The Grand Narrative of the “Holy Defense”: Dynamics of Representation and Subversion in Iranian War Literature

• Applicant: Goulia Ghardashkhani-Otter, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404765835

Grand narratives are indispensable to the ideological formation of newly established political systems. The grand narrative of the “Holy Defense”, referring to the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) as an identity-shaping event in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a case in point. Based on dichotomies such as national autonomy/foreign domination, righteousness/evil, piety/godlessness, self-sacrifice/self-indulgence etc., it has been actively deployed to accredit and justify the cause of the Islamic Revolution and the operation of the Islamic Republic's institutions—not only in propaganda posters and art, but also in (state-sponsored) narrative literature.The prospected project will focus on the relationship between the grand narrative of the “Holy Defense” and its representation and reflection in post-revolutionary Iranian literature—both in literary works that fall into the genre of Holy Defense literature, and works that represent war and war-related issues without being marketed as literature of the Holy Defense.The project will examine how the representation of the “Holy Defense” has changed through time within narrative space, and specifically how and why the literature under consideration has over time either emancipated itself from the grand narrative, or has otherwise lost its artistic appeal. The underlying hypothesis is that in any diachronic actualization of a grand narrative, there is an intertextual dynamism at play which makes the grand narrative work against itself through the very fact of being actualized in narrative form—pulled down, as it were, from the lofty realm of abstract ideology, and subjected to the mundane requirements of plot and narrative convention. Within the framework of the prospective project, therefore, I would like to explore the structures and the processes through which the grand narrative of the “Holy Defense” over time subverts itself by being staged and represented in narrative text. The main aim of the project, accordingly, is to provide an answer to this question: How is the grand narrative of the “Holy Defense” affected by the dynamic intertextual relation between its consecutive representations in different narrative plots? The point of departure for the textual analysis is based on the hypothesis that a grand narrative follows a different structural pattern on the narratological level than a piece of narrative text in its literary sense.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants