epic poetry

This paper aims to explore the relationship between epic poetry and national self-consciousness and in particular study how Shahnameh may be analyzed from this angle. What is the relationship between the Shahnameh and the Iranian national self-consciousness? What can one say about the Iranian national self-consciousness on the basis of this text? What does the text reveal about the Iranian identity? A related question should also be answered, is the Shahnameh an epic? This is not a pedantic question concerned merely with definitions and labels. As will become clear, an epic reveals a great deal about the national consciousness of the people to whom it belongs (or who belong to it); to identify a poem as an epic, is to be making an important statement about the national consciousness of a people. The question of whether the Shahnameh is an epic or not is hence far from a pedantic one. It takes us right into the heart of Iranian national consciousness

In “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh” by Mehdi Akhavān Sāles (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition of epic storytelling. This paper examines the relationship between language, perception, self, time, and world created through the fiction of storytelling. Drawing on theories of perception, narrative time, and epic performance, our discussion touches upon the nature of “I” and “we”, the shifting narrative grounds and identities enacted by the narration, the imbrication of past and present in the figure of the storyteller, and the memory spaces that are created both in and through the text. The imaginary speech act of the storyteller casts the reader as audience, while at the same time, the epic past is overlayed by a tumble-down present. Language itself becomes incommensurable with what it describes. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of a lost age of epic heroes, as has often been claimed, ĀKHAR-E SHĀHNĀMEH emerges as the profoundly modern diagnosis of a split consciousness that affects the individual in a society that can no longer return to epic naïveté.