epiphany

This paper’s aim is to present a comparative study of the poetry of the American James Arlington Wright and the Persian Sohrab Sepehri in order to examine the main ground of convergence in their poetry, which is epiphany or sudden revelation of truth. This revelation is mostly informed by intuitive, as opposed to logical, thinking and a mystical union with nature and natural elements. The poetic art of both Sepehri and Wright precisely consists in reminding the readers of the necessity of redefining and reconstructing the self through an awakening based on spiritual moments. In both Sepehri and Wright, the magic moments are presented through epiphany whose mission is to alert the soul to the absence/presence of what matters, and to the ways of dealing with the problem.

story from Dubliners has received immense critical reception over the years and has been studied through various critical frameworks. However, its potential for analysis based on Hegelian dialectic has been largely overlooked. Considering the last episode of the story as a moment of epiphany and self-realization, the study seeks to discuss how the protagonist’s development of consciousness can be interpreted based on the three stages of Hegelian dialectic: Understanding (Idealization of Mangan's sister and the bazaar), Dialectical (faced with contradiction at the bazaar), and Speculative (the final epiphany). The analysis demonstrates how the narrator’s initially fixed determinations and alienated consciousness in the understanding stage face their contradiction at the dialectical moment, resulting in the final epiphany, which mirrors the last stage of the dialectic where contradictions are resolved and self-realization is achieved. Further, based on the principles of Hegelian dialectic rooted in philosophical idealism, the study not only asserts that the narrator’s consciousness evolves through a process driven by contradiction, but it also interprets the narrator’s journey from naïve idealization to self-realization as a universal process of maturation. To avoid a mechanical and rigid application of the dialectical method, the analysis relies on close textual reading to identify the elements that contribute to each moment of the dialectic and deeply contextualizes the argument to deviate from oversimplification of the text.