A new-historicism reading of the play "Fereshteh-ye Tarikh" by Mohammad Rezaee Rad; Fascism, an exceptional situation or a rule

New historicism represents the spirit of the last few decades of the world. This theory is the result of a post-constructivist world, a world that was once dominated by constructivism. The current viewpoint considers history as textual, and the text as historical. Also, this historical text/textual history considers the battlefield between the conflicting (challenging) thoughts of the author, society, customs, institutions, and social actions. Nietzsche's anti-positivist epistemology, Hayden White's view of history, as well as Michel Foucault's theory about history, and the presentation of concepts such as discourse, power, and knowledge, have had a significant effect on the formation of the theoretical foundations of this approach. To address the political, social, cultural, and historical contexts of the work, the new historians use the method of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, known as "thick description". Considering the capability of this approach in discovering social, cultural, and historical codes, but it has not been used much for reading texts, especially Iranian historical drama. Our purpose in the current research is to read critically/creatively, in a descriptive-analytical way, of the postmodern historical drama "Fereshteh-ye Tarikh" written by Mohammad Rezaee Rad. It is based on the approach that its most important promoter, Steven Greenbelt, considers to be practical not-(experimental); A type of practice-based research. Using the last hours of Walter Benjamin's life as a basis, "Fereshteh-ye Tarikh" explores the era of World War II (a time when the government was active the nation was passive, and fascism was based on power). Through Benjamin, who played his historical role, he helped Brecht to find a new apparatus in the fight against the bourgeois way. Rezaee Rad has admitted that, based on the sixth thesis of "Theses on the Concept of History" written by Benyamin, he did not intend to bring the history as stated in the official sources in his play. By deviating from this real event, he intended to express his and his contemporaries' vision about the truth of that historical moment. A thought that was expressed in the moment of danger and by grasping Benjamin's memory. For this reason, he went over the small details, such as the place and manner of Benjamin's death, which took place in a hotel room in the port of Port Beau and changed them to better understand his historical era beyond the era of this last philosopher. By reading this play in the light of new historicism, other aspects of its meanings are revealed. The aspects that were brought out due to the constant movement between the text and the context, as well as with some of Benjamin's writings, such as theses about history.

Referring to the current dialectic between the legitimacy of fascism or its assumption as an emergency in the present play, has led to the conclusion that "Fereshteh-ye Tarikh" is the basis of the discourse of the legitimacy of fascism, and therefore it is in contrast to the discourse that considers fascism as an emergency, therefore, history is linear and upward.