Author
Professor of Critical Theory
Abstract
New Historicism is one of the most influential methodologies of textual analysis which was theorised in the essays and books of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose in the late 1980s. Although this approach took its roots in the field of literary criticism, its impact has subsequently been expanded to cultural studies and is today considered, along with other approaches such as critical discourse analysis, to be among the most common methodologies of textual analysis. Nietzsche’s anti-positivist epistemology and also Foucault’s theory of discourse have had a considerable impact on the formation of New Historicism’s theoretical foundations. Consequently, New Historicists believe it is impossible to gain an objective or authentic knowledge of history. They also regard “historical truth” as a discursive construct and, as such, subject to change. They, therefore, reject the notion of “spirit of the age” as a reductive and misleading concept for understanding the multiple discourses operating in any specific period of history.
This essay begins with an overview of the theoretical concepts of New Historicism and goes on to offer a reading of the Savushun, a novel by the modern Iranian author Simin Daneshvar, from the perspective of this critical approach in order to analyse the variety of discourses in the period of Iran’s occupation by the Allied armies during World War II. Focusing on the Samirom uprising in the same period, this essay intends to analyse the literary representation of this historical event in the novel. Applying the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of “thick description” and drawing on a variety of sources such as the archives of the Organisation of National Historical Documents, newspaper reports, diaries of Reza Shah, memoirs of Lieutenant General Amirahmadi, as well as articles and books written by historians and scholars of contemporary Iranian history, the essay attempts to offer a picture of discursive conflicts during the time of Samirom uprising. In doing so, the above-mentioned non-literary texts are read along the text of Savushun and compared with the novel by way of discourse analysis. The results of the analysis indicate how the silent voices of history are allowed to be heard and represented as minor or counter-discourses offering their own interpretations of historical events to the reader. The New Historicist analysis of Samirom uprising’s representation in Savushun shows how the central government in Iran created epistemes such as “nationality”, “civility”, “insurgence”, “banditry” and the like, by setting up a binary opposition between nomads’ culture and life style on the one hand and the country’s development on the other, in order to pave the way for the suppression of the nomads.
Keywords
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