UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Realities of War or War of Realities: Realities: An Analytical Reading of Six Persian Novels of the Iran-Iraq Warby Babak Mazloumi Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine, 2023 Professor Nasrin Rahimieh, Chair

My dissertation, titled Realities of War or War of Realities: An Analytical Reading of the Six Persian Novels of the Iran-Iraq War, demonstrates how the novelistic representations of the Iran-Iraq war and their critical reception transformed over time, allowing for more complex understanding of the war. I focus on the following six novels, unsettling the stark binaries of their early reception: The Scorched Earth (1981) by Ahmad Mahmud, Soraya in a Coma (1983) by Esmail Fasih, The Winter of 84 (1987) by Esmail Fasih, The Headless Palms (1983) by Qasemali Farasat, Chess with the Doomsday Machine (2008) by Habib Ahmadzadeh, and The Scorpion on the Platform of Andimeshk Railroad or Blood’s Dripping from This Train, Sir! (2012) by Hosein Mortezaian Abkenar. If one considers the timeline of publications of each one of the novels and the related critical essays, published mostly on the heels of each other, it is possible to see a gradual change starting from the 1980s with novels and critical stances representing either Islamic (as crystalized in The Holy Defense doctrine) or Marxist perception of the Iran-Iraq War. The last novels I study, published almost thirty years after the inception of the war, exhibit a drastic change leading into an individualized and singular perceptions of the war, defying any dominant value system. One can see this defiance crystalized in the structure and style of the novels as well as the critics’ approaches to them. How do the Iran-Iraq war novels represent the realities of this war? Is there a single reality or are there a multitude of realities represented? Either way, should one employ a variety of epistemological approaches to examine this reality? The present research endeavors to go above and beyond a myriad of heterogenous, if not downright contradictory, approaches to the subject. That is, it tries to examine the changes these literary works and the critical commentaries have endured not just through time but also because of time. Then, there is a second layer resulting from the interaction between the novel and the outside world. In other words, the present research evinces how factors such as historical-biographical conditions and critical commentaries on the work influence our perception of the novel's realities.