Linguistics and Ancient Languages
Abdolrasoul Shakeri; Masoud Farahmandfar
Abstract
A Persian translation of the book The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature, written by Dr. Kamran Talattof from Arizona University, has recently been published in Iran, and is currently a textbook in some Iranian universities and is taught for the courses of ‘Contemporary ...
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A Persian translation of the book The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature, written by Dr. Kamran Talattof from Arizona University, has recently been published in Iran, and is currently a textbook in some Iranian universities and is taught for the courses of ‘Contemporary Persian Poetry’ and ‘Contemporary Persian Prose’ at the undergraduate level and also for the course of ‘Contemporary Persian Poetry’ at the postgraduate level. In addition to analyzing the form and content of the book, the writers of the present article try to examine the new theory that Talattof has proposed through integrating contemporary Western theoretical approaches and specific features of contemporary Iranian society and literature. His book sheds light on the mutual relationship between politics and contemporary literature and society of Iran. The Politics of Writing in Iran examines methodically and unprecedentedly the impact of different ideologies on literary movements, and accordingly arranges the literary products of the last one hundred years into several movements, arguing that each of these movements is an ‘episode’ and thus the whole modern Persian literature is ‘episodic’. The theoretical approach of Talattof’s book rests on this premise that ideological paradigms have determined the manner of writing literary works in Iran in the past hundred years. The present article offers not only a short overview of the literary historiographic attempts in Iran in the last one hundred years, but also a brief account of the Western theories of literary historiography in the last few decades. In the end, the relation and correspondence of the book’s theory of ‘episodic literary movements’ and the theory of ‘Iran as a short-term society’ is highlighted.
