چکیده

Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian-American writer, captures the essence of belonging to two distinct worlds in her two novels, The Last Illusion and Sons and Other Flammable Objects. As a feral child who has been raised among birds, Zal, the protagonist of the former novel, believes himself to be a bird, and consequently, when he is introduced to the world of human beings, he struggles with his identity as a man rather than a bird. Equally, the Adams, as immigrants, have hugely different experiences in Iran, their homeland, and in America, which affect their identities. The world of the past is in opposition to that of the present, driving the characters to have different identities in each world. It is argued that these colliding worlds, which have contrasting identity standards, result in distressing and traumatic identity conflicts on three levels of person, role, as well as social identities. The process of identity formations in these novels are analyzed based on Burke and Stets’s identity theory. The ongoing process of identity formation and the various identity interruptions as well as verifications along the way are studied. Although these worlds continue to collide throughout the novels, the characters learn to establish their identities somewhere in the middle of these worlds and to resolve their identity conflicts as much as possible. The characters end up having to re-identify themselves in a third space of their own creation: a space somewhere in the middle, bridging the two worlds which seemed mutually exclusive at first.

کليدواژه ها

identity, Identity Theory, immigration, trauma, diaspora literature, The Last Illusion, Sons and Other Flammable Objects, Porochista Khakpour

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Raha Athari , 1398 , Colliding Worlds: An Analysis of Conflicting Identities in Porochista Khakpour’s Novels; The Last Illusion and Sons and Other Flammable Objects , اولين کنفرانس بين المللي مطالعات زبان انگليسي