Persian Literary Studies Journal
Volume:8 Issue: 14, Summer-Autumn 2019

The studies concerning the employment of postmodern techniques in Iranian movies failed to address how postmodern practices can reflect relevant postmodern themes and thoughts. To fill the gap, this paper aims to investigate the significance of utilizing postmodern styles of filmmaking in Iranian cinema by referring to one of the most recent avant-garde productions, Homayoun Ghanizadeh’s Maskhareh-baz/ A Hairy Tale (2019). To find the link between the postmodern form and the content of the movie, it draws on scholars’ views for theorizing postmodernism, particularly Linda Hutcheon. Benefitting from her views, this research reveals how postmodern features and styles of A Hairy Tale, such as metafiction and the intertextual web of references, reflect the uncertain, cynic and ironic condition of human in the postmodern world. The unreliable narrator of the movie, ironically named Danesh/ Knowledge, drowns the film in an intertextual ocean of references raging from classic cinema, literature of the absurd, pop art and historical events. Finally, it concludes that the film is successful in its attempt to portray a barbershop as a microcosm of the postmodern paranoid world, where humans are unable to trust any information they receive. Thus, by depicting human’s skepticism, the film illustrates the ambiguous condition of the postmodern man.

The Constitutional Revolution in Iran provided grounds for both the realization of women’s personal and social rights and their entrance into the literature and literary discussions of that important era. In fact, women’s sociocultural status became one of the major subject matters of the poetry of the Constitutional Revolution era. It soon became so central to this poetry that few poets could ignore the themes of women’s freedom and rights. Equality, freedom, education, women’s social functions, critique of gender discrimination against women and blaming the perceptions of women as sex-objects are among the main themes reflected in the poetry of Constitutional Revolution. Among the outstanding poets of the time, Bahar and Nassim Shomal hold more traditional and temperate stances towards the subject of women’s rights, while others such as Iraj Mirza, Lahooti, Eshghi and Aref Ghazvini have more radical positions in this respect. They have sometimes even rejected Hijab for women. The present study aims at closely depicting the views of six poets about women and finding out the extent to which their special images of women can be analytically explained based on a theoretical framework. Results from this study show that feminist theories can be applied to justify and clarify the poets’ views of women’s rights and status in Constitutional Revolution time in many respects.

This article provides a comparison between the conventional and modern theater of revolt. It also indicates that the modern theater’s attitude of revolt is twofold, existential, and social. Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Beyzai, all from different parts of the world share one idea which separates them from their predecessors and links them to each other; it is their attitude of revolt toward what makes them modern playwrights. Luigi Pirandello and Bahram Beyzai’s drama embrace the atmosphere of revolt in the modern era considered as the precursors of Existential drama of revolt. The modern theater starts with the sense of spiritual and social disintegration, fragmentation of man, and his estrangement of officialdom. Within the framework of comparative literature and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, this article analyzes the philosophical traces of the issues of life, time, and the human-made concepts and forms of life and applies them to the selected plays of Pirandello and Beyzai Ultimately, this paper distinguishes two types of human revolt in theater and differentiates between Beyzai and Pirandello and concludes that whereas Pirandello’s revolt is based on moving from one mask to another, Beyzai’s revolt is on ripping off the masks and facing the ultimate nudity of the existential face of human being.

The relation between history and literature is very important especially in Iran where historical texts in terms of their writing styles are included in literary work category. Looking at Iranian classic literature chiefly the texts from 11th to 18th century, we can conclude that modern historiography was not common in Iran leading us to guess that in fact court writers were in charge of writing Iran’s history with a very difficult language. Therefore, reading these historical books for research can face us with many difficulties. Some of these historical texts are special books for Ph.D. course in Persian literature and language because of their very difficult language and literary style that is named artificial style. Understanding these requires extensive knowledge in words and literary devices. Historians use the narrative method to explain events thus the structure of historical texts is closed to story style. On The other hand, it is not possible to understand and analyze literary works without a historical understanding of the period in which they were written. This study tries to analyze the relation between historical and literary books and problems in understanding them. In addition, we suggest some solution for researches in these two fields (History and Literature).

This study discusses self-knowledge and its possibility in literary works, particularly in novel proper. Novels can depict the development and change of characters and are an ideal form to portray the self-knowledge that characters gain as they grow up. I inquire into the limitations that a literary work places on both the author and the reader’s imagination. Whether to attempt to depict or to defy the real world, literary imagination is checked by outside reality. On the other hand, the reality itself is framed by the literary work to be representable and expressible for the literary medium which either narrates or depicts objects, thoughts and emotions, and events. The narrator can relate the characters to the readers who can connect with the characters’ thoughts and emotions. On this account the possibility of self-knowledge is probed in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel, Missing Soluch, and how both the characters and the readers are engaged in the story’s events. For the purposes of this paper, I set out to explore the kinds of knowledge we gain by reading the novel, contrast the epic with the novel in order to see how they portray a character’s thoughts and emotions, and discuss the importance of narrative in a character’s development.