Machine summary:
Instead, while acknowledging the importance of social, historical, and ideological contexts, in other words the world outside the text, Khorrami’s study of contemporary Persian fiction contends that we must scrutinize the world inside the texts – their aesthetic, linguistic, and for mal devices and concepts – to develop a comprehensive view of literature’s historical evolution.
The work under review argues that modernist Persian fiction evolves from a counter-discursive to a non-discursive position vis-à-vis official discourses in Iran, primarily under the Islamic Republic.
The point, however, is that since modernist Persian fiction’s trajectory toward non-discursivity means that texts move farther from the world of already existing concepts toward an individual aesthetic space, we cannot use the discourses of politics, religion, sociology, and so on to understand the work that fiction performs.
Whereas the counter-discursive position early in the trajectory means that writers offer a view of reality in direct opposition to that of of ficialdom, writers at the later non-discursive stage do not engage with the existing discourses at all; rather, they create worlds that no grand narrative or totalizing ideology can explain in full.
Khorrami’s identification of non-discursivity as a central component of modernist literature and his ex plications of non-discursive texts in this chapter most notably set Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction apart from other studies in the field.
Even though a modernist writer may hold no particular extra-literary ideological commitment, one easily sees how non-discursive writing poses a grave threat to the representatives of official discourse.