سيمين دانشور: شهرزادي پسامدرن

Simin Daneshvar: A Postmodern Scheherazade

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical reading of Simin Daneshvarʹs two recent novels, Jazireh Sargardani and Sareban Sargardan , which are in fact two volumes of a triology, in the light of the theories of postmodernism. I postulate that Daneshvarʹs thought-provoking experiments with postmodernist modes of writing have more often than not gone unexamined owing to a patriarchal blueprint in criticism that reduces her oeuvre to the works "written by a prominent male authorʹs wife", thus denying her the critical recognition that she would. have most certainly enjoyed had she not been a woman or had she had the tact to publish her works under a male pseudonym. Drawing on the theories of postmodernism advanced by such critics as Barry Lewis, Peter Wollen , David Lodge, Ihab Hassan and Douwe Fokkema (all of whom offer catalogues of postmodernist in fiction typically opposed to modernist poetica) as well as Brian McHale ( who borrows the Russian Formalist concept of "the dominant" to characterise postmodernismʹs dominant feature as ontological); I argue that Daneshvarʹs recent novels could be read alongside these theories to demonstrate that her work exhibits postmodernist features.