Presenting an engaging reflection on the work of prominent modern Iranian literary artists in exchange with contemporary Continental literary criticism and philosophy, this book tracks the idea of silence - through the prism of poetics, dreaming, movement, and the body - across the textual imaginations of both Western and Middle Eastern authors. Through this comparative nexus, it explores the overriding relevance of silence in modern thought, relating the single concept of "the radical unspoken" to the multiple registers of critical theory and postcolonial writing.

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College, USA. He is the author of The Chaotic Imagination: New literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (2010) and Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (2012).

Part 1: Silence and the Outside 1. The Poetics of the Unspoken: Disaster, Exhaustion, and the Outside of Language (West) 2. Eternity's Wager: The Wanderer, the Insurrectionary, and the Counter-Historical Moment (East) Part 2: Silence and the Dream 3. Scathing Imaginaries: Abandonment, Forgetting, and the Night-Dream (West) 4. The Aesthetics of the Unreal: Agitation, Sabotage, and the Fragment (East) Part 3: Silence and the Body 5. Disciplined and Innocent Bodies: Power, Masking, and the Visionary (West) 6. The Captive and the Exile: Vulnerability, Sensation, and Desire (East) Part 4: Silence and Experience 7. The Excessive and the Formless: Delirious Writing (West) 8. Paradox, Ecstasy, and the Catastrophic Mind: Apocalyptic Writing (East)