Journal of Literary Criticism and Rhetoric

Document Type : scientific-research

Authors

1 Professor of Persian Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 PhD student in Persian Language and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jlcr.2024.362913.1950

Abstract

Irony as a word means mockery, ridicule, derision, and the like. In Persian literature, there have been many names for all kinds of jokes, with different credits. In contemporary research in this field, irony is used as a word for all texts that are characterized by laughter. In fact, irony is a type of literature that magnifies evil and ugliness. In this descriptive-analytical research, the general and expanded meaning of irony, which includes concepts such as lampoon and facetiae, is used, and after examining the definition and scope of the concept of irony and specifically, situational irony, we will analyze this genre in the sixth chapter of Jami’s prose work called Baharestan in order to identify the various statuses that create irony in this text; Finally, we try to analyze why certain statuses are used more frequently. So, in this research, at the theoretical level, the most frequent statuses used to create the situational irony in the classical Persian literature have been discussed and then, at the applied level, the situational irony in a specific literary work has been analyzed using those theoretical tools. On one hand, the descriptive dimension of this paper is based on the explanations about irony, in general, and the situational irony and the statuses which make it, in particular. On the other hand, the analytical aspect of this research is based on the implementation of the aforesaid analysis in the sixth chapter of Jami’s Baharestan. The findings of this research show that Jami has used situational irony in more than half of the passages of the sixth chapter of Baharestan, and his most frequent use in creating situational irony has been the status of disagreeable characteristics. In this way, he has ironized both external undesirable traits, such as ugliness, and inner unsavory characteristics, such as oppression. In addition, Jami’s use of eight different situations out of the ten most frequent situations that create situational irony in classical Persian literature has displayed a high diversity in the aforementioned book.

Keywords

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