Carnivalesque in Chess with the Doomsday Machine

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2011

Encyclopaedia of Islam, Brill

Qurratulain Shirazi • 53 ìThe Adventures of Amir Hamzaî is the ìIliadî and ìOdysseyî of medieval Persia, a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga. Born as early as the ninth century, it grew through oral transmission to include material gathered from the wider culture-compost of the pre-Islamic Middle East. (2008, n.p.) The AAH has been compared to many Western classics as well as to classics from Islamic literature. Elizabeth Hand considers it an ìEastern variant on Le Morte díArthur or Orlando Furioso,î and, in contemporary times, finds its sheer elegance comparable to Isak Dinesenís Gothic stories (2008, 32). Hand also cites many more examples of its resemblance to literatures emanating from other parts of the world. The two storytellers of the AAH used the preexisting narrative materials to produce their tales. They included history, folklore and legendsóall used freely without any predefined pattern or organization. Apart from this freedom of choice, they had a creative capacity for incorporating new events and materials into the narrative. Thus, they not only used the existing materials, for example, oral anecdotes and stories present in the folklore of every culture as well as stories about historical events, they also invented new stories and interesting events. The AAH is thus a product of the storytellersí skills in weaving colorful story patterns. These patterns are designed to lure a listenerís or readerís aesthetic, emotional and rational faculties into the fictitious world of a romance by taking him away from the world of reality into an unreal world of fancy and desire. Therefore, one of AAHís major characteristics is providing an escape from their immediate reality for the members of the audience. The idealistic nature of a romance is the main driving force for the telling of the AAH and is also a governing principle in structuring the narrative. All designs and schemes that dominate the structural and compositional plan of the story are subject to the ultimate aim of enthralling the listener. In his effort to woo the audience, the storyteller distorts history, geography, politics, the rules of morality, and religious knowledge in every conceivable way. Farooqi has labeled this feature a manifestation of ìidle talesî (2000, 123). The ultimate aim of the storyteller is to prolong the narrative and keep the listener spellbound with relentless anticipation for more action and drama to come. His mastery of different structural patterns and thematic motifs permits him to expand the narrative endlessly. No wonder that the storytellers of DAH have transformed the anecdotal account of Amir Hamzaís life into a full scale, voluminous romance cycle.

International Journal of Persian Literature, 2022

This article examines the reception of Kafka in modern Persian literature. Ṣādiq Hidāyat’s Kafka’s Message (Payām-i Kāfkā 1948) is the catalyst of this reception as one of the first critical Persian texts to discuss a European writer and the first sustained, critical text on Kafka in any Islamic cultural context. Hidāyat’s efforts in repackaging Kafka as a Manichean, downplaying Kafka’s Jewish ethnicity and religion, are placed in dialogue with past, present, and future critical readings of Kafka in academic circles. By shedding light on Hidāyat’s introduction to Khayyām’s Melodies (Tarānahā-yi Khayyām 1934) and Kafka’s Message, this article moves beyond previous scholarship, which focuses exclusively on Hidāyat as a surrealist novelist and short story writer, to draw attention to his contributions to Persian literary criticism. It shows how Hidāyat perceived and articulated a critical humanism in a tradition which he traces from ‘Umar Khayyām, through Kafka, to his own literary enterprise. An appendix offers an original English translation of the opening pages of Kafka’s Message.

Pakistaniaat, 2013

It has become clichéd by now to say that the world changed forever after 9/11. Though the veracity of this statement can still be doubted yet undeniably the discursive practices illustrating this ‘change’, have taken a new turn. Slogans such as ‘War against Terrorism’, ‘War for Peace’, and ‘War on America’, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ have gained inevitable currency and authenticity in the modern awareness. In this scenario, one of the most effective discourses had been the political rhetoric about Afghanistan ever since 2001. An analysis of the virtually constructed linguistic structures opens up ways of understanding how meta narratives make the people forget actuality of this war and believe blindly in the politically constructed virtual reality. This research article aims exploring a new form of war narrative namely war games_ a genre that heightens the action but not the motif, refutes historicity of an event, politicizes the general consciousness, triggers hatred for the ‘other’ where this ‘other’ is a complete stranger for the player’s consciousness and finally a medium that not just challenges one’s sense of reality but also replaces it with desired panoptical tautology. The article focuses on the complexity of war video games and studies them as a new and subtle visual medium of war narrative. For this purpose, three of the most famous and latest war games (Delta Force, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor) depicting US operations in Afghanistan are analysed in pithy detail. Where most of the criticism on video games is based on their form or structure, this article attempts at exposing the significance and complex inter-relatedness of content and form.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2011

C o m p a r a t i v e S t u d i e s o f S o u t h A s i a , A f r i c a a n d t h e M i d d l e E a s t V o l . 3 1 , N o . 2 , 2 0 1 1 d o i 1 0 .1 2 1 5 / 1 0 8 9 2 0 1 x -1 2 6 4 3 7 9 © 2 0 1 1 b y D u k e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s 4 9 8

The idea of the modern entered Iran’s literature around 1920s as this notion of becoming “anew” was also flourishing in other areas, such as political, social, and cultural spheres of public life. This short article aims at providing a survey of literary modernism in Iranian novel1 of early 20th century and how these elements of the modernist novel are presented in the formal and technical aspects of the fiction of the time. A shift from and breaking the traditional norms, themes, narrative styles, and characterization are among the elements that render the writings of authors such as Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Sadeq Hedayat, Bozorg Alavi, Sadeq Chubak, Gholam Hossein Sa’edi, Samad Behrangi, Jalal Al-Ahmad, and Simin Daneshvar, among many others, modern.

Governare la paura. Journal of interdisciplinary studies, 2012

Critical Literary Studies, 2020

The present research seeks to investigate Shahram Rahimian’s Dr. Noon Loves His Wife More Than Mussadiq [1] based on the literary historiographical theory of Hayden White. The central argument of this analysis is to demonstrate how Rahimian represents the history of Iran’s 1953 coup in his novel through mentioning an Iranian historical figure, Dr. Mussadiq, and his relationship with other members of the political party. The history of Iran’s coup and especially that of Dr. Mussadiq have been an interesting subject for most of the historians and writers. Rahimian in his novel impressively addresses the historical facts of the period and endeavors to focus on the realities and at the same time to create a new version of the events by fictionalizing the way he presents his characters. He attempts to convey to the readers that it is possible to have different versions of the apparent historical facts. This novel provides corresponding peculiarities with the postmodern approach of historiography that is presented by Hayden White particularly in his remarkable work, Metahistory (1973). White contends that there could be different versions of historical facts and it is the task of the historian and the writer of historical fiction to interpret the realities and to make his/her own version of the past. Employing White’s significant concept of emplotment, the study explores the way Rahimian depicts the Iranian socio-political and cultural scene of the early 1950s in his novel from a historical perspective.

Anthropology of the Middle East, 2016

This article examines French-Iranian literary interactions in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which arguably had ongoing effects in Iran on attitudes towards links between morality and social and economic inequality. Some of the earliest fictional stories published in Persianlanguage newspapers, in the 1850s, were French. This trend continued, through Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1906), into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period, Morteza Moshfeq-e Kazemi began writing the first Persian serial story and novel, Tehran-e Makhuf (Appalling Tehran). The present study investigates the effects of the translation of French serial stories on Persian ones, with a specific focus on the impact of the novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), by Eugène Sue, on the Persian novel Tehran-e Makhuf (1924).