Sadegh Hedayat Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Despite previous references to the themes of disability and bodily nonnormativity in Sadeq Hedayat’s fiction, it has yet to be extensively re-read from this viewpoint. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, and particularly by employing thoughts and concepts from the developing areas of critical masculinity studies and disability studies, I read two understudied short stories by Hedayat: “Abji Khanom” and “Davood the Hunchback.” Both stories foreground the crucial intersection of gender and bodily nonnormativity as manifested in the social embodiments of the stories’ titular characters. While also intending the essay to serve as a very brief introduction to the above critical areas, I seek to answer the following questions about the stories: What has excluded the main characters from meaningful social interactions in their societies? What is the significance of Hedayat’s foregrounding the junction of gender and bodily nonnormativity in both stories? What might have caused each character’s highly pessimistic view toward his or her embodiment? I argue that the nonnormative bodies of both characters—whose societies legitimize a certain hierarchy of bodies—have afflicted them with stigmatized and hence socially devalued embodiments that render as liable both characters’ gender performances. This has brought about the characters’ social exclusion. Also, despite their difference in sex, both characters appear to be victims of similar hegemonic masculine ideals in their patriarchal ableist societies, which have internalized in our characters a pessimistic personal-tragedy view toward disability and bodily nonnormativity.

- by
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- Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Gender Studies, Persian Literature

Iranian intellectuals including Iranian modern literary writers who were supposed to act as the consciousness and
voice of their people fall prey to the imported Western modernity. The influence of these western education and
culture rendered them so alienated that pushed them to build a big rift between themselves and the rest of the society.
This causes these writers to create an image of the natives that comes to the fore as the most macabre and
stereotypical representation of the indigenous people. Although many different studies have been carried out on the
Blind Owl, it seems that little focus has been cast upon the major reasons of such presentation. This paper explores
the text to reveal how the author, by giving credit to himself as an ‘I’, artist and a painter, struggles to build a rift
between himself and the others, the rest of the society, the world of Rajaleha, the Rabbles. This study, by focusing
on the representation of the native as the other, attempts to disclose the orientalised system of representation that the
author has employed to portray the majority of the society as the peripheral and finally as the ‘Other’.

- by Esmaeil Zeiny
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- Persian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Sadegh Hedayat
- by Mohammad Ragheb
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- Omar Khayyam, Sadegh Hedayat, رباعیات, 'Umar Khayyam

Sadegh Hedayat‘s The Stray Dog oscillates between two geographical
locales, native homeland and the land of his master where he spent a part of his life
there, Europe. This story can be read as the manifestation of the Iranian identity
dilemma which is defined as a confused situation in which a sense of ―sardargomi va
sargashtegi” ―confusion and wandering‖ began to materialize in the main character.
This article, through analyzing the story as an allegorical story, will seek to explain
the distinctive problem and condition of displacement encountered by an Iranian
writer which arise feelings of isolation, estrangement, internal and external
psychological trauma which at large prevents identities to be formed at either end and
leads into final self destruction and death in Nolandia.

- by Esmaeil Zeiny
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- Postcolonial Studies, Iranian Studies, Sadegh Hedayat

Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) is one of Iran's preeminent writers of short works of fiction. This article is about the role that subtext plays in his works, in general, and in his Blind Owl, in particular. The main reasons for writing the article are: to highlight subtext as a literary device; to apply subtext to such Hedayat short stories as "Dāsh kol" (Dash Akol), "Sag-i Velgard” (the stray dog), " b-i Zendegī” (the water of life), and other short stories; and to illustrate how mourning rituals that Hedayat might have observed in India, serve as a subtext for his Būf-i Kūr (the blind owl). In the case of The Blind Owl, we shall first study the storyline that is used as subtext and follow that with corresponding events from the novella. The article ends with an investigation into whether The Blind Owl is a novel, why is it that we have difficulty understanding it, and the meaning of the novella to the extent that it can be extracted from the subtext. An understanding of the full meaning of the novella belongs to a separate study.

- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Buddhism, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Persian Literature

Sadeq Hedayat is widely known for his harsh criticism of societal norms he regarded as inappropriate, and objection to problems of women and the view of society toward them. Abji Khanom is not exempted from this generalization. It is a story published in one of his best-known short story collections Buried Alive. Hedayat in this story protests against objectification of women, and condemns the view that regards women no more than a doll which is appreciated only for its beauty. In this paper we aim to give a brief explanation about this beauty-appreciative culture, and how advertisements and even our childhood fairytales push us to the belief that beautiful is good. The subsequent parts analyze the psychological effects of the beauty standards on women, along with the role played by family in construction of these ideals in the mind of little girls. The last part looks at beauty from a different angle and deals with its pitfalls.

- by Taravat Roomiany
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- Literature, Feminism, Sadegh Hedayat, Sadeq Hedayat

If we interpret The Blind Owl according to its Buddhist subtext, we can summarize the storyline therein as follows. In India, before the Mongol invasion, one of two identical twin brothers, who had converted to the religion of the Linga, sleeps with a Bugam Dasi temple dancer. The Bugam Dasi bears a child. When the other brother, too, sleeps with the same dancer, it becomes difficult to know which young man is the father of the child. To determine the identity of the father, the brothers are put in a dungeon in which a nag-serpent is let loose. The nag-serpent bites one of the brothers and gives him a slit lip. A scream amid hysterical laughter is heard. Following that, the brother with the slit lip, walks out of the dungeon. He is deranged. The other brother leaves the dungeon unharmed. Although the determination regarding the identity of the father of the child remains uncertain, the child is given to the brother who was not harmed by the nag-serpent.

- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Buddhism, Persian Literature, Buddhist Studies, Iranian Studies

En nuestra presentación podremos reconocer los siguientes patrones: traducciones hechas a cuatro manos al castellano, traducciones al castellano, en las que distinguiremos las realizadas por iraníes y las realizadas por españoles, las traducciones al catalán, las traducciones religiosas, y un último apartado dedicado a las obras de los traductores ocasionales.

- by Mahyar Ebrahimi
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- Intertextuality, Sadegh Hedayat, Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl
- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Franz Kafka

زبان نهادی اجتماعیست متاثر از عوامل اجتماعی مختلف چون سن، مذهب، طبقه اجتماعی، ونیز عامل جنسیت. مطالعات حوزۀ جنسیّت علاوه بر تفاوتها، به تبعیض ناشی از تفاوت دو گروه جنس نیز میپردازد که از آن با عنوان "جنسیّت زدگی"یاد میشود. عامل جنسیت گاهی بر زبان و نحوه ی استفاده از زبان تاثیر گذاشته و سبب ارتقاع ارزش یکی از گروه های جنس، و تحقیر ناعادلانه دیگری میشود. از سویی، "جنسیت زدگی" تفکریست فرهنگ-محور و در جوامع مختلف متفاوت انگاشت میشود واز این رو مورد توجه زبانشناسان و مترجمان قرار گرفته است. هدف پژوهش حاضر بررسی وجود جنسیت زدگی در آثارصادق هدایت و تشخیص نوع این جنسیت زدگی بود. بدین منظور، سه داستان کوتاه از وی انتخاب و با لحاظ مدلی هفتگانه برگرفته از طرح مبسوط پاک نهادجبروتی مورد تحلیل و بررسی قرار گرفتند. سوالات تحقیق از طریق مطالعه ای تحلیلی پاسخ داده شدند و جنسیت زدگی آثار هدایت از نوع زبانی تشخیص داده شد.

