Aporias of Modernist Aesthetics in Pahlavi Iran

Rather than offering definitive insights into what “Modernist Aesthetics in Pahlavi Iran” constitutes, this chapter argues that the movement away from the dominant ways of reading modernist aesthetics requires a departure from the question of “existence” and “discovery” toward critical processes of “invention,” where acts of close reading and paradigms of comparison tease out, invent, and imagine alternatives to modernity by attending to the tensions between a text and its many contexts. Rather than sentencing texts to follow the interpretive fate of their modernist Euro-American counterparts, we can think of the critiques of the modern situation, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s formulation, that call into question the imagined identity of this present with itself and interrogate the metaphysics of continuity and rupture. The implications of such readings far extend the imaginary borders of aesthetics and gesture toward new forms of political relationality. Informed by the famed modernist poet Nīmā Yūshīj’s “anxious aesthetics,” the chapter explores these ideas through a reading of Férydoun Rahnéma’s short documentary film, Takht-e Jamshid ( Persepolis , 1960).