Irony and the study of its role in the formation of Iranian dramatic literature - the practical title of the impasse of trust

Academic Thesis in Drama Master's Degree

Trend of Dramatic Literature

Abstract

Irony is one of the smart techniques that great writers and poets use to deepen their literary work or increase its effectiveness. A technique in which the ironist writer uses the contradiction between "what he says" and "what he really means" to make the audience think and sometimes make him laugh. Irony has a special place in Iranian classical literature and many great Persian poets have also used it. Iranian shows are ironic in their nature, and the irony in them lies in their narratives and characterisations. The question is, with such a support, has there been irony in Iran's advanced dramatic literature? Another question that is raised is that considering that the first Iranian playwrights - Mirza Fethali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Agha Tabrizi - lived in the political and cultural suffocation during the reign of Feth Ali Shah Qajar, if they did not use this technique in their works, would they have ever succeeded in creating their plays? It is in Iranian plays, the types of irony and its functions in the works of two advanced Iranian playwrights are examined and compared to the political and cultural conditions at the time of writing the advanced plays, it becomes clear that if the advanced playwrights did not use this technique, in addition to endangering their lives, Iran's dramatic literature would also be destroyed in the same bud, as a danger to the government.

Key words: irony, literature Drama, Mirza Agha Tabrizi, Mirza Fateh Ali Akhundzadeh

Introduction

Irony is a literary technique and artifice that has a kind of ambiguity and conceptual contradiction hidden in it, which makes the ironist author able to present his desired concepts to his audience in the envelope and under the cover of other concepts, and the audience is overwhelmed by the pleasure of discovering his main meaning behind the apparent words. Irony is often funny, and this laughter is sometimes the poison of laughter at the stupidity of the character who thinks that everything will go according to his wish, but does not know that fate has something else planned for him.  By being aware of this contradiction, the audience is placed in a position of higher awareness of the ironic victim, and this position of superior awareness of the facts and events ahead is the same position that mankind has been seeking to achieve since the beginning of its creation and has not yet succeeded in relying on it. In addition to being a unique art and technique, irony is powerful and efficient in the art of drama and story writing, it also deals with thinking and ideology in a way, and it is among the concepts that are defined at any time, according to the characteristics and traits of a person at that time and his general conditions, and is always meaningful and meaningful. Irony, which was formed in ancient Greece by ignoring and self-deprecating a typical comic character, in "Oedipus Shahriar" of the same era, was the bearer of a bitter and impressive reality about the unification of the hunted and the hunter (Oedipus and himself) and the unquestionable intervention of fate and the hand of man against it.   Irony, which until the 20th century was known as instrumental irony with specific definitions and frameworks, in the new century was able to explain the paradox of modern human life and happens to have the ability to interpret both sides of this great equation, i.e. both religious thinking and nihilistic views.

As the likes of Kierkegaard [1] in his doctoral dissertation with the same title, irony is based on religious thinking. It defines and interprets and others like the followers of Marxism see nothing in it except the absurdity and determinism of the world and life. Or just as the ironic situation in Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" makes the audience laugh, it is the ironic understanding in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" that causes laughter that is ultimately bitter and incomplete.

Therefore, irony is one of the tricks whose simple use in the structure of a play is enjoyable and gives strength, and through which we can see the truths of human life in the heart of more complex works. At any time, he mentioned it or criticized it and even ridiculed it.

In this research, after defining the word irony and examining its history and types, we will investigate the presence of this technique in Persian literature and Iranian plays - which are the basis of the formation of Iranian dramatic literature - and finally, we will mention the ironies of advanced Iranian plays - the works of Mirza Fethali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Agha Tabrizi - and examine the function of each of them.

Chapter 1

Problem and main questions

Irony in Farsi is the verbal equivalent of words such as sarcasm, satire, hypocrisy, taqiyya, deception, mockery, suspicion, etc. It is that all these meanings together cannot crystallize the correct and accurate meaning of irony as a stylistic technique. In its nature, irony has a kind of ambiguity and duality, which can sometimes be accompanied by humor. Perhaps the closest Persian word to the concept of irony is "irony", which, of course, is often given as an equivalent to irony in many dictionaries. Persian irony has divisions such as adjective irony, adjective irony and verb irony, near irony and unlikely irony, allusion, implication, code and extension, in fact irony divisions in Persian are more in words and combinations, while ironic division is more in terms of structure and content. Irony, in fact, is the contrast of appearance with reality. This is the characteristic that for irony there are different types such as verbal irony, behavioral irony, philosophical irony, etc.

In the dictionary of Persian literature, it is stated in the definition of irony: "In the term, it is a technique that the author, according to the context of the text, gives a very different meaning to an apparently clear word or event, in which there is a completely pleasant perception of incongruity. In other words, irony is a literary expression in which there is a kind of duality in its tone, as compared to what was said or Seen, it is unreasonable or incomprehensible from another aspect or contradictory and contrary to expectation." (Anoushe, 1381: 15). According to the mentioned definition of irony, it is clear that using the word "contradiction" cannot fully explain how the ironic situation is formed. The idea of ??duality in irony is not only contradiction, sometimes there must be a "contradiction" to form an ironic situation. A contradiction in which there is no possibility of adding opposites.  For example, the irony of the situation is the irony hidden in the situation where the character is placed in a situation with two sides. A situation that puts him in charge of choosing between his two lovers, two lovers who are in conflict with each other and choosing one requires destroying the other. Shakespeare has used this type of irony a lot in his works.

The use of irony, from the 18th century onwards, was expanded by the companions of new criticism - who saw the existence of irony in the text as one of the documents of its literature - as one of the tools to create tension in the text. They believed that every text has tension and irony is one of the types of this tension. A tension that, of course, ultimately brings the text to unity beyond its contradictions.

Irony has existed in Persian literature for a long time and one of the main reasons for the attractiveness of the works is their irony. Like the story of Rostam and Sohrab, the most interesting point of which is the father and son's ignorance of each other, while the reader is aware of this relationship. The most interesting type of irony is the audience's awareness of the characters' ignorance of the reality of what is going on. Rostam and Sohrab each have a wrong idea of ??their rival and think that what they think is the truth, while the audience knows that they are both wrong and the reality is in stark contrast to what it seems. This kind of irony is seen a lot in Persian literature. As an example, Persian allegorical literature also has a kind of irony in it: the characters are "things" that are not "things" in reality, but are "allowed" from what they should be. Undoubtedly, such ironies are also present in theatrical adaptations of these works.

Irony has a lasting presence in Iranian plays. All types of Iranian shows, from Naqali - which is ironic because of its ironic Shahnameh - to Siah Bazi and Ro Hauzi - which is full of ironic innuendos and characters -, from Tazzie and its ironic tricks to distance themselves to grocery games and marquee games, all have ironic features. And these ironic features are the reason for the attractiveness, moral education and mostly humor of these shows.