Feminine voice in Iran's Contemporary Literature

This article considers literature with all its literary obligations as a narration of language and analyzes two generations of authors while focusing on the gender variable. In this research two pairs of literary texts within the period of forty years are analyzed using discourse analysis and speech from formalist school of literature, in order to extract the literary and gender features. The article deals with the question of what are the characteristics of the writings of men and women in fields such as degree of movement in literary text criteria, departure from terms outside standard language including usage of archaic terms, indigenous terms, creation of new terms or proximity to central trends of language and culture such as usage of expressions and idioms in two generations of authors. This study reveals that in analyzed texts, men have not been more successful or closer to the creation literary term but they have done it in a more different style than women, Men have turned to laborious writing compared to women, whereas the women’s writings are more versatile and fluent while maintaining literary criteria. It is also worth mentioning that the movement of the two generations of authors in the course of time has been to assimilate and approximate to each other. In other words male authors have departed from rules of laborious writing more than male authors of previous generation and female authors have departed from versatile writing more than female authors of previous generation. Regarding terms and expressions women have been loyal to regional and indigenous language while men have been loyal to standard language. With respect to creation of new terms no difference was seen between two genders. Considering usage of laborious terms, the second generation has used less as compared with the previous generation, although the subject of these laborious terms is different. On the whole we can conclude that male and female authors have departed from extremist features of their previous generation and are moving towards a common aim although their starting point are different.