هانری لوفور

Informed by Henri Lefebvre’s “Production of Space” theory, this study aims to explore Khaqani’s representation of prison in his “Prison Poems” in the light of the perceived, imagined, and lived space dialectics. This research adopts a descriptive-analytical approach and employs library sources. The results of this study show that in the perceived space, the poet, informed by phenomenological and critical perspectives, reinterprets the material space of the prison by confronting the veil and recognising the implicit mechanisms of power; in the imagined space, echoing the prescriptive knowledge of the discourse of power, the poet, as the subject, adopts a forced understanding of the space, which reveals the power and role of other groups in Khaqani’s imprisonment; in the lived space, the poet, echoing an implicit resistance against the discourse of power, employs his imagination and poeticity to create a different space within the realm of possibilities, which has no material correlation with the real prison but only adds a utopian meaning. This study concludes that the material space of the prison, the imprisoned poet as an active subject, and the discourse of power affect the ambience of Khaqani’s “Prison Poems.”   

Nefrin-e-Zamin (The Curse of the Land) is a novel by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad about a teacher who narrates his presence in a nameless village. The novel displays the transition from tradition to modernity. It takes place during land reforms of the then government. The present article is an analysis of the novel from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre challenges the alleged static features of space and introduces it as vibrant and multi-layered. From this stance, the village is an active and dynamic space redefined in the course of the story. The teacher’s entry into the village, as a stranger, becomes a means to depict the multifaceted nature of the village. Lefebvre’s three-part dialectic, comprising the teacher’s perceived, conceived, and lived experiences in the village – represented in spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces – are investigated in this study. The teacher’s visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile perceptions of the village space are studied in detail. The correspondence or discrepancy of the teacher’s mental conception and his lived social experience in the village are discussed next in this paper. The fragmentation of the homogeneous space of the village and its hierarchization to exercise the power of the ruling class of the village are also investigated. Finally, the paper looks into the right of the villagers and strangers to the city and its two subcategories – the right to participate and the right to occupy. The teacher, the steward, and the painter from Shurab are the strangers in the village whose right to the city is important. From Lefebvre’s viewpoint, the village is not a neutral and passive space; rather a dynamic and multifaceted space that has significance and undergoes change and reinterpretations.

This research employs a comparative study design to analyze the political, sociological, and physiological impacts that Iraq-Iran and Iraq-America war had in shaping the literary approach that the Arab/Iraqi female war memoirists use. The Arab/Iraqi war memoirists including Haifa Zangana and Dunya Mikhail try to bring out the violent effects of the oppressive space as considered the concept of subjectivity, which they live. The Arab/Irqi war memoirists portray themselves as authoritative spears in the war whether they were acting as civilians or soldiers to overcome the aggression, where they take a transgressive move by attacking gender roles and taking up masculine roles such as leading activists’ groups. The current research is based on the premises that from a geopolitical point of views, Zangana and Mikhail are found to rewrite the scripts of war as a reflection of the gendered experiences, while they open up new approaches to the themes of war in literature and narrative.

Kelly Robin Adams in her doctoral dissertation “Literature Practices in Women’s Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement “(2012) carried out a research on the literate practice in women’s memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement, where the researcher highlights the participatory roles that women played in the movement including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. On the other hand, Johnson M. Alison in his book, Histories of War: Representations of Silence in Woman’s Vietnam/American War Narratives (2016) draws on the feminist rhetorical theories of silence, listening, and praxis to interrogate traditional psychoanalytic through thought by investing how America, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-American women who experienced the war provide a different model for narrating the war and coping with trauma. On her part, Amy Kathleen Sininger with The Truth in Comedy: Representations of Postfeminist Success and American Culture in Women’s Comedic Memoirs (2015) researched on the representations of postfeminist success and American culture in women’s comedic memoirs. The researcher carried out an in-depth analysis of how the increasing prominence of comedic is memoir is indicative of American cultural changes, particularly in relation to women and feminist, as women prove to dominate the genre. Consequently, Jenny Young Kijowski in Gender and Trauma from World War I to the War in Iraq: Narrative in the Aftermath of Loss (2015) analyzes the theme of gender ad trauma from World War I to the war in Iraq. The studies portrayed are correlated in some way because they provide the avenues with which the authors could express their experiences with the war while taking a transgressive move to portray themselves as agent of destruction of the symbolic order that privilege the masculine in literature.

The variations in the geopolitical orientations of the Arab/Irqi female war memoirists provides readers with the information about how the space they occupied influenced their selection of language and style of approaching about the war events in the Iraq-Iran and America-Iraq war. These geopolitical orientations form the foundation for the selection of the theoretical perspectives that can be used to read the Arab/Irqi female war memoirs. This research employs “Geocriticism” approaches by theorists like Bertrand Westphal, and Robert Tally, and philosophers like, Henri Lefebvre with his Production of Space to analyze the relation existing between the subjects and space in literary terms with critics such as Hélèn Cixous the concept of écriture feminine.

From a geocriticism approach, the Arab female war memoirists are found out to rewrite the scripts of the Iraq-Iran and the Iraq-American war as a reflection of the gendered experience, where they open up new approaches to the theme of war in the literary world. The audience of the studies can therefore track the foundation for creating knowledge in terms of how space, land, and spatiality within the jurisdiction of Arab female war memoirists influences their style of approach in portraying the events of the war.

This study aims at investigating the production of space in Zero K (2016) in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s spatiology. Lefebvre conceptualized space as being comprised of three moments: the spatial practices, the representations of space and spaces of representation; on the one hand, and the conceived-the perceived-the lived, on the other hand. The analysis demonstrates that the characters create their own spaces individually or collectively, each in their own way. On a broader scale, the novel divides into two kinds of space: the abstract and the differential. But on a closer analysis, the character-narrator, on the one hand, uses a set of literary practices such as climax, anticlimax, register shifts, description, humor, iron, incongruity, word coinages and plays, and , on the other hand, everyday practices such as love, walking, bodily activities to defend himself against the rampant growth of the abstract space. In addition, the very act of novel writing could be taken as producing spaces of representation against the representations of space in the society. In the light of lefebvrean spatiology, some of the literary techniques could be redefined as space-producing ideological practices, too.