The Poetics of Politics: Commitment in Modern Persian Literature

Wozu Dichter in Dürftiger Zeit? —Hölderlin Triumphant or turbulent, cultures are at once symbolized by and constituted from their arts and sciences. Literature celebrates, as law canonizes, the grand ideals of a living culture. Traditional or transitional, societies and their institutional structures of authority find elaborate expressions in the literature they produce. This volume of Iranian Studies is devoted to an examination of the modern Iranian writer and contemporary Persian literature in their dialectical, interaction with a transitional Iranian culture and society. Its focus is on a revolutionary literature within a revolutionary social context. The term "revolutionary" is used here in its fundamental cultural sense, embracing both the social and the political. This paper is devoted to a sociological examination of the problem of "commitment" in modern Persian literature. To reach for the political nature of the problem, it traces the formation of the intelligentsia in modern Iranian society.