Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction

Abstract

For at least the past several decades, Persian literary scholarship has drawnits conceptual framework largely from the social sciences. Despite severalnoteworthy exceptions, a tendency to read Persian literature for its sociopoliticalcontent still guides the way scholars write about and teach the fieldtoday. Indeed, a brief survey of course syllabi with “Persian literature” in theirtitles would no doubt reveal that instructors (the present writer included) byand large introduce writers and their works based on non-literary socio-historicaldevelopments, either arranging texts chronologically by their years ofproduction or presenting them (still usually chronologically) as reflections ofthe historical events, social movements, and ideological currents that shapedthe 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 disserviceto both individual texts and literary studies as a discipline when weconsider non-literary factors as the primary criteria by which to analyze andschematize literary works. Instead, while acknowledging the importance ofsocial, historical, and ideological contexts, in other words the world outsidethe text, Khorrami’s study of contemporary Persian fiction contends that wemust scrutinize the world inside the texts – their aesthetic, linguistic, and formaldevices and concepts – to develop a comprehensive view of literature’shistorical evolution.The work under review argues that modernist Persian fiction evolves froma counter-discursive to a non-discursive position vis-à-vis official discoursesin Iran, primarily under the Islamic Republic. The author’s conception of discursivityrelates directly to his understanding of the term modernist. The single ...