This dissertation traces the substantial expansion of Western interest in contemporary Iranian art over the past two decades. In reading Iranian artifacts, it argues that Western disciplinary frames, most specifically art history and criticism, circumscribe the heterogeneity of Iranian contemporary art. Submitted to Western frames of legibility, the multivalent aesthetic properties of contemporary Iranian art is reduced to readily consumable social, political, and ethical messages. Burdened by the need to speak for Iranian society as a whole, the diverse aesthetic economies of Iranian artifacts are curtailed and reconfigured so that they align with Euro–American understandings of meaning, value, aspiration, and desire.

Thesis (M.A.)--Guo li Taiwan da xue. / Cover title. Reproduced from typescript. Bibliography: p. 251-252.

Thesis (M.A.)--Guo li Taiwan da xue. / Cover title. Reproduced from typescript. Bibliography: p. 251-252.

Thesis (M.A.)--Guo li Tai wan da xue. / Cover title. Reproduced from typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-252).

The New Wave (Moj-e Now), as the rather large body of “quality films” made in Iran before the 1979 revolution came to be known, forms the main thematic concern of this study. From start to end, however, this primary track of investigation is opened up to other mediums of cultural production: modernist Persian fiction and poetry, the visual arts scene, the discourse on ethnography and “folklore studies,” and the critical texts produced by public intellectuals. The second main theme coming to the fore is the intersection of the emergent “discourse of authenticity,” the Iranian intellectuals’ growing demand for “cultural rootedness,” and the production of modernist aesthetics in literature, arts, and cinema. Introduced early in the text, the idea of “modernism of uneven development” provides the theoretical frame for this project; the recurrences of the hypothesis, particularly as it pertains to a temporal divide between the city and the countryside, are discerned and analysed. The Iranian New Wave Cinema, I contend, always showed an ethnographic register, as it too was after worlds and times deemed as vanishing. This “movement” in cinematic modernism first emerged from within the documentary mode, which began to flourish in Iran from the 1960s. Cutting right across this study, the perceived divide between the urban and the rural finds its reflection even in the way that some of its chapters are organized. Hence, the allegory of the city, and that of the country. But, where ends the national allegory, a matter still conditional on imagined continuity, other forms of allegory come to the surface. Critical reading in this sense becomes an act of reproduction, further opening up fissures and discontinuities of what is already deemed as petrified, whether of the national or of realism. Retaining a faith in the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality though, certain manifestations of materiality come to the fore through my close readings of films from the New Wave. A number of these material formations come to focus as the “objects” of the study: the museum display, the ruin, the body, the mud brick wall, the moving car, and the old neighborhood passageway.

From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, a corpus of didactic Persian texts circulated across Central and South Asian courts, functioning as a ‘mirror for princes’ or didactic manuals of ethical comportment. Numerous such manuscripts were embellished with meticulously detailed and laboriously created paintings. But what was the role of manuscript illustrations in shaping ethical and moral transformation? Though we now understand paintings through the frameworks of taxonomy and connoisseurship, how did illustrations make meaning to their intended audience, who read the text and were steeped in textual traditions? Contemporary sources are silent on the role of paintings in didactic texts, but, as my dissertation demonstrates, an in-depth evaluation of paintings and their accompanying text reveals how painted manuscripts engendered specific reading practices. These reading practices involved listening, visualizing mental images, viewing paintings, anticipating, recollecting, confusion and wonder, exercising patience, and even stilling our minds – experiences that made the reader-viewer dwell on the manuscript’s contents for an extended period. Focusing on painted manuscripts commissioned and collected by the Qutb Shahis in sixteenth-century Golconda, this dissertation’s chapters explore how writers, scribes, painters, and illuminators deployed allegory, repetition, and narrative plot, to attract and sustain their intended audience's attention.