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A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Aria Fani
Aria Fani*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Episodic approaches may point in the direction of general trends by examining the ideological presuppositions of dominant literary discourses. However, they necessarily reduce the aesthetic complexity of literary movements and fail to critically consider poets whose vision may not directly speak to common literary trends. Poets such as Bizhan Jalāli (d. 1999) have been rendered standalone figures whose visions of poetic modernism are understood only in the context of their “non-adherence” to the dominant literary discourse of their time or are overlooked altogether. This essay examines how the literary life and reception of Bizhan Jalāli intersect with the intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings of committed circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The twists and turns of Jalāli’s poetics do not speak directly but rather laterally to committed articulations of modernism. The article returns Jalāli to his literary milieu by analyzing the way his work has been received by poets, anthologists and critics. As the contours of literary commitment drastically change in the 1980s and 1990s, another image of Jalāli emerges: once marginalized for his “non-commitment,” he is championed as an “apolitical” poet.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 523 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2017

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Footnotes

Fani is grateful to Goli Emami, Wali Ahmadi, Kevin Schwartz, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Leyla Rouhi, Chana Kronfeld, Kāmyār Ābedi and Samad Alavi for their detailed and astute comments on different drafts of this paper, and also thanks Robert Alter and Bristin Jones for commenting on the translations as well as the anonymous reviewers at Iranian Studies for the constructive suggestions.

References

Works by Bizhan Jalāli

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Āb va Āftāb [Water and sun]. Ruz, 1983.Google Scholar
Bāzi-ye Nur [The play of light]. Navid, 1990.Google Scholar
Ruzāneh’hā [Dailies]. Farzan Ruz, 1995.Google Scholar
Darbāreh-e Sheʿr [On poetry]. Self-published, Farzān, 1998.Google Scholar
Didār’hā [Encounters]. Morvārid, 2001.Google Scholar
Naqsh-e Jahān [Image of the world]. Morvārid, 2001.Google Scholar
Sheʿr-e Sokut [The verse of silence]. Morvārid, 2002.Google Scholar
Sheʿr-e Khāk, Shiʿr-e Khurshid [Poetry of the soil, poetry of the sun]. Morvārid, 2003.Google Scholar
Sheʿr-e Pāyān, Shiʿr-e Duri [Poetry of the end, poetry of separation]. Morvārid, 2004.Google Scholar

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