources. Writer’s dexterity in manipulating the language of his narrative helps him to dominate the minds of his readers according to his reality and mentality. This tool can be a means to make the storyline and form the reality and identity of the writer and transmit them onto his readers directly or indirectly, directly through his frank expressions and debates, or indirectly through the subconscious mind of the readers by skillful utilization of the medium of communication, language. The latter method is what Naipaul resorts in his narratives which will be dealt with in this dissertation.
Much of the realities we hold onto are formed by writers, politicians, philosophers, theoretical scientists and scholars, who impose the mentally created and fictionally formulated worlds onto the laymen, convincing them of the credibility of their ideas. Once man saw the earth as a flat board and used to live on the flat plateau balanced on the horns of a bull, with extremes from which he could fall down if he stepped out its boundaries.[1] Later, he changed his view to see the same earth as a round ball without any noticeable extremes, floating in infinite space. Today the same globe is believed to be more oval than globe. The nature of human being impels him to find comfortable refuge in a discipline by fictionalizing his world more, like the one we witness in Matrix[2], as John Gray mentions in his Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004).
Language as Power Tools in Nineteen Eighty Four
Language is a power means that plays essential role in building up the mentalities, and identities of the individuals and communities about the self and Other. All other tools, such as history, ideology, education, politics and economy, gain validity through language and history. As Language is able to create the realities and identities through diction and depiction, history can confirm and stabilize the created realities and identities as valid and reliable. In George Orwell’s words, “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”[3] And hence, who controls the language, in this case Newspeak, controls the minds; who controls the minds controls the masses. Therefore, the modern and postmodern colonizers have taken up again the cultural elements like language and history to secure or expand their power positions and dominance over the subject nations.
In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the production of the intellect over long periods of time was “nothing but errors” (169). Benjamin, Marx and Althusser jointly assert that reality as equal to truth is a “version of events preferred, indeed imposed, by the dominant or ruling group in society” (Branningan 42). This can be supported with Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous statement in which he believed that “history is written by the winners.”[4] By writing history, the men in authority define reality and truth for their subjects. Therefore, reality in its philosophically common signification is an invention of a politically or ideologically dominant group who impose their preferences on the common classes of the society as the only comprehensive and sacred order. In order to gain enough validity for the invented reality, the power controllers turn to revelation to relate their fabrication to the supernatural and God. This kind of reality is, then, propagated by the dominant group which is believed to include the ultimate truth and reality; thus attempting to extrude all the views and news according to the patterns of their own established dies. While “outside political [and ideological] contest and competing wills to power” there are “only different versions of events,” which, in his The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault labels “facts” (126).

Newspeak (Ingsoc)
In the modern world of 1984, what is happening to the language of Oceania is depicting another facet of the case. Here the Party has launched a great project in purifying and rectifying the "Old language" into the "Ingsoc” or “Newspeak". The old words like "freedom", "individualism", "peace" that have become stale and pointless and have lost their real meaning, are to be wiped out of the dictionaries, and consequently all texts in print or in mouths, and substituted by the newly invented ones like, "facecrime", "thoughtcrime", "goodthinker", "doublethink" or the words whose meanings have been intensified or altered like "war", "ignorance" and "slavery".

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotee of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought__ that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc__ should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on the words.

As discussed before there is a direct link between a language in question, its structure and vocabulary, and the structure of the mind of its speakers and the thought procedure of its users. In his "Politics and the English Language", Orwell confirms:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. (Orwell Essays, 156-7)

In Nineteen Eighty Four, the same thing is happening to the English language. Shortening and limiting the vocabulary, in the length and meaning and omitting the unwanted words and redundant grammatical rules is another phase of the project. The outcome, Newspeak, will be nothing but a defective language with no comprehensive grammar and very limited vocabulary. By this means, the government will find itself somehow successful in penning the minds of its subjects to the afore-determined ways of thinking which is guided and monitored strictly by the rulers.

Orwell adheres this kind of language abuse mostly to politicians. Since politicians deal with power subject more than any other classes, and they resort power in entirely different ways that are generally regarded to be negative, like force, hypocrisy, political lies… They manipulate language, corrupt it and destroy its beauty by trying to display their ideals to the people that may never come true. "Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind" (171).

Literature is of no exception. There is a special department called Fiction Department in which literary books especially, so-called potboiler novels, are written "on novel-writing machines" a work that "consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor" (130).

By controlling the language and ultimately controlling the minds of its speakers, the Party will be able to drive the speakers to lose, after one or two generations, their ability to speak or even think in a way other than the Party prefers. As a result, the possibility of any oppositional speaking or problematic thinking will be thwarted in the bud, and the danger of any kind of revolt or revolutionary movement will be entirely eliminated.

Conclusion
As Foucault believes, power cannot be limited to a specific source or usage; it comes from everything and is applied to anything it includes. Everything is disposed to the various faces of power it puts itself into. Language, sex and science are three most common means that are hold of to get to the desired power. Since human being's first-rate tool for communication is language, in its any form, written, oral, symbolic, colloquial, poetical . . ., it has always been one of the most powerful means in the hands of the politicians, scholars and prophets, to persuade the people, lead them into their preferred paths or stir up their emotions for their own targets. This manipulation of language as a power tool is pervasively reflected in the literary, philosophical and scientific works. As we saw above, in Oceania language is an important tool to control the thoughts of its speakers, by shortening and limiting the vocabulary range and deforming the structure of the discourse. We find Orwell's Fiction Department, in which artificially made novels are churned out for masses, in the libraries and governmental offices, where they try to fulfill the task of rewriting a new dictionary to limit the vocabulary of the language and through it the mind of its speakers. This seems to be the best method in manipulating the mentality and creeds of the inhabitants of the society.
Taking the above discussed means of power into consideration and trying to find evidences of them in Nineteen-Eighty-Four gets one to this conclusion that the author, Orwell, has had based the tenets of social self-policing trends in a given society on the management or, in better words, manipulation of the spoken language of the subjects and ultimately their minds.

