تبلیغات 
Someone once said creative writing is like iodine to a wound. It cuts life a knife when it is poured on the wound, but the pain is temporary. The end result is a healed wound.
Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate")[1] is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:
When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.
In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.
Culture shock refers to the anxiety and feelings (of surprise, disorientation, uncertainty, confusion, etc.) felt when people have to operate within a different and unknown cultural or social environment, such as a foreign country. It grows out of the difficulties in assimilating the new culture, causing difficulty in knowing what is appropriate and what is not. This is often combined with a dislike for or even disgust (moral or aesthetical) with certain aspects of the new or different culture.
The social environment (context), also known as the milieu, is the identical or similar social positions and social roles as a whole that influence the individuals of a group. The social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts. A given social environment is likely to create a feeling of solidarity amongst its members, who are more likely to keep together, trust and help one another. Members of the same social environment will often think in similar styles and patterns even when their conclusions differ.
The term self-help (or self-improvement) refers to self-guided improvement[1]—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
Self-help often takes place on the basis of self-reliance, of publicly available information, or of support groups where people in similar situations join together.[1] From early exemplars in self-driven legal practice[2] and home-spun advice, the connotations of the phrase have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, purveyed through the popular genre of self-help books and through self-help personal-development movements. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging.[1]
Groups associated with health conditions may consist of patients and/or their care givers. As well as featuring long-time members sharing experiences, these health groups can become lobby groups and clearing-houses for educational material. Those who help themselves by learning about health problems do exemplify self-help, while one might better regard help in this context as peer-to-peer support.
Peter Wagner is a German social philosopher. His research focus is with the issues of social theory and political philosophy of contemporary Europe. He has done comparative research in the history of the social sciences, and has in his publications attempted to formulate and utilize a sociology of modernity.
Modernization theory is the theory used to summarize modern transformations of social life. The theory looks at the internal factors of the country. It is an evolutionary theory that assumes that with help, "traditional" countries can develop in the same ways "modern" countries did. Throughout certain periods of time, modernization theories attempt to identify the social variables which contribute to the social progress and development of certain societies and seek to explain the details of social evolution. Not surprisingly, modernization theories are subject to much criticism stemming from the views of the communist and capitalist parties, world systems theorists, and globalization theory and Dependency theory. Modernization theory not only stresses the process of change, but also the response to that change. It also looks at internal dynamics referring to social and cultural structure and the adaptation of new technologies.
Modernization is a concept of sociology, politics and culture. It is the view that a standard, teleological evolutionary pattern, as described in the social evolutionism theories, exists as a template for all nations and peoples.[1][2]
Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (14 March 1905 – 17 October 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist, well known to the broad public for his skeptical analyses of the post-war vogue in France for leftist ideologies that largely took their inspiration from a Marxist tradition.
Social Darwinism refers to various ideologies based on a concept that competition among all individuals, groups, nations, or ideas drives social evolution in human societies.[1]
The term draws upon the common use of the term Darwinism, which is a social adaptation of the theory of natural selection as first advanced by Charles Darwin. Natural selection explains speciation in populations as the outcome of competition between individual organisms for limited resources popularly known as "survival of the fittest", a term coined by Anthropologist Herbert Spencer, or "The Gospel of Wealth" theory written by Andrew Carnegie.
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877[2] and was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter. The term "social darwinism" has rarely been used by advocates; instead it has chiefly been used (pejoratively) by its opponents.[3]
While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century.
Sociology of the Internet or sociology of cyberspace explores the social implications of the Internet, new social networks, online societies (virtual communities) and social interaction on the Internet.
The Internet—the newest in the series of major information breakthroughs—is of interest for sociologists in various ways: as a tool for research, for example, in using online questionnaires instead of paper ones, as a discussion platform, and as a research topic. Sociology of the Internet in the last sense includes analysis of online communities (e.g. as found in newsgroups), virtual communities and virtual worlds, organizational change catalyzed through new media like the Internet, and social change at-large in the transformation from industrial to informational society (or to information society). Online communities can be studied statistically through network analysis and at the same time interpreted qualitatively, such as through virtual ethnography. Social change can be studied through statistical demographics or through the interpretation of changing messages and symbols in online media studies.
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (February 13, 1901 –August 30, 1976) was one of the major figures in 20th-century American sociology. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be."
Formalism in the broadest sense refers to a type of criticism that emphasizes the "form" of a text rather than its content. Formalist critics also tend to eschew discussion of any elements deemed external to the text itself (history, politics, biography).
More narrowly, Formalism refers to the critics and theorists working in Russia (actually, the Soviet Union) in the 1910s and 1920s. Major figures include Victor Shklovsky (Theory of Prose), Boris Eichenbaum (Theory of the Formal Method), Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the Folktale), Yuri Tynianov ("On Literary Evolution"), and Roman Jakobson ("Linguistics and Poetics"). Mikhail Bakhtin is often inappropriately lumped in with the Russian Formalists, but he has more in common with historicist and cultural approaches.
Russian Formalists emphasized the "literariness" of artistic texts, which they found in the linguistic and structural features of literature (as opposed to its subject matter). For example, Victor Shklovsky, in his famous essay "Art as Technique," offers his notion of defamiliarization as the defining feature of literary texts. Art takes that which is familiar and "makes it strange," slowing down the act of perception and making the reader see the world in new ways (think, for example, of how Cubist painting changes our perception of everyday objects and forces the viewer to work to reconstruct the image).
The Formalists also introduced the distinction between what they called "syuzhet" and "fabula"--roughly translated as "discourse" and "story"--that is, the distinction between the abstract storyline (fabula) and the virtually infinite number of ways in which that story can be "plotted" (discourse). The Formalists, understandably enough, often emphasized those texts that had complex, sophisticated, and often self-reflexive plots and language, features that flaunt their "literariness" (Tristram Shandy, the Quixote, Nikolai Gogol's skaz narration, etc.).
The Russian Formalists were among the first to bring a scientific approach to literary analysis and influenced other movements such as the Prague Linguistic Circle and Structuralism, and their work has many affinities with New Criticism and the Chicago School of critics. While many have criticized some formalists' unwarranted exclusion of history and context from literary analysis, their sophisticated insights into the workings of narrative have been invaluable to a wide variety of critics and theorists, particularly those working in narrative theory.
Literary analysis involves interpreting a work and arguing for a particular way of understanding it. Such analysis is frequently called "literary criticism," but this phrase does not necessarily mean finding fault with a work of literature. Rather, literary analysis critiques, compares, and judges literary works. An essay of this type includes the following:
Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the different genres�narrative, dramatic, lyric�in addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to create the culture.
1. What Is Literary Theory?
2. Traditional Literary Criticism
3. Formalism and New Criticism
4. Marxism and Critical Theory
5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism
6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
9. Cultural Studies
10. Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
