Maryam Mehrara - Department of literature and humanities, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

It used to be common among the critics to use biographical and historical information behind a text, or better to say behind a text’s writer, to get to a better understanding of its meaning and its morals. However, after the emergence of the formalists, in Russia, and the new critics, in the United States, this inclination toward finding a relation between history and meaning of a text, rather than analyzing the text itself, was demolished. On this verge of history, the critics decided to analyze a text closely to find the different connections in the text interwoven in its words. According to the formalists, a literary text must have been different from other texts and its literariness should have been proven by its use of literary devices. The goal of this essay is to analyze an Iranian story by Mohammad Mohammad Ali and to determine the different figurative devices used in the text to get to the ultimate unity of the text and consequently to the different roles of its components i.e. to its literariness. In order to get to this ending, this essay focuses on the dominant figurative device used: paradox, and make a conclusion on the unity of the text by such paradox

Formalism, Literariness, Akasi, Mohammad Mohammad Ali, Figurative devices