The apprehension of space in twentieth-century French and Iranian war literature : A Comparative Study of the Works of Claude Simon and Mohammadrezā Bāyrāmi ; L'appréhension de l'espace dans la littérature de guerre française et iranienne du XXe siècle : Etude comparée de l'oeuvre de Claude Simon et Mohamad Reza Bâyrâmi

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the place, the role, and the layout of war’s space in the work of 20th and 21th century authors in a comparative manner. Both of whom fought in a war and have made it a central material in their writing: the Frenchman Claude Simon and the Iranian Mohammadrezā Bāyrāmi. War literature has undergone great changes during the 20th century: each conflict, due to the historical, national, and historical context in which it took place, makes this literature the expression of unique and yet universal experiences. Since the Great War, the radical experience of a military conflict is the origin of a new poetics of the war literature, which is centered around the subjectivity of the fighter. The expression of such an extreme experience underlines the act of writing as a conscious and autotelic construction. War fiction is also strongly linked to the social, cultural and political atmosphere, since military conflicts have determining and often long-term consequences. I have used thematic criticism and comparative methods to illustrate the impact of armed conflicts on the way spaces are experienced by these writers. Despite their diverse cultural atmospheres and worldviews, both writers have been able to transform their unique experience into a universal narrative, via the medium of literature. In this dissertation, I have tried to enrich the research on comparative war literature between Iran and France, as there are not many studies on Iranian war literature in France. I also have addressed the influence of post-war French literature on contemporary Iranian literature and attempted to develop the perspectives on the political and poetic stakes of world war literature. This thesis is a cross-disciplinary study in regard to the numerous dimensions of the two notions of "space" and "war". I began on the premise that in modern war fiction, there exists a particular disruption of space, a disruption that generates a certain bizarreness. The narrative refers to an experience so radical ...