Mimetic and Diegetic Narratology: A Comparative Study on Akhundzadeh’s The Miser and Ibrahim Sinasi’s The Wedding of the Poet

Classical narratology was mostly based on a biased reading of Plato’s The Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, which considered mimesis as mimics and gestures in dramatic literature and diegesis as narration in novels and fiction. Through this perspective, the act of narrating and the presence of a narrator became the necessities for the texts being analyzed narratologically. However, the two terms mimesis and diegesis are much more complicated and the division is not that strict. In addition, although since the beginning, drama in Iran and Turkey has always been dependent on diegetic ways of narrating, after becoming familiar with the western drama by translating and adaptation, the writers in these two countries, started to adopt mimetic approaches. The first examples of this new journey are the Collected Dramatic Works of Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh by Iranian playwright Akhundzadeh written between 1850-1857 and The Wedding of the Poet by Ibrahim Sinasi in 1859, Turkey. This comparative study aims to analyze the narrative of the plays The Miser, a play from the collection, and The Wedding of the Poet through the framework of mimetic and diegetic narratology. Accordingly, these two plays both show relations to their ancestors and the diegetic characteristics are apparent in the plot, characterization and also, spatial-temporal aspects of these plays.