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Publications by Jane Mikkelson
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History , 2020
The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain inte... more The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain intelligible,” a fictional being that exists in the soul, but not in the world. This remarkable bird is notable (along with the Earth, the moon, the sun, and God) for being a species of one. In this essay, I read the poetry Bedil of Delhi (d.1720) in conversation with the philosophical system of Avicenna, arguing that the phoenix in Bedil’s own philosophical system functions as a key figuration that allows him simultaneously to articulate rigorous impersonal systematic ideas and to document his individual first-personal experiences of those ideas. The phoenix also plays a metaliterary role, allowing Bedil to reIect on this way of doing philosophy in the first person—a method founded on the lyric enrichment of Avicennan rationalism. Paying attention to the adjacencies between poetry and philosophy in Bedil, this essay traces the phoenix’s transformations from a famous philosophical example into one of Bedil’s most striking Gfigurations in his arguments about imagination, mind, and self.
The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scho... more The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scholarly essays and sample texts related to Persian literature from 650 through the 16th century. It includes analyses of some seminal ancient texts and the works of numerous authors of the classical period. The chapters apply a disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the many movements, genres, and works of the long and evolving body of Persian literature produced in the Persianate World. These collections of scholarly essays and samples of Persian literary texts provide facts (general information), instructions (ways to understand, analyze, and appreciate this body of works), and the field's state-of-the-art research (the problematics of the topics) regarding one of the most important and oldest literary traditions in the world. Thus, the Handbook's chapters and related texts provide scholars, students, and admirers of Persian poetry and prose with practical and direct access to the intricacies of the Persian literary world through a chronological account of key moments in the formation of this enduring literary tradition. The related Handbook (also edited by Kamran Talattof), Routledge Handbook of Post Classical and Contemporary Persian Literature, covers Persian literary works from the 17th century to the present.
Modern Philology, 2021
Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call e... more Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call early modernity? How did early modern authors perceive or imagine relations between far-flung literary cultures? Answers to these questions depend on what is meant by world literature, a category whose meaning, scope, history, and value have been contested in recent scholarship. In this essay, we reconstruct concepts of world and world literature that were held independently by two poets: Bidel of Delhi (1644–1720) from Mughal India and Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) from rural England. During Bidel’s and Traherne’s lifetimes, projects of enlightenment and self-knowledge were driven by thinking with worlds. Taking this blurring of self and world as our point of departure, we begin by examining how Traherne’s and Bidel’s concepts of world name the relations that condition phenomenal appearance and epistemic endeavor. We then show how each poet responds to experiences of diversity (across languages, religions, temporalities, and geographies) by articulating their own concepts of world literature. Finally, we argue that these notions of world literature are structured by practices of assemblage—a concept we borrow from the early modern album (muraqqaʿ). As objects that collect varied specimens of art and calligraphy, albums solicit creative engagement with diverse materials, encouraging readers to attend to similarities and differences in style, medium, and content without imposing hermeneutic principles. We reflexively activate this early modern concept of assemblage in order to retune current scholarly approaches to world literature and early modern studies.
