مطالب

The present paper proposes to consider eventfulness as a category for developing feminist narratology. Feminist/gender-conscious models of narrative theory have already taken into account a few narratological categories for their project including narrative closure, engaging narrator, and narrative authority. Studying the relationship between narrative eventfulness and women’s writing can be of great help for furthering the feminist narratology’s agenda. Eventfulness is a scalar feature of narrative, attributed to the degree of existence of a change of state. An event can occur in story-world, narration, or in the reader’s mind. The canonicity-breach aspect of an event, that is, the success or failure in transgressing boundaries, makes eventfulness ideologically significant. To show the applicability of gendering narrative eventfulness, Zoya Pirzad’s I Turn off the Lights is used as an illustrative example. I Turn off the Lights (Persian: Cheraq-ha ra Man Khamush Mikonam 2001; English translation: Things We Left Unsaid 2012) is a contemporary Iranian novel which has been received very well by the readers. Choosing I Turn off the Lights as an example is expected to give my appropriation of feminist narrative theory a comparative quality. By situating I Turn off the Lights in the literary context of Iran, it is argued that the reduced form of eventfulness in the novel can be read as a sign of ossified normative orders that make border crossing for the main female character (Clarisse) almost impossible.

John Rawls’s political philosophy is involved in what has been called constructive interpretation. It requires that a theory of justice be limited within the boundaries of political or social practices of any particular society, but not with the most abstract elements. A constructivist conception of justice represents the principles of justice not as part of some abstract moral rules known through theoretical reason, but rather as “the outcome of a procedure of construction” founded in practical reasoning. Rawls argues that reasoning about what justice is demanding should proceed from the social practices which are already established. He maintains that among the many existing social practices, we should attend to the most basic existing social structures (i.e., major institutions) because their effects are “so profound and present from the start.”