Politics of resistance in modern Iranian Literature: Trauma, memory, and the limits of subjectivities

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2748879_(Table of contents)

As a creative literary technique, metaphor has found a place in modern Iranian literature as a form of expression against censorship and political oppression. This thesis aims to examine the metaphorical uses of mental restlessness, mental discomfort, illness, and metamorphoses with examples from modern Iranian literature. The main uses of metaphors in these artistic productions are subsequently explored as a reflection on a national allegory of poverty and injustice, failing modernization, and a critique of admiration for the West, which Jalal Al-i Ahmad defines as gharbzadagi, and finally Iranian nation’s alienation, disenchantment, and disappointment as failing revolutionaries. Thanks to the creative direction of metaphors, authors experimentally tested the limits of representing the political dissident and what is unrepresentable such as fear, mental metamorphosis, and madness. The main discussions center on how these narratives develop the themes of subjectivity, the biopolitical determination of classes, and the literary articulations of resistance both to censorship and resistance to one’s existential crisis. The narratives deconstruct ideas of the human question, Westernization, and the martyrdom of the Sacred Defense literature (adabiyat-e defa’-e moqaddas) as well as fallible ideologies resulting from failing revolutionaries who are tortured and traumatized. Most importantly, the analysis of "resistance" as a reversed ideological form for the Sacred Defense Literature puts forward the potential of modern Iranian literature as an emerging center of resistance literature.