Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

257 Pages·2018·2.484 MB·English

by  Hamid Rezaei Yazdi, Arshavez Mozafari

Persian Literature and Modernity
Persian Literature and Modernity recasts the history of modern literature in Iran by
elucidating the bonds between the classical tradition and modernity and exploring
textual, generic and discursive formations through heterodoxical investigations.
This is fi rst done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition,
including the m unāzirah (debate), Ahrīman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical
aloneness) and n ā riz̤ā yatī (discontent). Following this are broader structural and
processual treatments, including the emergence of the genre of the social novel, the
international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the
development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse in Iran.
Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, the
chapters in this volume make a case for stepping outside the bounds of orthodox
literary scholarship in Iranian Studies with its associated political and orientalist
determinants in order to provide a more nuanced conception of literary
modernity in Iran.
O ffering an alternative reading of modernity in Persian literature, this book is
an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in the history of modern
Iran and Persian literature.
Hamid Rezaei Yazdi is an educator and researcher in the fi eld of Middle Eastern
studies, with an emphasis on the historiography of modern Iran. He received his
PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the
University of Toronto and is currently a Professor in the Department of Liberal
Studies at Humber College.
Arshavez Mozafari is a historian of modern Iran based in Toronto. He received
his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the
University of Toronto.
Iranian Studies
Edited by:
Homa Katouzian
University of Oxford
and
Mohamad Tavakoli
University of Toronto
S ince 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a leading
learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Iranian
society, history, culture and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series
published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and
innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies.
Gender and Dance in Iran
Biopolitics on the Twentieth-Century Stage
Ida Meftahi
Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi
Building an Ark
Prashant Keshavmurthy
Iran and the Nuclear Question
History and the Evolutionary Trajectory
Mohammad Homayounvash
The True Dream
An English Translation with Facing Persian Text
Ali-Ashgar Seyed-Gohrab and Senn McGlinn
Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution
Family and Nation in Filmfarsi
Pedram Partovi
Persian Literature and Modernity
Production and Reception
Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari
F or more information about this series, please visit: w ww.routledge.com/
middleeaststudies/series/IRST
Persian Literature
and Modernity
Production and Reception
Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi
and Arshavez Mozafari
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez
Mozafari; individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yazdi, Hamid Rezaei, editor. | Mozafari, Arshavez, editor.
Title: Persian literature and modernity : production and reception / edited
by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series:
Iranian studies ; 37 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2018038230 (print) | LCCN 2018054408 (ebook) | ISBN
9780429505348 (master) | ISBN 9780429999628 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN
9780429999611 (Epub) | ISBN 9780429999604 (Mobipocket) | ISBN
9781138585331 | ISBN 9781138585331(hardback) | ISBN
9780429505348(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Persian literature—1796—History and criticism.
Classifi cation: LCC PK6406 (ebook) | LCC PK6406 .P47 2019 (print) |
DDC 891/.55409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038230
ISBN: 978-1-138-58533-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-50534-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of fi gures vii
Contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
H AMID REZAEI YAZDI AND ARSHAVEZ MOZAFARI
PART 1
2 Rival texts: modern Persian prose fi ction and
the myth of the founding father 25
HAMID REZAEI YAZDI
3 Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran:
ʿAlavī and Hidāyat 85
ARSHAVEZ MOZAFARI
4 Linguistic realism and modernity: the ontology of the
poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib 112
HENRY M. BOWLES
5 A predestined break from the past: Shiʿr-i Naw,
history, and hermeneutics 141
FATEME MONTAZERI
PART 2
6 Intimating Tehran: the fi gure of the prostitute in
Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s 165
JAIRAN GAHAN
vi Contents
7 Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press:
Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow 185
SAMUEL HODGKIN
8 Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and
modernity’s anthropological drive 213
PARISA VAZIRI
Index 243
Figures
2.1 The archetypal Shaykh and Shūkh, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdarū 38
2.2 (a–d) Parallel Texts, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdārū 43
7.1 [Artist unknown], back cover illustration, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī,
Krimil, trans. Nâzım Hikmet 196
7.2 [Artist unknown], cover illustration, Krimil 197
8.1 Still from B ād-i Jin 216
8.2 Still from T ranquility in the Presence of Others 221
8.3 Still from N ifrīn 223
Contributors
Henry M. Bowles is a DPhil student in Classics at the University of Oxford. He
holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature and an MA in Middle Eastern
Studies, all from Harvard University.
Jairan Gahan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Near and Middle
Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her novel Z īr-i Āftāb-i
Khushkhiyāl-i ‘Asr (Under the Carefree Afternoon Sun) won the Golshiri Award
for First Novel in 2011.
Samuel Hodgkin received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Chicago and
Colgate University, and he completed his dissertation as a Mellon Humanities
Fellow and an exchange scholar at Harvard University.
Fateme Montazeri is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Near Eastern
Studies, University of California Berkeley. She received her BA and MA from
the University of Tehran and completed another MA at the Graduate Theologi-
cal Union.
Arshavez Mozafari is a historian of modern Iran based in Toronto. He received
his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the
University of Toronto.
Parisa Vaziri is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University with joint affi liation
in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies. Her
research explores the legacies of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world.
Hamid Rezaei Yazdi received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He is cur-
rently a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College.
1 Introduction
H amid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari
S cholarship on Persian literature and its place in the history of modern Iran is
haunted by questions of origins and infl uence. Despite continuing efforts to disen-
tangle them from their perceived indebtedness to European and Anglo-American
models, Persian texts remain tethered to the metropolitan spark of genius in one
shape or form. Ever since “fi rst contact” was made in the nineteenth century, this
infl uence is argued to have “increased in width and intensity.”1 Indeed, frameworks
that rely considerably upon Western benchmarks, modalities and timelines have
been employed regularly to explain the history of modern Persian literature – and
with astonishing currency and success.
W hat this volume seeks to do is expose the limits of key suppositions concerning
textual production and reception as they are premised upon the “rule of colonial
difference.”2 Without thoroughly discounting the notion of colonial servility and its
effects on textual production, what we are here primarily concerned with are organic
literary developments, local and regional networks and rooted forms of experimen-
tation.3 Above all, we seek to disburden modernity of its aseptic remoteness from
tradition by acknowledging tradition’s role in shaping Iranian modernity. Occluded
by decades of literary scholarship – perhaps due to convention – the necessity of
this intervention is made all the more glaring once one considers the way the wide-
spread employment of spatial metaphors in prevailing histories betrays the underly-
ing notion that modern Persian works are somehow the (frequently rotten) fruits of
Western imagination and industry, in the same vein as “legal and institutional
frameworks”4 and other constructions of the “self and community.”5
S tandard accounts relate how a certain format (the novel, the novella, the short
story) or genre (for instance, S hiʿr-i Naw [New Poetry]) “entered” Iran at a certain
point in time, was “introduced” into Persian literature by an exemplary fi gure
(often a founding father), was “brought back” by Iranian students or by other
members of the intelligentsia studying or living in Europe (predominantly through
translation), or followed shortly after schools or technologies, cut from the cloth
of the West’s intellectual tradition, were “imported” into the country, one prime
example being the printing press.6
Similar to the way communicable diseases – as part of the civilising mission of
the Anglosphere – and other “immense distortions”7 were thought to have smote
native barbarism into the maw of obscurity, the introduction of literary