The Relationship of Mythical and Modern Iranian Story: A Philosophical Perspective

In the present study, we have set out to depict the relationship of mythical and modern Iranian stories from the perspective of the philosophy of Art. Hegel, in his idealistic formation of the history of philosophy of Art, showed that in the primary stages of civilization, Art was the outcome of the connection of “absolute” and “essence.” As a result, Art has failed to show absolute unity with “absolute.” Along the same line, Heidegger and Lukács considered the distance between Art and “essence” as a sign of decline. Meanwhile, the members of the Frankfurt School, put forward new ideas in the Hegelian context of the time; they demonstrated that modern Art and literature, are moving away from reality and attempted to approach “essence,” “universal,” and “unity.” In modernist stories, employing myth is one way to establish a relationship between “unity” and “universal” and so we experience deformation and disintegration of the contemporary world, we witness a flashback, a mythical unity in the shape of formal avant-gardism. From the same perspective, Hedayat and Golshiri are main representatives of two fundamental breaks in modern Iranian stories from 1300 to 1357. Along with modern deformation of the contemporaneous forms, they included flashbacks and Iranian myths, in the form of transformation and deconstruction, in their stories. The results indicated that these two authors, in a dialectical fashion, depicted both the spirit of modernity and the need for historical rereading and representation.