ABSTRACT
Traditional Persian views on ars poetica explicitly acknowledged the insufficiency of language and maintained that language cannot exhaust meaning. Instead, it favored a kind of poetic language that resisted direct, unambiguous expressions. The few extant manuals of classical poetics in Persian rarely addressed the authorial omniscience of the “author” as the unquestionable subject of literary-cultural creation and innovation. In concealing subjectivity, they were able to concentrate on the technical refinement, stylistic elegance, and rhetorical sophistication of aesthetics and poetic writing.1 In contrast to classical Persian poetics, the communicative nature of modern poetics establishes the notion of subjective directness.2
In the case of literature in Afghanistan since the early decades of the twentieth century, the subjective intention of the poet to convey or express certain principles has assumed a paradigmatic tendency. Perceiving subjectivity as a quintessential aspect of the project of modernity, twentieth-century intellectuals located in its expressive authority not only the distinctive modernity and innovation of literary writing and cultural practice but also the power to achieve national development, historical progress, and social improvement. The intellectual proponents of modernity in Afghanistan considered themselves to be omniscient subjects entrusted with the formidable, yet necessary, task of enlightening the people and advancing the historical effort for social emancipation and liberation. This tendency, concurrent with the political radicalization of society, gave rise to a unique, modern discursive formation whereby literature and history-that is, the literary subject and the historical subject or the representational mode of writing and the historical message-became intrinsically and unavoidably interlinked, to the extent that they appeared as one and the same entity. So far as representation signified and embodied historicization, even what may be called the most “aesthetic” of representations and applications that evoked and resonated with the so-called “self-expressiveness” of literature, necessarily assumed a socially practical objective and ideological orientation. The teleological agenda of the purposive aesthetics that epitomized literature as an intellectual practice heralded what would become the primary principle and the widely accepted criterion for evaluating and
