A Critique of Reductionist Readings of Nima Yooshij’s Poetry

As an offspring of reductionism, modern science can be traced back to the Renaissance and mankind’s effort to understand the universe as a unified whole through analysing its diverse components. Even though one might assume that reductionism is a positive phenomenon, it has negative effects in literary theory. This study investigates reductionist readings of Nima Youshij’s poetry. As the centre of the contemporary poetry canon, Nima necessitates close reading and in-depth analysis. The present article explores the reductionist readings of six Iranian critics – Sirous Shamisa, Saeid Hamidian, Taghi Poornamdarian, Reza Barahani, Shapour Jourkesh, and Mahmoud Falaki – who have reduced Nima’s poetry to simple and readily accessible meanings. To do so, the study at hand investigates different forms of reductionism and critiques form, subject/object, language, exegesis, and symbols in Nima’s criticisms. The results of this study show that reducing Nima’s poetry dismantles his poetic structure and organization.
 
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
Persian modern poetry moved beyond traditional structures of form and language to reflect society, philosophy, and aestheticism. As the father of modern poetry, Nima Youshij can be regarded as a theoretician of modern literature. Even after a century of the so-called “Nima movement,” modern literary theories suffer from serious challenges, such as reductionist readings. Reductionism, the approach of explaining complex phenomena by breaking them down into their smallest components, has several potential problems. It can lead to oversimplification, obscuring implicit qualities and complex interactions in poetry.
 
2. Methodology
Informed by contemporary literary theory and critical discourse analysis, this descriptive-analytical study investigates the reductionist readings of six Iranian critics: Sirous Shamisa, Saeid Hamidian, Taghi Poornamdarian, Reza Barahani, Shapour Jourkesh, and Mahmoud Falaki.
 
3. Theoretical Framework
The present analysis is in accordance with three forms of reductionism: ontological reductionism, which involves analyzing poetic works through the lens of reducing complex elements to their fundamental components, often exploring the relationship between the poem's structure, language, and meaning; epistemological reductionism, which examines how poetry, through its language and structure, reduces or simplifies complex human experiences and ideas and turns them into fundamental elements. It explores whether poetry, despite its subjective and often metaphorical nature, can offer insights into the nature of knowledge and reality itself. The third form of reductionism is methodological reductionism, which analyses poems by breaking them down into smaller parts to discover their structure, language, and effects. This approach can involve examining individual words, lines, stanzas, rhyme schemes, and other formal elements in an attempt to see how they contribute to the overall meaning and experience of the poem. It also employs Adorno’s notion of “the non-identical” as a conceptual tool in the analysis.
 
4. Discussion and Analysis
There is a kind of structural reductionism in Shamisa and Hamidian. Shamisa, by reducing the form to language and meter, and Hamidian, by ignoring the connection between form and context, reduce Nima’s poetry to a collection of static elements. Their insistence on the vivid presence of Khorasani poetry in Nima’s poetry shows the influence of traditional interpretations in creative and new forms of criticism.   By focusing on the object, Jourkesh ignores the subject. His epistemological reductionism disregards the structural and linguistic complexities of Nima’s poetry. As a consequence, Nima’s poetry is reduced to a passive process of affectation and inspiration.
By differentiating “personal” and “conventional” symbols, Barahani aims to formulate a new theoretical structure for sign systems in modern poetry. Sadly, he fails to do so. He selectively associates different signs to different phenomena without presenting a plausible explanation; for instance, he associates “phoenix” and “night” with mythology and Nima’s personal experiences without drawing a clear borderline between them. This analytic incoherence dismantles the unified structure of sign systems and reduces them to fixed and static meanings.
By echoing the Memetic hermeneutic patterns, Pornamdarian and Falaki analyse Nima’s poetry in accordance with the lived experiences of the poet and its socio-political dimensions. This approach, which posits poetry and history on the same level, reduces the meaning process to external significations.
 
5. Conclusion
The results of this study show that reductionism prevents a thorough understanding of the complexities of modern poetry. By reducing the poeticity to static and individual elements, reductionism dismantles the organic unity of the poem as a whole, disrupts the holistic experience of reading a poem, and overlooks other valid readings.
 
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