[Discussion] PUBL.- Michael M.J. Fischer, Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Michael Fischer <mfischer@MIT.EDU>

PUBL.- Michael M.J. Fischer, Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

New from Duke University Press

Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the
Transnational Circuitry

Michael M.J. Fischer

Over the past decade Iranian films have received enormous international
attention. Combining his extensive ethnographic experience in Iran and 
his broad
command of critical theory, Michael M.J. Fischer argues that the widespread
appeal of Iranian cinema is based in a poetics that speaks not only to 
Iran's
domestic cultural politics but also to the more general ethical dilemmas 
of a
world simultaneously torn apart and pushed together. Approaching film as 
a tool
for anthropological analysis, he illuminates how Iranian filmmakers have
incorporated and remade the rich traditions of oral, literary, and 
visual media
in Persian culture.

Fischer reveals how the distinctive expressive idiom emerging in 
contemporary
Iranian film reworks Persian imagery that has itself been in dialogue 
with other
cultures since the time of Zoroaster and ancient Greece. He examines a 
range of
narrative influences on this expressive idiom and imagery, including 
Zoroastrian
ritual as it is practiced in Iran, North America, and India; the mythic 
stories,
moral lessons, and historical figures written about in Iran's national 
epic, the
Shahnameh; the dreamlike allegorical world of Persian surrealism 
exemplified in
Sadeq Hedayat's 1939 novella The Blind Owl; and the politically charged 
films of
the 1960s and 1970s. Fischer contends that by combining Persian 
traditions with
cosmopolitan influences, contemporary Iranian filmmakers -- many of whom 
studied
in Europe and America -- provide audiences around the world with new 
modes of
accessing ethical and political experiences.

Part I: Speaking after Zarathustra: Ritual, Epic, and Philosophical Forms of
         Reason

1. Yasna: Performative Ritual, Narrative Mnemonic

2. Shahnameh: Parable Logic

Coda: Illuminationism: Philosophical Allegory

Part II: Seeing After Film: Textual and Cinematic Forms of Ethical Reason

3. Awaiting the Revolution: Surrealism Persian Style

4. Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: The Work of Art, Ethics, and
    Religion in Postrevolution Iranian Cinema

5. War Again: Qandahar, 911 -- Figure and Discourse in Iranian Cinematic
    Writing

Coda: Balancing Acts (After 9/11)

Epilogue: Beyond "Mobile Armies of Metaphors": Sheherezade Films the Games

Duke University Press
December 2004, 474 pages
Cloth ISBN 0-8223-3285-x
Paper ISBN 0-8223-3298-1 (paper), Price: $23.95

Web: www.dukeupress.edu



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