Literary Modernism and Literary Modernity in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This article puts Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity in conversation with Levi Thompson’s Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry to explore the relationship between literary modernism and literary modernity in non-Western literary contexts. It highlights the authors’ parallel theoretical engagements of Michel Foucault’s “attitude of modernity” and modernists’ and modernizers’ reworkings of literary heritage through the sublation of premodern literary content and form into modern conceptions of literary history. Drawing on these parallels, the article reviews several points of convergence in contemporary Arabic literary historical analysis that limn Jabbari’s approach to the Persianate world, which crosses between Persian and Urdu, the naskh and nastaʿlīq scripts, and Iran and India. It seeks out connections in the work and thought of Jabbari’s interlocutors, such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār and N. M. Rashed; Iranian modernist poets Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād; and the Arab “free verse” (shiʿr ḥurr) poets such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. The article highlights how Jabbari’s book proves that literary historians in the Persianate world were subject to modernization discourse in making themselves modern and therefore covered up aspects of their premodern heritage that did not fit their modernizing projects.