Aesthetic Depictions of Madness and Detachment: A Comparative study of Shahrnush Parsipur's Women Without Men and Shirin Neshat's Cinematic Adaptation

Abstract

The differences between artistic forms of expression create differences in the thematic representation of concepts. Focusing on Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (2011) and its adaptation of the same title by Shirin Neshat and her contributor Shoja Azari (2009), this dissertation compares the disparities in the portrayal of madness and detachment in cinema and literature. It explores how each of the two art forms expresses the same concepts differently. In this research, the psychological understanding of madness and detachment follows Lacan’s registers and their Borromean rings correlation. In order to demonstrate how madness and detachment are a continuous thematic heritage of Iran’s literary and cinematic tradition, this study employs Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of movement-image and time-image for the analysis of the movie, and narratological concepts like narrative voice and focalization for the novella. Additionally, comparative literature, through the reciprocal illumination of the arts, endeavors to compare how cinema and literature achieve distinctive depictions of themes because of the differences of their tools. In the context of this research, the eventual artistic interpretation of madness and detachment is significant since literature and cinema that are born in Iran or produced by Iranians are usually shaded historically, politically, or socially. In broader terms, this dissertation attemptsto go beyond issues of faithfulness and the dichotomy of original/copy found in the adaptation theory, trying to show how cinema and literature add to and borrow from each other artistically.