THE STRUCTURE OF AUTHORING IN NIMA YUSHIJ'S POETRY: A BAKHTINIAN READING

Abstract

<p>This thesis employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of architectonics to examine the poetry of Nima Yushij, the father of “New Persian Poetry.” The architectonic structure of Nima’s poems presupposes an authorial position situated outside the whole of the work. Outsideness provides the author with the distance that is necessary for consummating the hero and all other elements inside the work’s environment in determinate spatial and temporal boundaries. As Bakhtin puts it, only in this way can the author acquire a surplus of seeing that is required for adopting a valuational stance in relation the hero and the work as a whole. To Bakhtin, the author’s valuational stance toward the hero is the essence of the aesthetic product. This valuational position vis-à-vis the other, which generates what Michael Holquist calls the “structure of authoring,” is enacted on multiple levels in Nima’s poems as the hero, and sometimes the narrator, also perform the authorial function vis-à-vis other characters inside the poem, i.e., fixing them in determinate spatial and temporal boundaries. Of course, from the author’s perspective, the hero and the narrator are also situated inside the poem and occupy specific horizons in its environment. In this sense, their authoring activity is not a precisely aesthetic activity. Nevertheless, Nima utilizes the hero and the narrator’ activity to foreground the structure of authoring inside the poem, to make its dynamics “viewable.” This is a point that I will try to elucidate fully in the course of this study.</p>