چکیده:
This essay examines the process of canonizing Shahnameh as an emergent discursive and material site of cultural memory in early twentieth century in Iran. Of particular significance in this regard is the first Ferdowsi millenary celebrations and the concomitant Ferdowsi millennial conference held in 1934 as a turning point in modern discourses revolving around Shahnameh. There is a power-fraught dialectic of domestication and foreignization in appropriating Shahnameh as a mnemonic sign in this period. The authors closely read the signs of this emerging semiosphere in order to bring to the fore the problematic of monologizing cultural memory by means of ideological entextualization.
خلاصه ماشینی:
In another effort to bring the past into the present, albeit even less convincingly at moments, the contemporary Iranian political philosopher Javad Tabatabai, whose theory of Iranshahr has attracted the confirming attention of many and the critical responses of many more, returns to Shahnameh to argue that since the book’s time Iran has entered into various phases of “decadence/crisis/decline” from which it has never been able to restore itself – a Hegelian narrative of history marked by moments of decadence, especially by the crevices and cracks of modernity (For a critique of this view see Boroujerdi & Shomali).
Against his | 188 Canonizing Shahnameh in Early Modern Iran: A Historical-Semiotic Approach interpretation it can be argued that Ferdowsi was a self-conscious poet and among his kings with farr one can point to Fereydun who through political mobilization of the people, and not supernatural powers, brings his enemy down, and in this sense the book should not be always read in its mythic-epic dimensions.
(30) Forughi’s views, when read against the background of nationalist agendas of his time seem to imply in its subtext that Iranians have always needed and revered | 196 Canonizing Shahnameh in Early Modern Iran: A Historical-Semiotic Approach kings, and moreover, it is for assumed enmity with the “other” that one needs to preserve the collective memory of a nation.
(Omidsalar, Iran’s Epic 35; see also Zia-Ebrahimi, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism) | 198 Canonizing Shahnameh in Early Modern Iran: A Historical-Semiotic Approach 3.