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Iranian Literature: Modern and Postmodern

This panel was compiled by the Conference Program Team from independently submitted paper proposals.

Presentations

Village Life on the Urmia Plain: Hannibal Alkhas’s Nostalgia
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Population shifts from rural to urban have affected the human geography of Iran as have the growth of some former villages into large enough population, commercial and communications hubs to transform them into towns. Yet, in our contemporary highly urbanized world, nostalgia for village life, seen as a pattern of social interconnection, is embodied in areas as diverse as child rearing philosophies, digital games and living a simpler life.

For Iran’s Assyrian diaspora community this nostalgia enters poetry and music with formal associations built on village-of-origin ties. Nearly all Assyrians of Iran have origins in the over 100 Assyrian villages located in the Urmiah/Salmas area now comprising West Azarbaijan. As self-help associations, members engaged in support for recent immigrants, but also as funders for village renovation and construction. Gradually as urbanization in Iran itself created a generation of educated men and women who were products of cross marriage among villagers, the memory of the village transformed into an imagined generic space redolent of extended loving family ties, slow but predictable life patterns and especially an idyllic agrarian lifestyle.

Nowhere is this Assyrian nostalgia for a lost way of life better expressed than in a selection of poetry and paintings by the leading Assyrian Iranian painter and poet of the late 20th century, Hannibal Alkhas (1930-2010). Through images music and poetry recited by the late poet himself I will explore this longing for a simple village family life fit into his career built primarily on the abstract art for which he is best known in Iranian circles.

Dowlatābādi’s Failed Attempt at Poetic Modernization
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In 1911, Yahyā Dowlatābādi published two poems of an unusual kind. Turning away from his customary poetic practice, as well as from a millennial tradition of exclusive quantitative meters (‘arūz), he produced a couple of poems which he dubbed "syllabic" (še‘r-e silābi). This was at the time when the Persian poetic tradition as a whole was diversely challenged by the actors of the “Literary Revolution” (enqelāb-e adabi). For all their variety, modernist undertakings aimed to meet a single demand: to break away from the past. Unlike other contemporaneous achievements, however, Dowlatābādi’s syllabic poems were discarded as insignificant and never followed up on. This paper aims to shed some light on Dowlatābādi’s rare undertaking, and on the possible reasons for its failure.

The Scorned Avant Garde: Reconsidering Tundar Kiya and the Emergence of Iranian Postmodern Poetry
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Perhaps no Iranian poet has been as universally unloved as Shams al-Din (Partow) Tundar Kiya (1909-1987). Many scholars and poets have rightly criticized Tundar Kiya for his rash boasting and bullying claims as well as for his lack of mastery of the Persian language. In his recent book Bā Čerāq va Āyinah (“With Light and Mirror”), Dr. Shafie Kadkani writes that his essay on Tundar Kiya’s “šāhīn” was written to critique the “hundreds of delusional pretensions” of avant-garde poets and their literary schools and manifestos. In my presentation, I intend to show that the dismissal of Tundar Kiya’s work -- and the works of postmodern poets -- is due in part to misreading and unwarranted expectation. We have to consider different criteria when evaluating writers like Tundar Kiya, just as one uses different critical measures for evaluating the Dadaists than for judging an early modernist artist like Édouard Manet. Using such works as Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, I will distinguish avant-garde poets like Tundar Kiya -- who attacked the literary institutions and broke with the traditional distinction between high and low art -- from modernist poets like Nima, who aimed to radically reform and modernize Persian poetry. If, like Jean-François Lyotard, we view postmodernism as an outgrowth of the avant-garde, we might come to regard Tundar Kiya as a forebear of Iranian postmodern poetry. Tundar Kiya’s Nahib-e Jonbeš-e Adabi – Šāhīn (“Dread of the Literary Movement: Shahin”) -- with its formal and structural innovation in a hybrid, expansive text -- can be seen as a key early postmodern work. To show his link with current postmodern poetry, I will briefly introduce three of the most innovative neo-avant-garde poets: Mohammad Ramezani-Farkhani (b. 1970), the subject of issue 6 of the journal Hekāyat šeʿr, which focuses on the young poets of the revolution; Mohammad Azarm (b. 1971), critic and a leading postmodern poet; and poet pen-named Anima Ehteyat (b. 1980), the winner of Karnameh Poetry Prize and the runner-up for Qeysar Aminpour Prize for free-verse poetry. The more sophisticated works by these poets from different socio-political circles illustrate how the early immature experimentations of poets like Tundar Kiya have flourished and advanced in recent Persian poetry.

The Coexistence and Contradiction between Certainty and Uncertainty in Shahriar Mandanipour’s Fiction
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As the literary indication of hot social and political debates such as the relationship between intellectuals and society, patriarchy, censorship, and political repression, the question of the coexistence and contradiction of certainty/uncertainty in Persian fiction has been located in the center of the matter of interaction between the author, the narrator, and the reader for the last century. By coexistence and contradiction, I mean a conflict and unity between certainty and uncertainty, so they attract and repulse each other at the same time. From a non-literary perspective, certainty is shown in direct demonstration of socio-historical context, mere reflection of real characters’ relationships, cultural traditions, and religious and political principles assigned by the government. From a literary viewpoint, certainty is recounted by an omniscient or semi-omniscient narrator in a predetermined situation. Alternatively, some Iranian authors define uncertainty as a desire to individualize the external reality by internal devices of fiction. They use parallel points of view, multiple themes, and invisible-limited narrators in order to illustrate individuals and communities’ chaotic situations. In this paper, I will investigate the role of the coexistence and contradiction of certainty/uncertainty in Shahriar Mandnaipour’s literary works as his conscious effort to portray the complexity of Iranian intellectuals’ post-revolutionary experiences. I argue that he has experimented in putting a number of mythical, cultural, political, and social independent/fixed variables into an interaction with fictional dependent variables in order to create uncertainties opposed to dominant certainties in Iranian society. I use the terms of “dependent” and “independent” in their experimental meanings. Independent variables are out of the author’s control, while the author can determine and regulate dependent variables. The myth of Adam’s creation and apocalyptic myths as well as the four basic elements of classical thought: air, earth, water, and fire in Mandanipour’s first novel, The Courage of Love (1998), scapegoating legend in his short story, “Shatter the Stone Tooth” (1996), political idealism in his another short story, “Again Facing the River” (1999), and the government’s censorship in his English novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009) are the examples of independent and fixed variables in Mandnaipour’s works. Dependent variables of his fictions include some fictional devices like parallel points of view, conflicting characterizations, fluid times and places, and multiple themes. The more dependent variables can act freely, the more his short stories and novels achieve uncertainty.