Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature

This study aims to foreground key literary works in Persian and Australian culture that deal with the representation of exile and dislocation. Through cultural and literary analysis, Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature investigates the influence of dislocation on self-perception and the remaking of connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. Examining writing and identity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Iranian Diaspora Literature, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/ Eng.1998), Hasti Abbasi provides a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations. Abbasi reveals how the exploration of exile/dislocation, as a narrative that needs to be investigated through imagination and meditation, provides a mechanism for creative writing practice.

1.      Introduction: Dislocation and Writing

2.      Writing in Exile

3.      Malouf’s An Imaginary Life

3.1.   Exile and Romantic Writing

3.2.   Ovid’s Poetic Language

3.3.   Untamed Nature as a “Background to Human Drama”

3.4.   The Child: Beyond the Limits of Self-identity

3.5.   A Sense of Exile

3.6.   Metamorphoses and Metamorphoses

3.7.   Symbols: Garden and Seasons

3.8.   Sexuality and Desire

4.      Parsipur’s Women Without Men and Iranian Diaspora Women’s Literature

4.1.   Goli Taraghi and Scriptotherapy

4.2.   Parsipur: ‘a nay-sayer’

4.3.   The Story of Parsipur’s Women and Patriarchal Subjugation

4.4.   Writing about Taboos and Ridiculing the Imposed Ideologies

4.5.   Feminine Writing

4.6.   Of Other Spaces: Garden and Heterotopias, Re-evaluation and Restoration

4.7.   Nomadic Experience of Women Without Men

4.8.   Narratives of Iranian Diaspora Women

4.9.   Lipstick Jihad and Hybrid Identity

4.10.                    Persepolis and a Third Space

5.      Conclusion

Hasti Abbasi teaches Bachelor of Arts courses at Griffith University, Australia. Abbasi has been short listed for the 2018 Viva la Novella VI Prize for her novella And the Raindrops Fill the Sea.