Marūfī’s Paykar Farhād [Farhād’s Corpse]:

Document Type : Research Papers

Author

English literatue

Abstract

By baroque, one implies the “general attitude” and “the formal quality” of a work of art which is trans-historical and “radiates through” histories, cultures, and works of art. In that way, just a seventeenth-century work of art cannot be considered baroque; on the other hand, even a postmodern work can display “baroque” features. However, as a slave to its era, the baroque of 2oth and 21th century cannot exactly overlap with that of 17th century. Called Neo-baroque, hence, the postmodern baroque reflects not only the baroque features like intertextuality, polycentrism, serielity, instability and the fluidity of boundaries, and a sense of movement but also a postmodern Baudrillardian chaotic, schizophrenic world ridden with non-originality, simulation, and “repetition with variation”. To-be-both-but-none feature, i.e. fluidity, is also a distinguishing characteristic of Abbas Marūfī’s Paykar Farhād [Farhād's Corpse]. As a sequel to Hidayat’s Būf kūr [The Blind Owl], Marufī’s story tells us another story as well: a tale, told by a schizophrenic female narrator, full of fragments and digressions which signifies multiple worlds within the single world of the narrative, in whose labyrinthine structure the reader gets lost. To dig this other story out, the article first focuses on the potentialities with which neo-baroque style can generally endow a text. Then, in the last part, it zooms in the major potentiality this neo-baroque style has provided Marūfī with: the potentiality of resistance, of viewing world from a feministic point of view or from the position of the abject.

Keywords


Butler, J. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, A Jones (ed.). London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 392-401.
Calabrese, Omar. Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times. Trans. Charles Lambert. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. 
Cowan, Bainard. “Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory.” New German Critique: Special Issue on Modernism, 22, 1981.  pp. 109-122.
Dimakopoulou, S. “Remapping the Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern: The Folds of Melancholy and the Melancholy of the Fold.” E-rea (Revue éléctronique d’études sur le monde anglophone) 4 (1), 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993.
Doy, G. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. London: I B Tauris, 2000.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1976.
---. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. London: Macmillan, 1984.
---. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. London: Zone Books, 1992.
Foster, Hal. Ed. Anti-aesthetics: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Washington: Bay Press, 1983. 
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. “Rise from the Ground like Feathered Mercury: Baroque Citations in the Fiction of Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson.” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 5, 2005. pp. 193-221.
Glissant, E douard. Poetique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. Trans. D. P. Costello. New York: Grove Press, 1957.
Joslin, Issac J. “Postcolonial Disruptions: Reading the Feminine Baroque in Calixthe Beyala’s Tu T’appelleras Tanga.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 14, 2010. pp. 485-93.
Juvan, Marko. History and Poetics of Intertexuality. Trans. Tiomthy Pogacar, USA: Purdue University Press, 2008.
Lambert, Gregg. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. London: Continuum, 2004.
Lopez-Varela Azcrate Asuncoَn. “Cultural Scenarios of the Fantastic.” Comparative Literature and Culture 10 (4), 2008. 
Mahon, A. Eroticism and art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Marūfi, A.  Farhād’s Corpse. Tehran: Ghoghnoos, 2000.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Trans. A. M. Berrett, et al. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
Ndalianis, Angela. “From Neo-Baroque to Neo-Baroques?” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hisponicos, 33 (1), 2008.  pp. 265-80.
---.Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
---. Polycentrism and Seriality: (Neo)Baroque Narrative Formation. MA: MIT University Press, 2004.
---.  Science Fiction Experiences, New Academia Publishing, LLc: USA, 2010.
Nizamī, A. Khosraw and Shīrīn. Vahid Dastgerdi (ed). Tehran: Barg Negar, 2007.
Nietzsche, F. Human, All-Too-Human. R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). London: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Panofsky, Erwin. “What is Baroque?” in Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997. pp. 19-88.
Spadaccini, N. and  Martin-Estudillo. Hispanic Baroque: Reading Cultures in Context, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Thorburn, David and Henry Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,  2003.
Wolfflin, H. Renaissance und Barock, Trans. Kathrin Simon,London: Collins, 1964.
Yoo, Hyun Joo. "The Neo-Baroque of Our Time: A Reading of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose." International Journal of Arts and Sciences, Vol 3 (10), pp. 166-73, 2010.