Author Description

In an inspired piece of criticism, Mohaghegh tracks the idea of "chaos" into the contemporary philosophical and cultural imagination of the post-colonial world, exploring its vital role in the formation of an emergent avant-garde literature in the Middle East. Concentrating in main on the writings of the twentieth-century Iranian new wave, Mohaghegh finds in the works of Sadeq Hedayat and Ahmad Shamlu provocative experiments with the limits of avant-gardism that have cast an enigmatic shadow across the future of world literature. "Here one tracks the chaotic imagination, and the emergent literatures that follow in its wake, searching after a certain breaking-point of thought from which there is no return. As such, this work explores some of the most elusive movements of the Middle Eastern new wave, following their experiments with the limits of the writing-act and the original concepts they generate (annihilation, desertion, contagion, shadow-becoming, the inhuman). What surfaces, in the end, is a rising language of blindness and burial, one that, though often secretive, convoluted, and even encrypted, might hold the passcodes for a still-unfolding future"