Simin Daneshvar’s ‘Model’: A Literary Sign of Modernity.

What we mean when we say that writing is modern in the Iranian environment? If, as the short stories of nineteenth-century American women writers suggest, to be a modern writer, particularly a modern woman writer is to be intimately involved with one's environment, then Simin Dānešvar (b. 1921?) is surely a modern writer. However, in the politically charged atmosphere of the period preceding the 1979 revolution, Ms. Dānešvar disassociated herself and her writing from literary modernity, which she equates with a society that has lost its moorings and produces alienated writers.