The Hikāyat of Modernity: Re-Periodizing Modern Iranian Literature

Since the theme of this roundtable session revolves around the question of literary modernity in Iran, the focus of my contribution to this session will be on replacing the posthumously dictated benchmarks of "modern" literature with historically specific factors contributing to literary modernity in Iran. The purpose of this approach is to offer a radical intervention in the ideologically evaluative paradigms for reading "modern" Iranian literature by instead drawing attention to historically grounded genealogies of literary modernity in Iran. By proposing the latter as the guiding paradigm for re-reading what is termed modern Iranian literature, I will be able to contribute to the central theme of the roundtable through an analysis of the organic local and historical conditions that informed the modernity of Iranian literature. Specifically, I will draw on my research to highlight the role of the classical genre known as the munāzirah as the deep structure of what later came to be termed – specifically in the case of Jamalzadeh – as the first collection of “short stories.”