Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction Who Writes Iran? By Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami (London and New York: Routledge, 2015. 249 pages.)

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 ...