Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction

Abstract

For at least the past several decades, Persian literary scholarship has drawn its conceptual framework largely from the social sciences. Despite several noteworthy exceptions, a tendency to read Persian literature for its sociopolitical content still guides the way scholars write about and teach the field today. Indeed, a brief survey of course syllabi with “Persian literature” in their titles would no doubt reveal that instructors (the present writer included) by and large introduce writers and their works based on non-literary socio-historical developments, either arranging texts chronologically by their years of production or presenting them (still usually chronologically) as reflections of the historical events, social movements, and ideological currents that shaped the societies from which those texts arose. Mehdi Khorrami’s Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction: Who Writes Iran? challenges this trend, arguing that we do a great disservice to both individual texts and literary studies as a discipline when we consider non-literary factors as the primary criteria by which to analyze and schematize literary works. Instead, while acknowledging the importance of social, historical, and ideological contexts, in other words the world outside the text, Khorrami’s study of contemporary Persian fiction contends that we must scrutinize the world inside the texts – their aesthetic, linguistic, and formal devices and concepts – to develop a comprehensive view of literature’s historical evolution. The work under review argues that modernist Persian fiction evolves from a counter-discursive to a non-discursive position vis-à-vis official discourses in Iran, primarily under the Islamic Republic. The author’s conception of discursivity relates directly to his understanding of the term modernist. The single ...