Silence in Middle Eastern and Western thought : the radical unspoken / Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak, 1979-

Series:

Intersections (London, England) ; 9.

Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories ; 9

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Iranian literature--History and criticism.

Iranian literature.

Silence in literature.

Criticism--Middle East.

Criticism.

Postcolonialism--Middle East.

Postcolonialism.

Middle Eastern literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Middle Eastern literature.

Middle East.

Physical Description:

xvii, 229 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2014.

Summary:

Presenting an engaging reflection on the work of prominent modern Iranian literary artists in exchange with contemporary Continental literary criticism and philosophy, this book tracks the idea of silence-through the prism of poetics, dreaming, movement, and the body-across the textual imaginations of both Western and Middle Eastern authors. Through this comparative nexus, it explores the overriding relevance of silence in modern thought, relating the single concept of "the radical unspoken" to the multiple registers of critical theory and postcolonial writing. In this book, the theoretical works of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gaston Bachelard, Antonin Artaud, and Gilles Deleuze are placed into a charged global dialogue with the literary-poetic writings of Sadeq Hedayat, Ahmad Shamlu, Nima Yushij, Esmail Khoi, and Forugh Farrokhzad. It also examines a vast spectrum of thematic dimensions including disaster, exhaustion, eternity, wandering, insurrection counter-history, abandonment, forgetting, masking, innocence, exile, vulnerability, desire, excess, secrecy, formlessness, ecstasy, delirium, and apocalypse. Providing comparative criticism that traces some of the most compelling intersections and divergences between Western and Middle Eastern thought, this book is of interest to academics of modern Persian literature, postcolonial studies, Continental philosophy, and Middle Eastern studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Silence and the outside 1

1 The poetics of the unspoken: Disaster, exhaustion, and the outside of language (West) 3

2 Eternity's wager: The wanderer, the insurrectionary, and the counter-historical moment (East) 20

Part II Silence and the dream 51

3 Scathing imaginaries: Abandonment, forgetting, and the night-dream (West) 53

4 The aesthetics of the unreal: Agitation, sabotage, and the fragment (East) 71

Part III Silence and the body 109

5 Disciplined and innocent bodies: Power, masking, and the visionary (West) 111

6 The captive and the exile: Vulnerability, sensation, and desire (East) 127

Part IV Silence and experience 151

7 The excessive and the formless: Delirious writing (West) 153

8 Paradox, ecstasy, and the catastrophic mind: Apocalyptic writing (East) 169.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415830652

0415830656

OCLC:

825750409