UC Berkeley

Modern Persian literary histories generally characterize the decades leading up to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a single episode of accumulating political anxieties in Persian poetics, as in other areas of cultural production. According to the dominant literary-historical narrative, calls for "committed poetry" (she`r-e mota`ahhed) grew louder over the course of the radical 1970s, crescendoed with the monarch's ouster, and then faded shortly thereafter as the consolidation of the Islamic Republic shattered any hopes among the once-influential Iranian Left for a secular, socio-economically equitable political order. Such a narrative has proven useful for locating general trends in poetic discourses of the last five decades, but it does not account for the complex and often divergent ways in which poets and critics have reconciled their political and aesthetic commitments. This dissertation begins with the historical assumption that in Iran a question of how poetry must serve society and vice versa did in fact acquire a heightened sense of urgency sometime during the ideologically-charged years surrounding the revolution. But the dissertation departs from episodic approaches to modern Persian literature by demonstrating how the various discursive responses to the question--both in theory and in poetic practice--do not fit neatly into one concept of "political" poetry. Simply put, the term "commitment" (ta`ahhod) refers to an on-going, unresolved debate in Persian poetics, not a discrete literary-historical phenomenon. Thus, even among ideologically aligned and/or self-identifying "committed" poets and critics, one encounters significant variations in the ways that each individual has understood poetics and politics to intersect.

This dissertation investigates the ways that three modern Iranian poets work through the intersection of poetry and politics in both their theoretical writings and their verse. In each of the three cases, the poets agree that poetry serves as a locus of political resistance and in this sense all three poets might fall under the general rubric of commitment that supposedly marked the period in which they wrote. However, as I demonstrate, each case study also produces a distinct poetics of commitment. In Sa`id Soltanpur (chapter one) the dissertation locates a militant poetics, arguing that poetry can participate directly in armed liberation struggles. In M.R. Shafi`i Kadkani (chapter two) the dissertation encounters a poetics of moral outrage, arguing that the canonical traditions of Persian classical and Islamic mystical poetry provide the discursive means through which to intervene in contemporary socio-political conditions. In Ahmad Shamlu (chapter three) the dissertation locates a humanist poetics that treats poetry's invitation for critical reflective judgement as itself a form of resistance to repressive state and economic structures, but does not put forth any particular alternative structure in their place. Finally, the dissertation concludes by considering the the poetry and criticism of Mohammad Mokhtari (chapter four) as articulations of a post-revolutionary poetics of commitment.

Methodologically, the dissertation takes special care to distinguish between the theories as they are articulated in discursive prose and the particular way that the poems themselves respond to, expand upon, or challenge the theories' claims. For its theoretical framework, the dissertation attempts to place modern Persian poetics in dialogue with Sartre's writings on commitment, Adorno's response to Sartre, Frankfurt School aesthetics, and European and American poetries. Ultimately, the dissertation aims to demonstrate how the question of poetry's service to society historically produced fruitful and variegated debates in Persian poetics and that the question remains relevant and unresolved today.

The dissertation also includes an appendix with original, parallel translations of the Persian poems considered at length throughout the main body of the text.