A Thousand Years of the Persian Book | REORIENT (original) (raw)
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Iranian Studies, 2022
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.
Iranian Studies
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The inte...
Persian Literature (ISLA 388), Fall 2024
Undergraduate course syllabus, 2024
This course is intended to introduce you to classic texts in English translation from the millennium of pre-19th century literature in Persian. You will read Rūmī, Firdawsī, Hāfiz and other famous poets with attention to questions salient to them and to us: how did poetry perpetuate or undercut father-son relations? Why and how did Persian (and Arabic) literatures celebrate their own origins in and as translation? How did the courtly panegyric fuse Islamic and pre-Islamic values, put moral pressure on its addressee and displace the speaker's desire? How can proverbs and wise sayings obscure life decisions rather than clarifying them? Does Rūmī's poetry need its readers to be scholars? What kinds of reading competencies do texts like his assume? Why and how do ghazals eroticize a cruelly distant beloved? How did a ghazal or masnavī relate to prior, present and future ghazals or masnavīs? What kinds of social spaces-the court, the Sufi hospice, the coffee house, the madrasa, the home-did these texts circulate in, assume and help produce? What gender ideals did they assume and prescribe? What genre logics do they obey and disobey? How did Persian literary culture understand emotion and how does this understanding differ from our own?