- by Nadia Ghazanfari-Moghaddam
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- Languages and Linguistics, Literature, Culture, Persian Culture
- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Persian Literature, Iranian Studies, Persian Litreture, Iranian Literature

زندگی صادق هدایت با تاکید بر چگونگی کار برد مفهوم ضمنی در بوف کور

- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Persian Literature, Tibetan Buddhism, Iranian Literature, Persian Culture

Sadegh Hedayat wrote The Pilgrim (1945) based on and shortly after the historical and political events of the final years of Reza Shah’s government and early years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. The article adopts the method of critical discourse analysis, as formulated by Ruth Wodak, James Paul Gee, and Norman Fairclough, to study the novel and analyze its author’s views on the political discourses of the aforementioned period in order to determine which political discourse or discourses influenced the novel. It is possible to consider the novel politically as a meta-discursive, non-discursive or non-ideological work in which political discourses, such as kingdom, nationalism, fascism, modernism, Westernization, secularism, traditionalism and religiosity, leftism (Marxism and communism), liberalism, democracy, and constitutionalism are criticized by the author. Political ideologies are utilized to secure the interests of their advocates and propagandists. Hedayat experienced many historical and political changes from the Constitutional Revolution to the period of Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah and saw the instability politicians, rulers, and profiteers. He mixed up these events with a furious satire and created a political novel. We cannot fully comprehend the novel without having knowledge of the political events and currents of the writer’s period and his political tendencies.

Through the application of theory developed by Deleuze and Guattari this essay digs into the disruptive potential of the surreal and mythic imagery present in Hedayat's novel 'The Blind Owl'. The whirlpool of time and space in 'The Blind Owl', ensuing from a mixture of linear and cyclic time-frames, allows for a scrutiny of the novel along the lines of (Deleuzian) concepts such as aion and chronos, spiritual and bare repetition and the spiritual automaton.

- by Jeroen Jochems
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- Comparative Literature, Persian Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Manichaeism
- by Professor Sam Roodi and +1
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- Comparative Literature, Persian Literature, Shakespeare, Humanistic-Existential

This entry focuses on Sadegh Hedayat’s travelogue Isfahan, Half of the World which is an early and celebrated example of travelogue in Persian literature. I will discuss Hedayat’s admiring and critical view of Isfahan as the most important city of Iran in terms of historical and cultural richness. Descriptions of the most central monuments and historical places of Isfahan will also be provided for the reader.

اگر بوف کور را بر اساس مفھوم ضمنی بودائی آن بررسی کنیم می توانیم داستان را این
طور خلاصه کنیم: در اعصار قبل از حمله مغول، در ھندوستان، یکی از دو برادر دو قلو که
دارای یک قیافه و یک اخلاق ھستند دین لینگا را می پذیرد و با دختر رقاصه ای که در معبد
لینگا می رقصد ازدواج می کند. رقاصه باردار می شود و پسری به دنیا می آورد. کمی بعد،
برادر دو قلوی شوھر نیز با ھمان رقاصه ھم بستر می شود. از آن به بعد معلوم نیست پدر بچه
کدام یک از آن دو جوان است. برای معلوم کردن ھو یّت پدر، دو برادر را با یک مار ناگ در
سیاه چالی قرار می دھند. مار ناگ لب یکی از برادران را می گزد و پاره می کند. پس از
چندی ناله ای مخلوط با خنده ای چندش آور به گوش می رسد و یکی از برادرھا در ھیئت
پیرمردی خنزرپنزری از سیاه چال خارج می گردد. وقتی متوجه می شوند که او بچه را نمی
شناسد، بچه و مادرش را به دست برادر دیگر می سپارند.

- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Buddhism, Buddhist Philosophy, Persian Literature, Tibetan Studies
- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Persian Literature, Persian Language, Desire, Persian Culture

Sadegh Hedayat and his Indian connections always appear as an interesting subject for discussion in Indo-Persian studies. Though Hedayat travelled to India in 1936 but he began to write about India and Indians at the time when he started his writing carrier. For example when he wrote the treatises: Man and Animal and Vegetarianism, he referred to India in these works. When he writes in favour of being vegetarian, he says that eating flesh of an animal is not essential for the growth of the human body. He praises the hectic work done by the Indian postman and says that we must learn from Indian postman (Figure 1) who eats only rice in his meal and walks miles and miles all over the city to deliver letters to people in both cities and villages. Hedayat always had a fascination towards India and gave respect to Indians in both his real and fictional world. It can be proved when we Figure 1 Indian Postmen

- by Nadeem Akhtar
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- Sadegh Hedayat

Satire by Sadeq Hedayat on the socio-political and religious situation in Iran in the 1940s.

- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Persian Language, Persian Litreture, Persian, Sadegh Hedayat
- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Buddhism, Languages and Linguistics, Persian Literature, Iranian Studies

Sadegh Hedayat, as a pioneer writer of Iranian contemporary novel, has always used psychological motifs in his works. His "Boof-e Koor"[The Blind Owl], out of his other works, is much more influenced by psychological motifs and can be regarded as a psychological novel. What seems important being analyzed in this story is the approach of narrator and his contradictions toward Sadegh Hedayat, himself.
The narrator, as the story’s main axis, is the one whose mind structure should be carefully recognized to judge about his manner of narration. Since the narrator’s mind has many contradictions and incompatibilities, his character structure seems being constructed out of various taboos orienting his mind.
In this study we try to psychoanalyze the narrator’s character, his spiritual taboos and the reasons of their formation to understand why the narrator's character has been formed in this way. Woman seems being the most principle social and psychological taboo of the story. The narrator’s special psychological structure in various stages of his mental development reflects three female characters throughout the story.

- by Journal of Persian Literature
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- Taboo, Narration, Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the 19th century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here the xenological uncanny. This article examines Iranian modernism through the lens of trauma theory, whereby haunted subjects fail in distinguishing between self and other, and modernization is perceived as demonization. The three works we discuss—Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl (1937), Bahram Sadeqi’s Heavenly Kingdom (1961), and Hushang Golshiri’s Prince Ehtejab (1968)—each delineate a different register in the xenological uncanny. Our lineage reveals how modernist Persian prose recapitulates a trajectory of possession and dispossession by the foreign and in the process brings about the traumatic recognition of a foreign voice within the self. In focusing on the divided modernist self from a Persian point of view, we identify an unrecognized trajectory for the uncanny within global literary modernism.

- by Rebecca Ruth Gould
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- Traumatology, World Literatures, Persian Literature, Modernism (Literature)

La perte de l’avenir a de tout temps été corrélative au sentiment du désastre, et ce qui fait la particularité et la généralisation de ce sentiment aujourd’hui, c’est que nous soyons passés de l’imminence à l’immanence de l’apocalypse. Un tel basculement est à même de nous faire perdre le sens du perspectivisme historique nécessaire à la métamorphose individuelle et collective. Les œuvres que je propose d'étudier parlent de la perte du monde connu : d'un côté, avec l'avènement de la modernité, c'est la civilisation persane qui disparaît dans Bouf-e-Kour de S. Hedayat, et le monde touareg du désert dans al-Tibr d'I. al-Koni ; de l'autre, c'est l’humanité en tant que telle qui se voit buter sur sa fin, guère plus capable de s’inventer un futur au temps des catastrophes écologiques et de la désillusion face au progrès : tel est le cas des 98% de la population ayant échappé au ravissement dans la série HBO The Leftovers, ainsi que du monde des combattants post-exotiques d'A. Volodine. Entre le désenchantement des premiers et le (désir de) réenchantement des secondes, transparaît la nécessité de recourir à ce que j’appelle l’entre-deux cosmologique : dispositif de médiation ontologique à l’aune duquel s’élabore l’existence, s’imagine et se métamorphose entre l’ici-bas, en tant que monde objectif, et l’au-delà, qui n’est en rien le monde des morts, mais l’horizon ontologique vis-à-vis duquel se crée la vie, entre enracinement dans le passé et élan de devenir.

