Leila Mohammadi Education PhD student . of Persian language and literature (original) (raw)
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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?
Advanced Persian (Winter 2021), Syllabus
Advanced Persian (Winter 2021), Syllabus, 2021
Assuming reading competency in Upper Intermediate Persian or its equivalent, this course aims to familiarize you with the rhetorical atmosphere and conventions of classical Persian literature (roughly from the 10th to the early 20th centuries C.E.). The term ‘literature’ is here understood with reference to all but the last week of this course in the sense of the discourses of adab, covering poetry in all genres and literary prose that is fictive, Sufi, epistolographical as well as historical. Accordingly, readings for the three classes every week will range across these genres, comprising selections from some of their earliest instances to the latest. You will learn to scan some of the most frequently used meters of Persian poetry. Beginning with two 17th-18th century conspectuses on the history of the Persian language and its literature, we will then begin where the poetic tradition locates one of its own beginnings – in Rūdakī (d.941) – and move forward in time down to 19th century Iran, Afghanistan and Hindustan.
Oral Tradition, 2004
The study of oral traditional elements in Classical Persian poetry was recognized by Albert Lord (1986:476). The monumental poem known as the Shâhnâma of Ferdowsi is a case in point. Its poetic diction reveals a system of phraseology that approximates Lord's definition of the formula in oral tradition studies (Davidson 1988). To the extent that formulaic structure is a basic feature of oral traditional poetry (Lord 1960), the diction of the Shâhnâma provides conclusive evidence for the oral traditional poetic background of this poem. In the study of Classical Persian poetry, the concept of oral tradition is problematic for those who assume that "orality" and "literacy" were incompatible in medieval Persian civilization (see Davidson 2000 for a survey of the ongoing debates). But recent work on oral traditions has made it clear that the essence of oral poetry does not depend on the absence of writing. In his later works, especially in Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (1991) and The Singer Resumes the Tale (1995), Lord showed that there exist patterns of coexistence and even compatibility between literacy and oral poetry in various poetic traditions. Lord's focus was on medieval Western European traditions, but there are striking parallels in Persian medieval traditions (Davidson 2000). Perhaps the most dramatic parallel is the conceptualization of oral performance in terms of a written book. The Persian Shâhnâma, which in fact means "Book of Kings," is not only an actual book that records the composition of the master poet Ferdowsi; it presents itself as a figurative performance, describing itself simultaneously as an ongoing performance and as a book waiting to be activated in performance. So also in medieval French and English traditions, among others, the concept of the book is linked not only to the recording of performance but also to the performance itself (Davidson 1994). An essential feature of Ferdowsi's Shâhnâma is its performativity, which is expressed by the poetry itself in its various references to the authoritative performance of its stories by performers conventionally
A Portrait of the Persian Poet
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Assistant Professor, Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch, Iran
Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2013
Ferdowsi is one of the greatest poets of Iran whose great work named Shahnameh, is a national epic which is equal to world epics such as Iliados and Odyssee which are Homerus' work. But its difference with epics of other nations is variety of this book. The book in which adventures of kings and champions has been expressed in mythical, heroic and historical stories. One of its stories is story of Siavash and Soodabeh which its story is very similar to a story from Euripide, Greek tragedy writer: story of Hyppolite and Phedre. This story has also been written by Racine, French poet and tragedy writer and both has created an independent story because subject of story itself has been considerable for them but Ferdowsi has considered to this story as one of Shahnameh adventures which is an introduction to important events. Both stories are about a forbidden and sinful love.In this essay, similarity and difference between story of Siavash and Soodabeh and story of Hyppolite and Phedre is studied.