Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 M.A. Student in Persian Language and Literature, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.
2 Associate Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.
3 M.A. Student in Philosophy, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
Postmodernism, through its critique of metanarratives, rupture from modern rationality, and emphasis on the fluidity of meaning, creates a framework in which poetry also distances itself from semantic coherence, musicality, and structural order. One of the most notable manifestations of this rupture is the “absence of meter” in postmodern poetry often justified by an appeal to the escape from meaning and to pluralism. Drawing on the philosophical foundations of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and by analyzing the relationship between nihilism, language, and art, the present study challenges this common assumption.
The central question is whether the absence of meter in postmodern poetry truly provides a path to the liberation from meaning, or whether it leads, instead, to the reproduction of a singular and negative mode of meaning. A review and analysis of previous research on postmodernism, nihilism, and contemporary poetry indicate that the escape from meaning in postmodern poetry does not result in a liberating multiplicity, but rather generates a form of hidden semantic unity a unity grounded in futility, negation, and a reduction of the world to random occurrences.
The findings suggest that the lack of meter and the formal disarray, contrary to the anti-coherence claims of this movement, possess an implicitly meaning-giving function and project the nihilistic lifeworld onto the level of language. From this perspective, postmodern poetry does not escape meaning but instead produces a new form of meaning through negation a meaning that emerges through the collapse of structure and external musicality.
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