The debate over political commitment in Iran was never limited to adjudicating content: it was frequently a debate over form as well. In the realm of fiction, this debate fixated on realism, the nature of mimesis, and the autonomy of art and the literary text. Within a few short years after forming the iconoclastic journal Jong-e Esfahan in 1965 with a group of likeminded colleagues, the writer Hushang Golshiri had become the preeminent modernist fiction writer in Iran. His critical essays represented a passionate defense of aesthetic autonomy at a time when realism and, particularly, socialist and “engaged” literature were powerful shibboleths in the Tehran literary scene. This paper begins with a look at Golshiri’s critical interventions in this debate and then moves on to show how the short stories he produced in the Jong era were an even more integral part of his response to the mimesis question. By reading his stories with a methodology drawn from “possible worlds” theories of narratology, Todorov’s fantastic, and Golshiri’s own theories, we see how these works break down the “one-world” frame of reality that realism takes for granted, and require the reader to grapple with multiple, often contradictory, possible realities in its stead.

In a twenty-four-year writing career that began in 1945 with the publication of the story “Pilgrimage” in Sukhan magazine and ended in 1969 with a heart attack at age 46, Jalal Al-e Ahmad established himself as a major voice in modern Persian fiction. His first and best known collection of short stories, The Exchange of Visits, appeared in 1946, followed in short order by Our Suffering (1947), Sihtār (1948), and The Unwanted Woman (1952), which was reprinted in 1964 with two additional stories. A fifth collection of stories entitled The New Generation remains unpublished, although a sampling of stories from that collection entitled Five Stories was published posthumously. The first of five longer pieces of fiction, Tale of the Beehives, was published in 1955. Three years later The School Principal appeared. Then, in 1961, came The Letter ‘N’ and the Pen, followed in 1968 by The Cursing of the Land, of which several chapters had previously been published separately. A final novel, A Stone on a Grave, remains unpublished.

In contrast to the situation in most countries, in German-speaking countries the study of Iran is not concentrated in one academic discipline. As a result, the attempt to “reconstruct” the history of Iranian Studies inevitably involves various disciplines. The individual results of these together form the kaleidoscopic spectrum of studies on Iranian themes in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The only academic discipline in the German language area that includes the name “Iran” is the one called “Iranistics” (German “Iranistik”).

A high official of the Iranian government was recently visiting the United States when he offered to meet students and scholars of Iranian affairs in order to discuss questions of mutual interest related to Iran. It was hoped that such a meeting in an academic environment would bring about a greater understanding of the current government policies and thus bridge the generation and information gap existing at present.

Among the questions he was asked was the following. Why should Iran spend a larger percentage of its national budget on military expenditure (in relation to portions allocated to health, education, etc.) than most countries for which such data is available?

Among the twenty-seven such countries only Indonesia, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Turkey showed a higher percentage of military expenditure for the years, 1952-1963.

This essay provides a historical analysis of Iranian experiences with disability. I will begin by reviewing the literary application of the term in various contexts. Next, I will examine the social milieux in which local observers, medical professionals, and policy makers talked about and treated disability. As state-run institutions emerged to address disability needs, health professionals often drew a distinction between physical disability and intellectual or psychological disability, raising ethical and legal questions about the status of the disabled in modern Iranian society. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate disability politics in contemporary Iran, where the disabled population has increased significantly as a consequence of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88). Although this paper concentrates on Iranian experiences with disability, comparisons can be drawn with other Islamic societies.

This essay has two purposes. One is to compare the agrarian mode of production in Iran during the 7th through 12th centuries with the mode of production in European feudalism, searching for clues as to why Europe--but not Iran--developed a capitalist mode of production. The second, accompanying purpose is to evaluate the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, a theory developed mainly within the Marxist tradition, in the context of medieval Iran.

A few Persian writers of the 1960s and 1970s dealt with the question of why non-European societies failed to experience a transition to capitalism, but their writings were not convincing. If the transformation from a feudal mode to a capitalist mode is due to feudal evolution, then a rigorous comparative approach is necessary in order to see why such an evolution took place in one society and not in another.

Boir Aḥmad is the territory of the largest tribe (or confederation of tribes) of Kohkīlūyah in South Iran, located roughly south of the Bakhtīyārī and west of the Qashqā'ī. Its population (75,000 in 1966) subsists on a mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry, which in the highly segmented mountainous topography necessitates a variety of nomadic and transhumant adaptations.

The political position within the wider Iranian context of the area presently called Boir Aḥmad has had a variegated history. Under the rule of the Atābegs of Lur-i Buzurg (12th-14th cent.) it was fairly well integrated and administered, with a flourishing economy and a largely sedentery population. In the following centuries, less stable "anarchic" forms of political organization seem to have prevailed, until the Qājār rulers tied the area to the center by appointing the local khāns as tax collectors and through interfering in their power struggles.

Only three out of her 36 short stories are available in English (two translated by the writer herself), and yet Simin Daneshvar (b. 1921) is Iran's first woman novelist and one of the country's most significant fiction writers. Daneshvar has published Savooshoon (the most popular Iranian novel), three collections of short stories, ten translations, and a memoir about her late husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Having retired from her teaching position at Tehran University, she lives in Iran and is now working on her second novel, The Wandering Island.

Daneshvar's literary work is a celebration of the feminine—her taste for life and love, her art of endurance and strength. While most of her female characters manage to survive, none reveals such stamina or resilience as the narrator of Jalal's Sunset. Confronted with the unexpected death of a husband, a colleague, and a collaborator, Daneshvar in this text portrays a real survivor.

