Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• fatemeh zamani

Department of persian language and literature, kosar university of Bojnord, Bojnord, Iran,

Abstract

one of the important topics in the contemporary fiction literature of the world is attention to women, their issues and problems .Among the contemporary Iranian writers, Fariba Vafi is one of the writers whose main focus of his fictional works is "women". she tries to represent the concept of women and femininity at different linguistic levels, which arises from the cultural, social and historical background of women, and criticizes gender distinctions and restrictions and deprivations of women. Therefore, based on Zoltan Kovecses's theory of conceptual metaphor, which considers linguistic metaphors to be culturally based, the conceptual metaphors of "femininity" have been extracted and analyzed in the fictional works of Fariba and its social and cultural foundations. The conducted study shows that the cognitive metaphors of "femininity" in Vafi's works come from three different cultural systems: "patriarchal", "modern" and "ancient". The cultural basis of many conceptual metaphors such as "a woman is nothing", "a woman is inferior", "a woman is a captive" have emerged based on the patriarchal cultural system. Metaphors such as "a woman is an angel" and "a woman is a guardian" are based on the mythological beliefs of ancient Iran about goddesses. Metaphors such as "a woman is a doll" and "a woman is a commodity" are based on modern and westernized culture, which unfortunately has put the current situation of women under the spotlight.

Keywords

• Conceptual metaphor
• the concept of femininity
• cultural system
• story
• Fariba Vafi

Main Subjects

• Literature