- by Khalil Khalsi
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- Comparative Literature, Cosmology (Anthropology), Apocalypticism, Dreams

Book review in Persian of the translation of Sadeq Hedayat stories published as Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, Westview Press, 1979.
article is “Montakabâti az Sâdeq Hedâyat” [book review in Persian], Irân Nâmeh 5, 4 (Summer 1987): 731-6.
بعد از انقلاب اسلامی در ایران و پرشور و آشوب شدن سایر کشورهای خاورمیانه، تعداد کتابهای جدید به زبان انگلیسی و زبانهای مختلف اروپا در مورد اقتصاد، سیاست و تاریخ کشورهای عالم اسلامی،و بخصوص ایران،کثرت یافتند.همراه با این‏ کتابهای بیشمار،چند مجموعه از آثار ادبی معاصر ایران هم به انگلیسی ترجمه شده و بچاپ رسیده است.متأسفانه این چند کتاب که مشتمل بر نمونه‏های برگزیدهء شعر نو فارسی و منتخباتی از مشهورترین داستانهای کوتاه نویسندگان دوران اخیر ایران است، مورد توجه غریبان قرار نگرفته است.این دلیل نیست که ادبیات معاصر ایران در مقابل‏ ادبیات غربی قاصر و ضعیف مانده است،بلکه علت آن،کمبود آشنایی مردم امریکا و اروپا با فرهنگ ایرانی است از یک جهت و از جهت دیگر فقدان مترجمین ماهرکه در آن واحد ذوق و طبع ادبی و هم آشنایی کافی با زبان فارسی و زبان انگلیسی داشته‏ باشند.طبعا وقتی که ترجمه‏های زیبا از آثار ادبیات یک ملت به زبان دیگر وجود نداشته‏ باشد،نمی‏توانیم انتظار داشته باشیم که عموم مردم به خواندن آن رغبت کنند.

- by Franklin Lewis
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- Translation Studies, Persian Literature, Literary translation, Sadegh Hedayat

This entry looks at the life and work of the Iranian pioneering modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat in the hope of finding out how the city, culture, and folklore influenced him and how he influenced them in turn. Hedayat’s life and work was presumably not irrelevant to the city, and there is evidence to support that both himself and his writings are connected with different urban spaces – mainly Tehran, Isfahan, Paris – and cultures as well as with their political aspects. These connections are more salient in his realist and satirical works in which he takes critical perspectives on the city, mostly on its cultural, social, and political aspects. It turns out that Hedayat looked at culture, worldviews, beliefs, monuments, etc., with a skeptical and critical lens at the same time as he maintained his relation with them and was a part of them.

Resumen: Sadegh Hedayat es una de las más influyentes figuras de la literatura persa
moderna y contemporánea. Desde una mirada muy crítica, su obra dramática La leyenda
de la creación, toca temas importantes de la sociedad iraní de los principios del
siglo xx, como el colonialismo, la religiosidad y el tradicionalismo.
Abstract: Sadegh Hedayat is one of the most influential figures of Persian modern
and contemporary literature. From a very critical point of view, his dramatic work The
legend of Creation, points out important issues of the Iranian society of the beginnings
of the twentieth century, such as colonialism, religious beliefs and traditionalism.

This article interrogates the limits of reading, translating, and teaching non-Western literature. Focusing on Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur; 1937/41), it demonstrates that what is, arguably, the most important work of modern Iranian literature but has also been called ‘a Western novel’, compared to the writing of Poe, and hence straddles and subverts both literary traditions, makes conspicuous the fact that our understanding of ‘global’ texts is conditioned by translation, critical reception, and the material aspects of publication. More precisely, the article examines how Western and non-Western critical approaches to this novel combine to produce illuminating, but also problematic, polysemies. Drawing on translation and postcolonial theories, it shows how specific lexical choices in Roger Lescot’s French and D.P Costello’s English translations transform the work’s meaning, and considers, more broadly, the critical, definitional, and theoretical queries into the politics of hermeneutics and translation these choices raise.

