Aesthetics and Death in Bahram Sadeghi’s "Malakut"

Modern art and literature transformed the foundations of modern aesthetics by paying attention to the negative and unconventional philosophical topics that did not play an important role in classical aesthetics. “Death” is known as one of the central elements of modern literature based on the thoughts of the existentialist and post-structuralist schools. In the modern novel, death plays an essential role in the structure and texture of the story in terms of content, language, and art; and many of the aesthetic aspects of the novel revolve around it. Sadeghi, as one of the leading writers of Iran, made “death” the subject of his novel, “Malakut”, and used many of the literary aspects of his work around this concept. In this research, using the descriptive-analytical method, the aesthetic aspects of death in “Malakut” have been analyzed, which are tied to other components of modern aesthetics. The findings of the study show that the relationship between death and other components of modern aesthetics such as paradox, absence, and ambiguity has led to the importance of the dark aspects of existence as well as the rejection of the work based on the classical and conventional standards of aesthetics.