1 - Transcending the Written Text : From Dava’i’s Sensescapes to Sensorial Promiscuities in a Hafezian Banquet

Summary

There is a time for abstract science and then another one for things … the works of my youth … I henceforth find old, precisely because they are very learned or strictly under surveillance. Luckily, the more one writes, the younger one becomes. Finally, no more surveillance; finally, I can play truant – no more school at all.

Prologue

Literary research premised on sensory studies challenges, above all, the monopolization of modern Persian literary criticism by socio-political discourses, which generally rely on content-based approaches that construct ‘committed readings’ of literary production. ‘Committed readings’ circumscribe the significance of the literary by allowing the text to be only a site of resistance and a call to action, thus foreclosing opportunities for alternative readings. Sensory studies challenge the limits of such approaches, and this confrontation takes place in the fields of aesthetics-stylistics and literary readings.

In the context of Persian literature, the geography of which exceeds Iran's current borders, modern literary criticism has relied upon (non-literary) concepts derived from systems of thought, ideologies, and social movements such as socialism, Islamism, Sufism, feminism, nationalism, orientalism, and post-colonialism to produce a vast arsenal of models for reading – and judging – works of both classical and modern Persian literature.

A conventional challenge to the aesthetics and stylistics of these reading models could be mounted by relying on dated yet still extremely useful rhetorical studies. However, this iteration stops at the level of identifying rhetorical devices and does not attempt to produce homogenous readings of literary texts. In addition, because of its exclusive reliance on verbocentric devices, this approach is not capable of confronting the ideabased textualism of committed-reading models in an organic manner. In fact, for anthropologists in the field of sensory studies, this, too, has been an issue. Among scholars who have attempted to form a strategy to interrogate this textualism and/or verbocentrism, Alain Corbin's contribution is most significant. David Howes summarizes Corbin's work as follows:

The writings of Alain Corbin are fundamental to the sensory turn in history. Breaking with the focus on ‘mentalities’ in the work of Febvre and the Annales School, and the focus on ‘discourse’ on the part of Foucault and the poststructuralists, Corbin set out to write a history of the ‘sensible’ (see Corbin and Heure 2000).