This paper analyses Iranian television production on Public Access TV channels in Germany. It is based on a broader study with qualitative interviews, hermeneutic content analysis of 40 hours of aired TV programs and a ?dense description? of the production background. Iranian immigrants were amongst the most active mother-tongue TV producers on local Public Access Channels (so called ?Open Channels?) since these were first launched in 1984. These non-commercial channels aim to make alternative themes and voices heard in the local public. However, the 9/11 attacks led to increased difficulties of access for immigrants from the Middle East, such as limited airtime and the obligation to translate programs. These measures diminished dramatically the opportunities to present Iranian TV shows on Open Channels. From the perspective of Communication Studies, this paper aims to analyse the intentions and strategies of Iranian immigrant media participation, but also the difficulties of access to the public sphere in Germany.

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh was not conceived as a national epic, but it does encapsulate another kind of group identity: it provides context and meaning for the glorious pedigree of the Iranian aristocracy. Ferdowsi himself was a member of the Khorasani dehqān gentry whose collective effort in the tenth century CE was turned towards preserving and reshaping their own history and literary heritage in the terms of the new era. This article analyzes the final section of the Shahnameh, dealing with the reign and death of the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III. As such, this section provides crucial clues for the function of the Shahnameh as a means to construct meaning for Ferdowsi's own group in his own time. The description of this crucial moment in history, pivoting between the era of Iranian kingship and the Islamic era, suggested possible modes for interpreting the present. The study reads this section of the Shahnameh with close attention to the use of the word nezhād (“lineage”), which circumscribes the identity of both the aristocrats of Ferdowsi's present, and the kings and heroes of the mythic past. In doing so, the transition between eras appears as a tragedy of nezhād, as the Sasanian dynasty is extinguished, raising permanent existential ambiguities for the entire class of Iranian gentry whose genealogies were associated with it.

This paper seeks to understand the political economy implications of nicotine addiction in Iran, focusing on the US Office of Foreign Asset Control's granting of Iran operations licenses to American tobacco companies. Presuming that tobacco taxes, levied both as import duties and ad valorem, would financially benefit the Iranian government, the introduction of a highly desired US product to the market would be antithetical to the sanctions regime currently in place. By comparing Iran's tobacco industry, and the attendant public health crisis that has arisen from high rates of nicotine addiction, to conditions in Turkey, it can be demonstrated that Iran is uniquely unable to extract revenues from the sale of tobacco products. The primary point of comparison between Iran and Turkey is smoking-attributable annual productivity losses of each country, as estimated through the use of Smoking-Attributable Mortality, Morbidity and Economic Costs Software (SAMMEC) and the available related literature. According to the calculations derived from the SAMMEC model, Iran is burdened with an astonishing economic cost due to the high prevalence of smokers. It is concluded that an awareness of this condition enables OFAC to award licenses to Big Tobacco without fear of undermining current foreign policy initiatives.

Mirza Muhammad Farrokhi Yazdi suffered a long series of persecutions, imprisonments, and exile during his rather short life (1889-1939). At the age of 16, two years before the Constitutional Revolution, Farrokhi showed his national and Islamic zeal by writing poems against the authorities of the British missionary school at Yazd, where he was a student. Following the circulation of one of these poems, in which he had defended the cause of Islam against the “devilish designs” of the Christians, the headmaster expelled him from school and thereby ended his formal education. This was the first and by far the lightest punishment the poet was to suffer for his beliefs.

As he himself proudly testifies, Farrokhi was a dehqān-zādeh, a peasant's son. When he was forced out of school, the peasant's son became a laborer. His family background and his own experience as a laborer greatly influenced the direction of his thought in later years.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 and the developments of the following decade greatly altered the social and political atmosphere in Iran. Poetic changes created in the wake of these developments were of considerable transitional importance and generated a suitable literary atmosphere for the more basic changes introduced by Nimā Yushij in the 1920s and the 1930s. A major issue in this regard is the impact of revolutionary developments on the general outlook and the literary creativity of the contemporary poets. The present paper includes a short introductory survey of the background and the characteristics of the “constitutional poetry” and a general discussion of the revolution's impact on the contemporary poets. A number of “constitutional poets” are then discussed individually.

In the literature of the Iranian-American diaspora, the memoir genre has become a predominant lens through which Western audiences “read” contemporary Iran. While many bestselling life narratives have relied on hostage crisis-era tropes of gendered repression and subsequent liberation in exile, new amalgams of style and theme, distortions of perspective, and complicated renderings of the “subject” are now beginning to cross borders. One of these is Shahriar Mandanipour's 2009 novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which this paper examines as an auto-fictional commentary on the memoir genre that both arises from and responds directly to censorship using a self-referential and layered text. Through three central dialectics—ambiguous violence, encoded desire and resistance to diachronic historicization alongside the nation—this paper demonstrates how Mandanipour's auto-fictional and often magical realist attempts elude what Gillian Whitlock terms the transnational “economy of affect” that publicizes, protects and ultimately drives the reception of memoir across borders.

Rapid developments of the twentieth century have forced attention upon the changing status and role of women in all societies. As they have acquired a longer life expectancy, are having healthier children, and with the advancing technology, mass production and distribution contributing to their lessening housekeeping chores, women have acquired more and more leisure time.

While the industrialized societies have been mostly concerned with the problem of leisure time for these women, and making optimum use of all human resources, both male and female, the developing countries have been facing the basic problem of illiteracy, and particularly illiteracy of their female population. There has always been a small segment of the female population in developing countries with as much, if not more, leisure time than those of the industrialized nations.