References:
Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's Press Inc., 1998.
Clegg, Stewart. Power in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006.
During, Simon. Foucault and Literature. London: Rutledge, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, The. A. M. Sheridan Smith (trans.). New York: Pantheon, 1972.
__________. Birth of Clinic, The. London: Routledge, 2003.
__________. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan (trans.). New York: Vintage, 1997.
__________. The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (Les Mots et Les Choses). Pantheon Books, 1970 (1966).

Gray, John. Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions. London: Granta, 2004.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Bandits. London: Abacus, 2004.
Mayhem, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. London: C. Griffin, [1864?].
Morriss, Peter. Power: A Philosophical Analysis. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Gay Science, The. Bernard Williams (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Orwell, George. 1984: A Novel. New York: Signet Classic, 1961.
__________. “Politics and the English Language.” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.
Rescher, Nicholas. Dialectics. [n.p.], 1977.
Russell, Bertrand; Brittan, Samuel. Power: A New Social Analysis. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938.





[1]               The famous “Flat Earth” of Flammarion Woodcut originates with Flammarion’s 1888 L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire 163.
                        [2] Matrix (1999) is the title of a famous movie directed by Any Wachowsky and Larry Wachowsky.
[3]               Nineteen Eighty Four, 248
[4]               http://www.quotegarden.com/index.html.

Teaching Literature


For me, learning is an active process in every discipline. It needs, therefore, an active and direct involvement of the learner in the process steered and monitored by the teacher. As consequence of the active involvement in the learning process, mastery on the subject can be expected from the learner. Otherwise, it would be a provisional retrieval of the memorized information which goes with the wind through the passage of time without any considerable actual or practical achievements. Literature is no exception. Literary subjects are directly or indirectly interacting with real life and facts in it. A student of literary studies should be able to interact with life and diverse issues in the world around with a shaper perception and smarter action and reaction which s/he achieves through defamiliarization fostered by literature.
As a teacher of English Language and Literature, I have dedicated myself to introducing my students to a wide variety of texts and subjects that will encourage them into critical thinking about the issues that emerge in their personal lives. My main objective is usually to facilitate their engagement with the ideas and themes expressed in the novels, short stories, and poems to prove to them the possibility of multiple significations and interpretations of a single text.
To achieve this objective, my strategy as a teacher is, first of all, to encourage a friendly relationship with the subject the students are to interact with for one semester, and more probably for longer time after their graduation. Therefore, they need to accept the subject either as a useful or interesting thing in their life. Hence, I have always attempted to apply a combination of techniques to promote not only the mastery of the subject, but also long-lasting (even life-long) learning and developing of the learners. For this purpose, the role of the students in forming the mood of the class and shaping the objective of the attempts is of essential importance. In my classes, students are not only passive audience who are expected to give in whatever they are provided with by the teacher. They have to learn skills such as critical thinking and rational decision making for their off-campus affairs as well. For me, teacher’s role is not limited to stuffing the memories of the students with predefined ideas and clichés turning their minds into reservoir of stale or preferred opinions.
Since literature and literary studies are constituted of various fields including reading and analyzing poetry, drama and novel, and writing on a wide variety of topics, which may be related to literature or not, requires different approaches to each category. I have experienced a variety of classes during my teaching years the most significant and challenging of which were Critical Writing and Short Story Telling. Through writing exercises, discussions, and student presentations, my objective is to provide the students with opportunities to think critically and develop their skills in communicating their ideas in more effective fashions. As I have experienced during my professional years, mere composition skills and knowledge such as paragraph development and grammar knowledge do not suffice to create an appealing texture for the reader or audience. The writer needs to consider the type and class of the audience with getting to know and utilize the most appropriate writing styles, and more importantly, not to lose her/his own "voice" among the words and sentences.
As a fresh lecturer with raw teaching techniques during my first semesters in my university, I found the writing and short story classes as two of the insufferably boring and exhausting ones both for the students and me. However, I thought that I needed to change my strategy partially, at least, to promote the results of the class. I started with writing class which was more energy-consuming than other subjects. I tried to attract the students more into the skill. Instead of giving them obscure topics to write about, I related the subjects to their personal lives to make them more tangible and understandable for them. In one of the writing classes, what we expected from a student was her/his ability to write critical essays on literary subjects. Therefore, I scheduled a warm-up section prior to entering into the writing task. The discussion of the subject with active participation of the students in class would prepare the minds of the students for critical thinking and jotting down their ideas.

Having been dealt with a wide array of subjects and courses such as essay writing, business correspondence, writing literary criticism, reading novel and poetry during my teaching tenure as English lecturer in undergraduate level, I have encountered heterogeneous classes with students who had various needs, motivations and aspirations. My attempt has always been to classify reading and writing as two aspects of one phenomenon which are complementary to each other. Therefore, they require the presence of the other to promote and develop.

The importance of writing and reading in one’s ability to comprehend and perceive the world around through the images, figurative language, and rhetoric of the writer in creating the meaning and views about the life and the world around have been elaborated in my PhD thesis on V. S. Naipaul’s travel narratives. The way a writer composes and arranges the order and position of the words and expressions in her/his text can not only cause misunderstandings between the reader and writer, but also create the reality for the reader as well.

Hence, the appropriate ways of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, as four coral skills for mastering a language and its literature, brings about the right way of communicating as writer, speaker, and audience, which is applicable not only to academic tasks of students, but also their actual life off the campus.

Majid Jafari Saray