A Linguistic Survey of the Postmodern Literary Style in Persian Novels

In recent decades, along with the global wave of postmodern literature, we have been witnessed novels in Persian fiction which claim to have new attitudes and a new approach to writing in this genre which naturally includes language and style. Since language is the most important element of the style in literary studies, any change in the form and content of the language in a literary work would be a sign of alteration in the artist attitude towards his/her external and internal world. So, it seems significant to analyze the influences of the postmodern literature philosophy on the language of Persian novels, since language and its associated elements and concepts have a central status in postmodern literature known by its way of using language to recreate the fictional world. The present article will analyze the linguistic patterns of Persian postmodern novels, and with a critical approach, explain different ways in which linguistic elements have been used in these novels. In order to find the linguistic arrangements that create this style, the linguistic elements ,inspired by layered stylistics, will be determined and categorized at three levels: phonetic, lexical, and syntactic. Also, linguistic characteristics of the text and their roles in reproducing the postmodern attitude or moving away from it at these three levels are described and examined in the fictional world of these novels. Investigating the language in these works reveals no distinctive stylistic properties at phonetic level; and at the lexical level, words have both literary and conversational functions. They are also grammatically cohesive.