An Analysis of the Function of Literary Devices in Hooshang Golshiri’s “The Wolf”

This article presents a formalist reading of Houshang Golshiri's short story "The Wolf". The first sections of this article provide an overview of the basic principles of Russian formalism. In these sections, Golshiri's views on form and formalism in literature are evoked to emphasize his being influenced by the Russian formalists and the new novel in France. By doing so, we have attempted to explain the theoretical framework applied to the present reading of "The Wolf." Indeed, here Golshiri's short story has been read according to his own theoretical writings on form in narrative fiction. It can be said that examining the literary devices in "The Wolf" provides a clear understanding of Golshiri's theoretical works. The present study shows that Golshiri uses techniques such as choosing a minor first-person narrator, disrupting the timing of the events, reporting public belief and rumor, delivering his narrative in pieces and not as a linear whole, using contradictory narratives and using a special language to create a structural ambiguity, which results in defamiliarization. In other words, the aforementioned techniques have greatly reduced the "referential" aspect of the Golshiri's language and have "highlighted" the formal components, raising the text to a certain level of "literariness".