To reframe a figure as central to a classical canon as Saʿdī is to Persian literature is a bold e... more To reframe a figure as central to a classical canon as Saʿdī is to Persian literature is a bold endeavor. Domenico Ingenito's Beholding Beauty is a magnificent achievement of multiple broad reappraisals that decisively reconfigure "the open landscape of Saʿdi's balanced contemplation of the beauty of the world" (p. 3). For centuries, Saʿdī's works have been associated with a style of smooth, limpid minimalism (sahl-i mumtanaʿ) conveying an elegant moral vision (or, less charitably, a wisdom that has been made to feel prim, safe, even arid). Although love is unmistakably a central theme throughout his corpus, Saʿdī himself does not supply crisp definitions of lust or love or passion; nor does he offer systematic taxonomies or theories of the erotic (p. 48). Reconstructing Saʿdī's "aesthetics of desire," Ingenito convincingly shows how Saʿdī effects a complex coalescence of "homoeroticism, lyricism, and political insight" (p. 92). One of the book's main claims is that it is philologically unsound to diminish or prudishly overlook the sensuality and homoeroticism at the core of Saʿdī's ethical teaching. When Saʿdī lingers on physical beauty as an embodiment of a patron's princely qualities, this "sexualized representation of political power" creates a vital "synergy between the erotic and encomiastic" (p. 98). Ingenito untangles such synergies with philological rigor, scrupulous contextualization, and critical care, offering a fresh, urgent, and tremendously exciting reassessment of the shaykh of Shiraz. Part 1 reveals the porousness between modalities and genres across Saʿdī's corpus, attuning readers to shimmering interplays between reality and fiction, verse and prose, literary convention and factual representation-attending in particular to fluidities of gender and desire. By rehabilitating Saʿdī's pornographic poems (hitherto almost entirely neglected by scholarship) and reading Saʿdī's obscene poems as counter-texts to the amatory lyric, Ingenito shows how seemingly opposed entities-courtly and pornographic lyric poetry; politics and lust; spiritual devotion and carnal passion-together constitute a flexible, interdependent system that accommodates diverse approaches to desire. For instance, conventionally, the beloved in medieval poetry is a beautiful boy who captures the gaze of an older man; but Saʿdī's poems also describe encounters with a beloved who is conspicuously not younger ("a strong man who has long since crossed the threshold of manhood"; p. 199). Saʿdī's willingness to write against the grain of convention is especially evident in his obscene poems. Pornographic poetry in Saʿdī's era trades primarily in bawdy humor and lewd description; in contrast, Ingenito reveals how Saʿdī's pornographic poems can harbor indeterminate intimacies, as in the following line from an obscene poem, translated by Ingenito with lapidary restraint: "How could I be fulfilled by just looking at you? Other actions I have in mind, but none of them can I say to you" (pp. 163-72). Such amatory lyric delicacy here, in the middle of an obscene poem, is startling-and perhaps more shocking in its incongruity than any flagrant violation of decorum. Simultaneous exposure to such different sides of the lyric spectrum equips readers with habits of hermeneutic openness, allowing them to experience the spiritual and the erotic as events that cannot be decoupled.
University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2, Spring, 2019
What is comparative poetics, and where is it to be found? The tradition of verses in Kashmiri asc... more What is comparative poetics, and where is it to be found? The tradition of verses in Kashmiri ascribed to the fourteenth-century female ascetic Lalla might seem a strange place to look for answers to these questions, given that the customary parameters of comparative poetics trace disciplinary origins to no earlier than the twentieth century (Earl Miner) and tend to favour a large sample size (the greater the variety of poetic traditions brought under analysis, the likelier the discovery of poetic "universals"). In this article, we offer an account of comparative poetics at work on a much smaller scale and within a distinctive matrix of pressures and principles. Building on the close analysis of Lalla's verses, we show how her corpus generates multiform "environments"-environments that afford the conceptual and aesthetic alignment of two pre-modern cosmopolitan literary and religious imaginaires, Sanskrit and Persian. In doing so, we call attention to what a comparative poetic endevour could look like in a pre-modern world by presenting Lalla's verses as an example of a literary corpus-importantly, not an extra-literary theoretical tradition-that is configured by immanent comparative poetics.
In "The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Li... more In "The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities", edited by Hani Khafipour
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History , 2020
The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain inte... more The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain intelligible,” a fictional being that exists in the soul, but not in the world. This remarkable bird is notable (along with the Earth, the moon, the sun, and God) for being a species of one. In this essay, I read the poetry Bedil of Delhi (d.1720) in conversation with the philosophical system of Avicenna, arguing that the phoenix in Bedil’s own philosophical system functions as a key figuration that allows him simultaneously to articulate rigorous impersonal systematic ideas and to document his individual first-personal experiences of those ideas. The phoenix also plays a metaliterary role, allowing Bedil to reIect on this way of doing philosophy in the first person—a method founded on the lyric enrichment of Avicennan rationalism. Paying attention to the adjacencies between poetry and philosophy in Bedil, this essay traces the phoenix’s transformations from a famous philosophical example into one of Bedil’s most striking Gfigurations in his arguments about imagination, mind, and self.
