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Narrative Geometry in ʿAli Reza Gholami’s Divar (The Wall): New Developments in Iranian War Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2022

Goulia Ghardashkhani Open the ORCID record for Goulia Ghardashkhani [Opens in a new window]
Goulia Ghardashkhani*
Affiliation:
University of Bamberg, Germany
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Abstract

Holy Defense Literature is the official term applied to a large body of prose and poetry published during and after the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88) as part of the Islamic Republic’s cultural policy to promote and maintain its Shiite and anti-imperialistic political and ideological agenda. Both the production and the critical reception of this body of work have since been gradually altered, resulting in a discrepancy between two mutually exclusive tendencies in the literary representation and interpretation of the Iran–Iraq war: the ideological and the realistic, the latter introducing a narrative alternative to the former. ʿAli Reza Gholami’s novel Divar (The Wall) (2015), however, can be read as an exception to this current creative and critical polarity. By openly renouncing any claim to any kind of truth, Gholami has rendered his highly technical literary creation into a narrative text that goes beyond the real to exert its undermining effect on the ideology of the Holy Defense. Drawing upon Andrew Gibson and Michel Serres, this article attempts to refashion the narrative geometry of Gholami’s novel to underline and elaborate on its destabilizing extra-textual meaning as well as its dialogical and dynamic literary effect.

Keywords

ʿAli Reza GholamiDivar (The Wall) NovelLiterature of the Iran–Iraq WarHoly Defense LiteratureSacred DefenseNarrative Geometry
Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 5-6 , December 2020 , pp. 873 - 892
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2020

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