Modern American Literature and Contemporary Iranian Cinema

Identity, Appropriation, and Recontextualization

Morteza Yazdanjoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032389721
• eBook ISBN: 9781000822021
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Literature

As an endeavor to contribute to the burgeoning field of comparative literature, this monograph addresses the dynamic yet understudied "intertextual dialogism" between modern American literature and contemporary Iranian Cinema, pinpointing how the latter appropriates and recontextualizes instances of the former to construct and inculcate vestiges of national/gender identity on the silver screen. Drawing on Louis Montrose's catchphrase that Cultural Materialism foregrounds "the textuality of history, [and] the historicity of texts", this book contends that literary "texts" are synchronic artifacts prone to myriad intertextual and extra-textual readings and understandings, each historically conditioned. The recontextualization of Herzog, Franny and Zooey, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman into contemporary Iran provides an intertextual avenue to delineate the textuality of history and the historicity of texts

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Adaptation Studies, Cultural Materialism, and Cultural Studies: An Intertextual Dialogue
• 3 Narrative Trajectories of National Identity in Iranian Cinema: A Historical Long Shot
• 4 Performing the Poetics of the Iranian Dream on the Silver Screen: Dariush Mehrjui’s Appropriation of Saul Bellow’s Herzog and J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
• 5 Watching Tennessee Williams in Iran: The Sanctity of Family Reconstituted
• 6 Birth of a Salesman: Revisiting Willy Loman in Tehran
• 7 Conclusion
• Index