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Azadibougar, Omid
2020.
World Literature and Hedayat’s Poetics of Modernity.
p.
77.
Article contents
The Serious Century and Hedayat's Grim Laughter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
Perhaps inspired, more than anything else, by The Blind Owl's famous opening lines, the reception of the novel has so far been dominated by a dark view of the narrative. However, subtle inter-textual links and formal patterns in the narrative could help to read a radically subversive laughter in it which targets the novel's predecessors and readers equally and concurrently. This article engages the aesthetic qualities of the novel and attempts to account for and emphasize the literariness of the text in interpretation. By singling out a few inter-textual links and elaborating upon them in detail, the narrative's parodic laughter, its significance and the way it can change our appreciation of the novel are discussed.
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Footnotes
The author sincerely thanks the editor and the reviewer of Iranian Studies for the energetic exchange of ideas, extends his warmest gratitude to Ortwin de Graef for invaluable and enlightening discussions, and thanks Franco Moretti, Theo D'Haen, David Damrosch, and Laetitia Nanquette their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this paper.
References
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29 Ibid., 19.
30 Ibid., 20.
31 Ibid., 20.
32 Ibid., 20.
33 De Graef, “The Eye of the Text,” 1109.
34 Ibid., 1109.
35 Ibid., 1109.
36 Ibid., 1109.
37 Ibid., 1109.
38 TBO, 6.
39 Ibid., 6.
40 Ibid., 8.
41 De Graef, “The Eye of the Text,” 1113.
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43 Ibid., 20.
44 Ibid., 21.
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49 Ibid., 1.
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53 Ibid., 9.
54 Ibid., 6.
55 Ibid., 17.
56 Ibid., 58–9.
57 Ibid., 59.
58 Ibid., 59.
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69 Frederic Jameson, “A Businessman in Love,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 112–13.
70 Frederic Jameson, “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Morett, 439.
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72 Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London and New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Nancy Armstrong, “The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 349; Bruce Robbins, “The Portrait of the Artist as a Social Climber: Upward Mobility in the Novel,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes.
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