ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the underlying discursive network that informed the authors’ perspectives and retrospectively helped shape a vision for the future. This discourse was strongly grounded in the elite Persian social circles to which the travelers belonged, and it was also based in the established literary patterns of the safarnameh genre in which they wrote. To understand how the discursively shaped ideals reflected in the safarnamehs eventually contributed to a full-blown indigenous experience of Iranian modernity, it is useful to consider the history and meaning of the term that is most often used to describe that modernity: tajaddod. Scholars disagree on when exactly the concept of tajaddod first appeared in Persian literature. Similar to the children in the movie, who are relentlessly questioned, the new generations of Iranian people are today often unable to comprehend the relevance of the never-ending hypothetical inquisitions about the missing tajaddod.
