Allan, MichaelNadalizadeh, Ahmad2021-11-232021-11-23https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26911My dissertation draws together postcolonial theory, film and visual studies, and questions of aesthetics and politics in the modern Middle East. Looking closely at Iran in the latter half of the 20th century, I explore literary and artistic works concerned with the limits of representation and the political possibilities of aesthetic remediation. These various works are not simply representations of historical events, but are themselves instrumental in shaping history. For scholars across the political spectrum, Iranian modernity has often been understood as a process of becoming Western, and postcolonialism has tended to frame modern Iranian history as a response to Western imperialism. In either of these two accounts, Iranians cease to be historical agents unless they either adopt or reject a modernist project understood to be Western. My dissertation refuses this contrast and considers history as a process that is not independent from literary and cinematic locutions. Across my three core chapters, I am drawn to writers and artists whose work explores the complex dynamics connecting aesthetic form (in Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s poetry, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel, and Abbas Kiarostami’s films) and historical events (the 1953 coup, the 1979 revolution, and the 1990 earthquake). Weaving together texts and events, I consider how each of these aesthetic forms (poetry, novels, and films) challenges a linear conception of historical progress with an alternate figuration of time. I argue that at the heart of these various textual examples is an aesthetics of repetition that capitalizes upon the unexpected. These various media, I suggest, not only engage and represent, but ultimately embody the form of the event itself.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Film and Media StudieshistoriographyIranian cinemaPersian literaturepolitics of aestheticsPostcolonial and Transnational Literary TheoryElectronic Thesis or Dissertation