An examination of the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran based on a Lacanian analysis of two Iranian banned novels

The cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran after the 1979 revolution has been closely entangled with the state's post-revolution ideology. As a result of this intermingling, an exclusionary, hegemonic and homogenising approach has been developed by the dominant cultural/pedagogic institutions in Iran, leading to censoring and banning cultural products that do not comply with the state's revolutionary causes. The current thesis pursues two related purposes: to examine how the Iranian society after the revolution has been depicted in the works excluded from the state's cultural sphere, and to see how these works represent a conception of subjectivity. With these purposes in mind, Shahriar Mandanipour's (2009) novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's (2012) novel, The Colonel, as two examples of banned/excluded literary works have been selected. The notion of exclusion, which has been taken synonymous with censorship in this research, is examined from two perspectives: Ranciere's aesthetic theory, and the Foucauldian notion of power-knowledge. This has been done in order to address the gap existing in the academic study of censorship in Iran after the revolution. While these two approaches have been used to explain the way through which censorship works in post-revolution Iran, the novels in question have been analysed through a Lacanian theory of subjectivity. A psychoanalytic transferential reading approach coupled with a close reading approach have been used as a method for reading and analysing the novels. Based on the analysis made, it was shown that in Mandanipour's novel the notion of love/sexuality, as an embodiment of lack in the Lacanian ontological argument, is set against the hegemonic positioning of the state, and in Dowlatabadi's novel the utopian, homogenising ideology of the state has been challenged through the depiction of the demise of a revolutionary family