Persian Literary Studies Journal
Volume:2 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2013

This paper explores the possible origins of some names in 1001 Nights. The names of the major characters of the Night stories, and their borrowed reflexes in Arabic, have been traced back to their ancient Persian roots. Examples from classical works are brought to argue that Shahrāzād, Shahriyār, and Dīnāzād are not only the correct forms but more suitable to the deep structure of the frame-story of 1001 Nights than other variations or alternative forms of these names.

This article draws attention to the ways in which Anita Amirrezvani’s The Blood of Flowers (2007), a historical novel set in 17th-century Iran, can be placed within the neo-orientalist discourse which informs many of the post-9/11 memoirs and novels set in contemporary Iran by women of the Iranian diaspora in the United States. Besides being a novel on Islam and Islamic rule—which makes it much timely for the post-9/11 period—The Blood of Flowers focuses on the question of women in Islamic/Iranian society, which furthers its consanguinity with the memoirs and novels written by women of the Iranian diaspora in the last decade. The argument made in this article is that Amirrezvani’s novel is, at least, as much about a distant and finished past of Iran as it is about contemporary Iran. In an attempt to retain the interest of the Western readers of diasporic Iranian literature by women, Amirrezvani has tried to retell the often repeated claims regarding women in present-day Iran in a new way, in the guise of a historical novel set in the distant past of Iran. This explains why, in the narrative, orientalist representations of Iran’s past history and neo-orientalist images of contemporary Iran are presented in an anachronistic coexistence.

This paper attempts to investigate the adolescent narrator’s journey into adulthood in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Neighbor. Considering the central character’s growth into adulthood, the paper argues that the compulsory military service can be fulfilled as a certain ‘rite of passage’ conventionalized within the society, as represented in the narrative. That is because, through this convention, Khaled is finally approved as an adult by his society. However, he is captured by anxiety of his military service, but he finally overcomes it towards the end of the novel. He is then claimed to have achieved a status in society, the bipolar structure of which shapes social attitudes, and this experience leads to his transition from ‘childhood’ to ‘adulthood’. Moreover, people in the storyworld are considered either grown-ups or non-grown-ups. Khaled, the protagonist, is part of the former group. The reader’s knowledge about the storyworld, however, is restricted to the character-narrator’s account, that is, the narrative perspective in this novel is oriented by narrating-I (Khaled-the adult), recounting retrospectively four years of his own adolescence. The act of narration does not refer to the experiencing-I (Khaled-the adolescent). According to the modern developmental models, the character in transition is supposed to be considered as an adolescent. But in the society into which Khaled was born, ‘adolescence’ is not ‘discovered’ as a stage of ‘life cycle.’ The so-called rite of passage, Khaled’s transformation, is seemingly achieved through military service from a modernist perspective, but it is questionable to what extent Khaled himself is aware of such transformation. Yet, it can be said that his development is affected by his political activities and his military service as well as by the other social subjects such as his family, neighbors, peers and party members.

The early twentieth-century nationalist discourse in Iran reviled, on the one hand, a Qajar hegemony on account of an exhausted “manifest destiny,” and lauded, on the other, a discourse of masculinity that assumed moral responsibility to protect the imaginary “geobody” of Iran. In this paper I examine how this discourse of patriotism resonates through Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s poem “This Autumn in Prison” (1966) and Esmail Fassih’s novel The Story of Javid (1981). With a comparative—and conducive—focus on Akhavan-Sales’s poetic figure Mazdusht at the outset of analysis, before turning primarily to Fassih’s protagonist Javid, I argue that the construction of an archetypal form of gender, or what I term an “original Iranian manhood,” is integral to both men of letters as they have channeled their nationalist concerns through literary expression. As I proceed with The Story of Javid, I propose that gender—nationally reimagined—shapes a quest narrative set, quite symbolically, during the historic decade of 1920s when the politically bankrupt Qajar rulers were giving way to the iron fists of a Pahlavi state apparatus, with fateful repercussions for Javid’s performance of masculinity—particularly with regard to the novel’s treatment of female characters.

In this paper, the writers try to compare two authors, the Iranian leftist, Bozorg Alavi (1904-1997) and the Polish Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), in their novels Her Eyes (1952) and The Secret Agent (1907), respectively. Although these two writers have different attitudes to Socialism and the question of revolution, both share Romantic idealism and a tragic sense of personal and social life. Moreover, they both are precursors of modernist novel in their countries, and share a humanistic attitude to life. However, both are intellectual elites and their relation to their homeland is problematic. All this make possible a comparative study of these two writers. Their political proclivities tint their views of life and politics and thus they have a dissimilar interpretation of nationalism and socialism, two political subjects they are entangled with. The very same political attitude colors their ideas of human agency and the ethics of human responsibility. Nevertheless, each writer critiques and questions the premises of his political belief in his work, which is the most characteristic modernist attitude they share. The paper will bring similarities, differences and contradictions in Conrad and Alavi’s opinions to politics and individual ethics into focus and conclude that the reason for greatness and fame of these two writers is their attempts at reaching an understanding of humanity rather than reporting on the political taste of a people or time.

By Baroque, the “general attitude” and “the formal quality” of a work of art is implied which is trans-historical and “radiates through” histories, cultures, and works of art. In that way, just a seventeenth-century work of art cannot be considered Baroque; on the other hand, even a postmodern work can display Baroque features. However, bound to its era, the Baroque of 20th and 21st centuries is not exactly the same as that of 17th century. Called Neo-Baroque, hence, the postmodern Baroque reflects not only features like intertextuality, polycentrism, seriality, instability and the fluidity of boundaries, and a sense of movement but also a postmodern Baudrillardian chaotic, schizophrenic world ridden with non-originality, simulation, and “repetition with variation”. To-be-both-but-none feature, i.e. fluidity, is also a distinguishing characteristic of Abbas Marūfī’s Paykar-e Farhād [Farhād''s Corpse]. As a sequel to Hedayat’s Būf kūr [The Blind Owl], Marufī’s story tells us another story as well: a tale, told by a schizophrenic female narrator, full of fragments and digressions which signifies multiple worlds within the single world of the narrative, in whose labyrinthine structure the reader gets lost. To dig this other story out, the article first focuses on the potentialities with which neo-Baroque style can generally endow a text. Then, in the last part, it focuses on the major potentiality this neo-Baroque style has provided Marūfī with: the potentiality of resistance, of viewing the world from a feministic point of view or from the position of the abject.