Ethical Narratives

Pourjafari, FatemehFatemeh Pourjafari has Ph.D. in English Literature and is the faculty member of the department of English Language and Literature, Kerman Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kerman, Iran. Her research focuses on the philosophy of ethics and narrative theory in world literature. She is also a translator and has published a number of literary translations.Baradaran Jamili, LeilaLeila Baradaran Jamili is Assistant Professor of Department of English Language and Literature, Borujerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Borujerd, Iran. She got her Ph.D. from Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. Her joint publications include a translation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer (1998), An Introduction to the Study of Novel (2002), Virginia Woolf: Imperialism and Colonialism in Travel Fiction (2018), and Intertextuality and Hypertextuality of English Romantic Poets in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2018). She has also individually published Virginia Woolf: Travelling, Travel Writing and Travel Fictions (2006) and numerous journal articles, especially on Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. She is one of the contributors of William Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Quatercentenary Anthology 1609-2009 (Switzerland, 2009, 2010), and Joycean Legacies (New York, 2015).

The authors analyze selected English post-postmodern novels by Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and Jonathan Franzen to demonstrate that a paradigm shift has occurred in literature at the turn of the millennium, both in the re-establishment of authorial authority and ethical agency. The twenty-first-century fiction rejects the relativism and irony of the postmodern sensibility and relies on ethical pragmatism and narrative sincerity. The post-postmodern novelists, chosen in this research, assert that literature is a redemptive and humanizing practice, which has the potential to express the significance of communal unity and provide the occasion for contact between individuals. To achieve this goal, these authors apply various narrative strategies to present truthful depictions of the contemporary world and the ethical dilemmas human beings confront in the aftermath of the eleventh of September.