Tehran in the Mirror of Novel: Sociological Thinking about Representation of Tehran in Persian Novels

This study is aimed at investigating how Tehran is represented in the context of Iranian Novels. The study considers novels as epistemic components, shedding light on the contribution of these components to a general phenomenon named modernity, which is manifested by the city. To this end, the following novels were selected theoretically and purposively: Half Invisible (Hossein Sanapour, 1999), Tehran, a city without sky (Amirhossein Cheheltan, 2001), We'll get used to it (Zoya Pirzad, 2004). These novels were analyzed, using Lefebvre's maxims and critical analysis. From Lefebvre's perspective, there is inherently no space. He maintains that space is produced socially. Explaining how social space is produced, Lefebvre refers to the following three dimensions, which have internally dialectic interrelations: Spatial practices, spatial representations, representational spaces. The results of the study show that the novels at best only represent one of the three dimensions, failing to represent the city emerging from the dialectic relations among these spaces. Being unaware of the dialectic nature of the city, the authors have represented an image of a suppressive city rather than a dynamic polyphonic one in their novels. In fact, the adoption of a romantic approach to novel writing dating back to the First Pahlavi resulted in a regressive, anti-urban society, depriving the authors of the opportunity to view the city from a dialectic perspective.