Malihe Al-sadat BANIFATEMI, Behzad BAREKAT

Cultural Context: A Comparative Study of Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Ebrahim Golestan's the Stream and the Wall and the Thirst

Abstract. Both Raymond Carver and Ebrahim Golestan are widely acknowledged as writers who pay special attention to the form and language of their writings. This study starts with these two general characteristics of Carver's and Golestan's writings in order to search for the overt and covert features of prose in Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Ebrahim Golestan's The Stream and the Wall and the Thirst. The paper necessarily does its best to perform some kind of comparison between the two works of Carver and Golestan. Following a formal linguistic approach, the research traces one aspect of macro-level, cultural context, and tries to show some major manifestations of it in the stories of the two selected fictions. The research undertakes to find out whether these short story collections might act as architectures with similar cultural contexts. Reading Carver (1981) and Golestan (1351/1972) for the issue of cultural context, it can be concluded that although they both give a considerable attention to the structure of their stories as if they are building solid architectures out of carefully chosen linguistic units, they reflect different cultural believes and customs.

Keywords:

Comparative Analysis, Macro-level, Cultural Context Raymond Carver, Ebrahim Golestan,

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