The Divining Reader: A Construct Based on the Bibliomantic Approach to Hafez’s Divan

The Divining Reader: A Construct Based on the Bibliomantic Approach to Hafez’s Divan

Hafez was an eminent Persian poet. His poetry collection, called Divan, is viewed as a literary work of profound significance. Indeed, Iranians regard it as something much more than poetry in that Hafez’s Divan is also used for bibliomantic purposes. After exploring Hafez in his social context and examining distinctive qualities of his Divan, particularly its application as a divination tool, the present article largely aims to introduce a novel reader construct in the realm of reader-oriented theories. The “divining reader” is the term I use for the reader who approaches a text in the same way that a person consults Hafez’s poetry collection as a bibliomantic text so as to find an answer to a question or problem. The divining reader has distinguishing characteristics, one of which is the “willing unframing of disbelief,” referring to the fact that the reader first unframes whatever disbelieving and then reframes the unframed disbelief into a belief.

Hafez was an eminent Persian poet. His poetry collection, called Divan, is viewed as a literary work of profound significance. Indeed, Iranians regard it as something much more than poetry in that Hafez’s Divan is also used for bibliomantic purposes. After exploring Hafez in his social context and examining distinctive qualities of his Divan, particularly its application as a divination tool, the present article largely aims to introduce a novel reader construct in the realm of reader-oriented theories. The “divining reader” is the term I use for the reader who approaches a text in the same way that a person consults Hafez’s poetry collection as a bibliomantic text so as to find an answer to a question or problem. The divining reader has distinguishing characteristics, one of which is the “willing unframing of disbelief,” referring to the fact that the reader first unframes whatever disbelieving and then reframes the unframed disbelief into a belief.