ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, I have outlined how history and poetry were constructed as two of the discourses out of which Shiraz was made into a city of knowledge. I develop this analysis by examining history and poetry as two distinct modalities of knowing. I attend to the specific and different ways in which people relate to history and poetry as modes of apprehension and representation of events. I consider the modalities of history and poetry and the ways people relate to them as the outcome of historical events, not as abstract genres. I frame their analysis with a consideration of how the 1950s in Shiraz were discussed or silenced in the late 1990s, at the time of my fieldwork. This historicizing approach opens the way for a genealogical consideration of the relevance of poetry as an existential ground for recognition.
