PhD project
Wail and Word: The Emergence of War Fiction in Persian Post-Revolutionary Literature
This thesis seeks to examine the emergence of Persian novels and short stories during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).
Persian war narratives will be studied from literary, narratological and historical points of view. As is often the case when grappling with historical, political and societal issues, these war narratives are complicated. Moreover, since many war writers do not explicitly indicate their positions on the war in their text, the reader has to get behind the fiction’s temporal front line so as to find it. Analysis of war fiction from these perspectives will therefore help readers go beyond the text in order to access greater meaning. More than any other literary form, the novel serves as the model, through which society perceives itself, as well as the discourse in and through which it articulates the world. In war novels specifically, words must be composed in such a way that propagate their emergence asocial culture models and models of individual personalities, as well as diagnose relationships between individuals and the culture.