Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Another fine example of academic prose ...



Here is an entry from Hamid Dabashi's book The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Harvard University Press).
The heteroglossia that results from the historical dialectic between the context and the text translates into the hybridity (polyglossia) of literary utterances that makes up a literary tradition. In such utterances, Sa'di's words are always already animated by the emerging intentions of their readers. This is how, in Sa'di's case, the mind of the moralist was at once literary in its disposition and moralizing in the collective consciousness of the people, who in loving and quoting and procreating him in effect celebrated their own repressed aspirations and thus collectively enacted a nonprophetic, self-revelatory act of prophecy, which in turn ipso facto detranscendentalized the sense of the sacred.
--J.C., "From the Top," The Times Literary Supplement (December 21 and 28, 2012), p. 42; image from

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