ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by challenging stock readings of modern Persian literature by contesting both the rubrics and methodologies used in conventional scholarship in designating certain works of fiction as modern. Bringing to light the assumptions underlying the Euro-centric and Orientalist nature of such readings, Rezaei Yazdi proceeds to offer an alternative reading of literary modernity in Persian literature. This reading highlights the dialogical tendency of modern works of fiction, informed, simultaneously, by the Perso-Islamic literary tradition and new influences. The narrative accommodating such a synthesis, Rezaei Yazdi argues, is the munāzirah (debate). By tracing the trajectory of the munāzirah in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the author demonstrates that the modernity of Persian prose fiction, thus far measured against European paradigms, is to be sought in the synthesis of indigenous and global trends. The chapter concludes that Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, who has been called the founding father of Persian prose fiction for allegedly imitating European models, in fact draws on this dialogic tradition.