This article aims at supplying an analytical reading of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (1917) and Sadegh Hedayat’s Three Drops of Blood (1932). It also concentrates on the close affinities between these two narratives. Not only that Hedayat has been influenced by Kafka, both writers show great impact of Freud on their work of art. Thus the focus of attention has been put on Freudian psychoanalysis. As to justify why the stories are told in the form of dreams, a secondary analytic reading has been carried out by devoting emphasis on the school of surrealism, its stress on the unconscious. Given these analytic frameworks, the article emphases on two major characters/narrators and the way they deal unsuccessfully with their surroundings, incidents, and other characters so as to create a balance between the internal conflicting forces of their personality. This paper concludes that both narratives are following roughly the same pattern of thought and ideology.
Key words: A Country Doctor; Three Drops of Blood; psychoanalysis; dream; unconscious; three; desire

- by Azra Ghandeharion
- •
- Comparative Literature, Iranian Studies, Franz Kafka, Sadegh Hedayat
- by Iraj Bashiri
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- Iranian Studies, Sadegh Hedayat, Sadeq Hedayat, Modern Persian Literature

Existentialist and post-structuralist theories are frequently-employed approaches in reading Sedegh Hedayat’s works. Some critics investigate evidences of absurdity in Hedayat’s works which lead to a nihilist reading of the author’s fiction. The present research adopts a psychoanalytical approach in order to demonstrate the shifting psychological status of characters in “Tomorrow,” from the conscious to sub-conscious, and the representation of the unconscious in the narrative. Regarding interior monologue as the primary form of stream of consciousness, this paper analyses the narration and its modes in the short story. Following the modernism movement, Hedayat introduced a new narration pattern instead of the traditional realistic narration of Persian contemporary literature. Interior monologue, stream of consciousness, fragmentary narration, multiple points of view, and combination of various timelines as modernistic techniques of narration are of considerable significance in fiction. As primary modernistic attempts in Persian contemporary fiction, “Tomorrow” focuses on a worker who is murdered in a proletarian protest. “Mahdi Zaghi” narrates his situation before the murder scene and “Gholam” narrates his condition after Mahdi’s death. These narrations illustrate interior struggles of characters which end in a stream of consciousness extract perching on Gholam’s unconsciousness.

- by Sajed Hosseini and +1
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- Psychoanalysis, Narratology, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud

This article compares two major 20th century magical realist novels - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl – as critiques of modern nation-making practices, in Nehruvian post-independence India and Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The analysis centers the interplay of accidents and systems, in political constructions and contestations of modern self, history and knowledge. The works are assessed in terms of two aesthetic paradigms of modernity: Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as traumatic deracination involving new creative possibilities and freedom, and Cocteau’s vision of modernity as an Infernal Machine where a pre-recorded universe annihilates creative freedom. The political significance of these aesthetics are evaluated against the two distinctive nationalist narratives which the authors set out to contest in their respective novels. Both novels offer important critiques of violence. Yet both reveal a Proustian aesthetic of nostalgia, rejecting organized political action in the public sphere to celebrate imaginative introversion.

Narrative has being existed in many different forms through communities in all places and all times. It began with human history, and there has been no nation with any narrative. Narrative is just like life. Since the man is under the influence of story’s narrative logic, the structure of [1]narration has an extensive range just like the variety of lives of human societies. What makes the narrative forms look different is the way the narrative elements such as plot, narrator, etc. are being used in the story. We examine, in this paper, the narrative techniques and specific methods used by Sadegh Hedayat and Abbas Maroufi in their modern novels, Boofe Koor and Paykare Farhad, respectively. Finally, we try to realize and find out the author’s linguistic syntax and Show the distinctions exist between two narratives, and also, to represent the ambiguity of each work exposing some examples from both stories.

- by Journal of Persian Literature
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- Syntax, Narration, Sadegh Hedayat, روایت
- by saleh Haqshenas
- •
- Henri Bergson, Sadegh Hedayat