Review of the Literature on Latin America in Ketab-e-Jom’eh

This paper aims to analyze a weekly magazine called Ketab-e-Jom’eh (Friday’s Book) and the reflection of Latin American’s revolutionary movements in it. Ketab-e-Jom’eh, published from July 26, 1979, to May 22, 1980, was supervised by a number of the most legendary Iranian authors and poets, such as Ahmad Shamloo1 and Gholam Hossein Saedi. I focus on the way a particular perspective on Latin American movements is constructed and perpetuated among Ketab-e-Jom’eh’s lectors. With a symbolic approach, I analyze those texts through their symbolic representation in the Iranian society, which requires me to study those symbols and their concomitant relevance in Iran. Eventually, I will use an interpretative approach to examine this magazine’s ideologically motivated articles in the broader context of the Iranian society with its particular traits. The dialectic relationship between literature and society helps us understand literature as the product of social conditions and influential factors in society. The position that I develop here echoes Louis de Bonald’s belief that “through a careful reading of any nation’s literature ‘one could tell what this people had been’” (as cited in Hall, 1979, p. 13). I employ such an expansive horizon to scrutinize the selection of literature on Latin American guerillas. I shall unfold the magazine’s ideological orientation from the angle of the context in which it is used. I aim to show that the historical context of the Iranian society at the moment gives those articles specific meanings. In pursuit of my goals, I will recontextualize the articles to determine their primary significance in the Iran of the 1970s and 1980s.