Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran
Censorship of Literature in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Author: Alireza Abiz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0755634926

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Censorship pervades all aspects of political, social and cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Faced with strict state control of cultural output, Iranian authors and writers have had to adapt their work to avoid falling foul of the censors. In this pioneering study, Alireza Abiz offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of how censorship and the political order of Iran have influenced contemporary Persian literature, both in terms of content and tone. As censorship is unrecorded and not officially acknowledged in Iran, the author has examined newspaper records and conducted first-hand interviews with Iranian poets and writers. looking into the ways in which poets and writers attempt to subvert the codes of censorship by using symbolism and figurative language to hide their more controversial messages. A ground-breaking analysis, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in contemporary cultural politics and literature in Iran.

Displaced Allegories
Displaced Allegories

Author: Negar Mottahedeh

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-11-14

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0822381192

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Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema. Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics.

English in Post-Revolutionary Iran
English in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Author: Maryam Borjian

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1847699081

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This book unravels the story of English, the language of "the enemies", in post-revolutionary Iran. Situating English within the nation's broader social, political, economic and historical contexts, the book explores the politics, causes, and agents of the two diverging trends of indigenization/localization and internationalization/Anglo-Americanization in English education in Iran over the past three decades.

Ghosts of Revolution
Ghosts of Revolution

Author: Shahla Talebi

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2011-01-14

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0804775818

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"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."

Iran
Iran

Author: Hamid Dabashi

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13:

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A deeply informed political and cultural narrative of a country thrust into the international spotlight Praised by leading academics in the field as "extraordinary," "a brilliant analysis," "fresh, provocative and iconoclastic," Iran: A People Interrupted has distinguished itself as a major work that has single-handedly effected a revolution in the field of Iranian studies. In this provocative and unprecedented book, Hamid Dabashi--the internationally renowned cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history and Islamic culture--traces the story of Iran over the past two centuries with unparalleled analysis of the key events, cultural trends, and political developments leading up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the combative presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Written in the author's characteristically lively and combative prose, Iran combines "delightful vignettes" (Publishers Weekly) from Dabashi's Iranian childhood and sharp, insightful readings of its contemporary history. In an era of escalating tensions in the Middle East, his defiant moral voice and eloquent account of a national struggle for freedom and democracy against the overwhelming backdrop of U.S. military hegemony fills a crucial gap in our understanding of this country.

Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran
Representing Post-Revolutionary Iran

Author: Hossein Nazari

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0755617371

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Memoirs of diasporic Iranian-American authors are a unique and culturally powerful way in which Iran, its politics and people are understood in the USA and the rest of the world. This book offers an analysis of the processes of production, promotion, and reception of these representations of post-revolutionary Iran. The book provides new perspectives on famous examples of the genre such as Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Hossein Nazari places these texts in their social and political contexts, tracing their origins within the trope of the America captivity narrative as well as teasing out and critiquing neo-Orientalist tendencies within. The book analyzes the structural means by which stereotypes about Islam and women in the Islamic Republic in these narratives are privileged by news media and the creative industries, while also charting a growing number of 'counterhegemonic' memoirs which challenge these narratives by representing more nuanced accounts of life in Iran after 1979.

Literary Translation in Modern Iran
Literary Translation in Modern Iran

Author: Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-12-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9027269394

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Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A sociological study is the first comprehensive study of literary translation in modern Iran, covering the period from the late 19th century up to the present day. By drawing on Pierre BourdieuN's sociology of culture, this work investigates the people behind the selection, translation, and production of novels from English into Persian. The choice of novels such as Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World provides insights into who decides upon titles for translation, motivations of translators and publishers, and the context in which such decisions are made.The author suggests that literary translation in Iran is not a straightforward activity. As part of the field of cultural production, literary translation has remained a lively game not only to examine and observe, but also often a challenging one to play. By adopting hide-and-seek strategies and with attention to the dynamic of the field of publishing, Iranian translators and publishers have continued to play the game against all odds. The book is not only a contribution to the growing scholarship informed by sociological approaches to translation, but an essential reading for scholars and students of Translation Studies, Iranian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies.

A Stone on a Grave
A Stone on a Grave

Author: Jalāl Āl Aḥmad

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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"Sangi bar Guri [A Stone on a Grave] is a candid account of a male Iranian, in this case, a well-known essayist, fiction writer and socially and politically engaged intellectual, in his struggle to cope with his inability to produce offspring. In this book, Jalal Al-e Ahmad delves into the recesses of his own psyche to explore the roots of his identity as an Iranian male, his manhood. Consciously, he tries to uncover why having children to continue one's name and legacy, not unlike one's gravestone, should signify that he had existed, and why it should be of concern and importance after one's death. In a sense, he attempts to justify his own inability to have children. But, subconsciously, he reveals aspects of himself and his psyche that he may not have intended to reveal. This volume also includes an in-memoriam essay by the renowned writer and Al-e Ahmad's wife, Simin Daneshvar."--BOOK JACKET.