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ID:
137390
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| Summary/Abstract |
This is a comparative study of anger and narrative control in two tragic stories cast in an epic-heroic register, the “Tale of Rostam and Sohrab” of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and “The Knight's Tale” of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The narrators of both stories are heavily invested in upholding a certain normative interpretation of the events they recount, a fatalistic worldview that justifies itself through the necessarily agnostic optimism that these senseless catastrophes gain meaning when situated within a greater order that is beyond the capacity of man to comprehend. The emotional responses of outrage and grief therefore have no legitimate place in this worldview, and must be submitted to a process of rationalization and violent suppression in order to be kept in check. However, this same process also reveals the underlying aporias of its own normative logic, producing a subtextual counter-narrative that resists and undermines the dominant voice of the text. The resulting fragmentation and narrative collapse provides a fruitful opportunity to investigate how both texts respond to a crucial ontological topic in medieval literature and philosophy: what does it mean to be an autonomous subject within a divinely ordered universe, and how can one distinguish justice from tyranny in a world entirely governed by fate?
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| 2 |
ID:
137387
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article discusses the reasons why Ferdowsi does not begin the Shahnameh with the episode of Zoroaster, which he quotes from the version of Daqiqi, but rather with an account of the creation of the world that, in contrast to Islamic historians writing before Ferdowsi, does not attempt to accommodate a Qur'anic view of creation and human history, but neither does he give a cosmology dominated or well informed by Zoroastrian theology. Similarly, Ferdowsi tends to present pre-Islamic Iran as having a consistent religious history, and perhaps avoids beginning with Goshtāsp's conversion to the religion of Zoroaster, as he makes Daqiqi appear to do, in order to minimize the role of religious conflict in Iranian history, again diverging from historians of the Islamic period writing before him. The article also explores the role of God in the Shahnameh and the absence of theodicy.
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