A Structuralist Analysis of Bakhtiar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate of the World in Terms of Lucien Goldmann’s Approach

Society, as the most fundamental factor in the formation of culture and the social structure, carries all aspects of culture, politics, art, and literature. Society and human productions are being produced and reproduced in a comprehensive contrast with each other. Society is thus the fundamental framework directing human actions and activities. Art and literature in particular, as human productions are surrounded by the social as opposed to the past belief considering them the products of taste and creativity and of imaginational nature only. It is illuminating to employ social theories in order to analyze literature and to study it within the framework of society. This is what the sociology of literature is concerned with. Researchers in the field of sociology of literature argue that all stories and other literary works retell the events of their times. The purpose of this research is to study the intellectual and aesthetic structures constructing the collective consciousness in the novel, The Last Pomegranateof the World, based on Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralism. In this approach, the content of a literary work and its relationship with the society the work was created in are studied. Instead of describing the content of a literary work, its content is examined considering its relationship with the worldview of a specific period. The results of the study indicate that in this novel we are faced with three periods of the social-political history of Kurdistan. Both the content and the form of the novel are accompanied by characters each representing a particular period of the social-political history of Kurdistan: Kurdistan before the uprising, Kurdistan after the uprising, when the civil war occurs, and the political and social consequences after the formation of Kurdish political ideas.