The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scho... more The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scholarly essays and sample texts related to Persian literature from 650 through the 16th century. It includes analyses of some seminal ancient texts and the works of numerous authors of the classical period. The chapters apply a disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the many movements, genres, and works of the long and evolving body of Persian literature produced in the Persianate World. These collections of scholarly essays and samples of Persian literary texts provide facts (general information), instructions (ways to understand, analyze, and appreciate this body of works), and the field's state-of-the-art research (the problematics of the topics) regarding one of the most important and oldest literary traditions in the world. Thus, the Handbook's chapters and related texts provide scholars, students, and admirers of Persian poetry and prose with practical and direct access to the intricacies of the Persian literary world through a chronological account of key moments in the formation of this enduring literary tradition. The related Handbook (also edited by Kamran Talattof), Routledge Handbook of Post Classical and Contemporary Persian Literature, covers Persian literary works from the 17th century to the present.
Modern Philology, 2021
Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call e... more Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call early modernity? How did early modern authors perceive or imagine relations between far-flung literary cultures? Answers to these questions depend on what is meant by world literature, a category whose meaning, scope, history, and value have been contested in recent scholarship. In this essay, we reconstruct concepts of world and world literature that were held independently by two poets: Bidel of Delhi (1644–1720) from Mughal India and Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) from rural England. During Bidel’s and Traherne’s lifetimes, projects of enlightenment and self-knowledge were driven by thinking with worlds. Taking this blurring of self and world as our point of departure, we begin by examining how Traherne’s and Bidel’s concepts of world name the relations that condition phenomenal appearance and epistemic endeavor. We then show how each poet responds to experiences of diversity (across languages, religions, temporalities, and geographies) by articulating their own concepts of world literature. Finally, we argue that these notions of world literature are structured by practices of assemblage—a concept we borrow from the early modern album (muraqqaʿ). As objects that collect varied specimens of art and calligraphy, albums solicit creative engagement with diverse materials, encouraging readers to attend to similarities and differences in style, medium, and content without imposing hermeneutic principles. We reflexively activate this early modern concept of assemblage in order to retune current scholarly approaches to world literature and early modern studies.
To reframe a figure as central to a classical canon as Saʿdī is to Persian literature is a bold e... more To reframe a figure as central to a classical canon as Saʿdī is to Persian literature is a bold endeavor. Domenico Ingenito's Beholding Beauty is a magnificent achievement of multiple broad reappraisals that decisively reconfigure "the open landscape of Saʿdi's balanced contemplation of the beauty of the world" (p. 3). For centuries, Saʿdī's works have been associated with a style of smooth, limpid minimalism (sahl-i mumtanaʿ) conveying an elegant moral vision (or, less charitably, a wisdom that has been made to feel prim, safe, even arid). Although love is unmistakably a central theme throughout his corpus, Saʿdī himself does not supply crisp definitions of lust or love or passion; nor does he offer systematic taxonomies or theories of the erotic (p. 48). Reconstructing Saʿdī's "aesthetics of desire," Ingenito convincingly shows how Saʿdī effects a complex coalescence of "homoeroticism, lyricism, and political insight" (p. 92). One of the book's main claims is that it is philologically unsound to diminish or prudishly overlook the sensuality and homoeroticism at the core of Saʿdī's ethical teaching. When Saʿdī lingers on physical beauty as an embodiment of a patron's princely qualities, this "sexualized representation of political power" creates a vital "synergy between the erotic and encomiastic" (p. 98). Ingenito untangles such synergies with philological rigor, scrupulous contextualization, and critical care, offering a fresh, urgent, and tremendously exciting reassessment of the shaykh of Shiraz. Part 1 reveals the porousness between modalities and genres across Saʿdī's corpus, attuning readers to shimmering interplays between reality and fiction, verse and prose, literary convention and factual representation-attending in particular to fluidities of gender and desire. By rehabilitating Saʿdī's pornographic poems (hitherto almost entirely neglected by scholarship) and reading Saʿdī's obscene poems as counter-texts to the amatory lyric, Ingenito shows how seemingly opposed entities-courtly and pornographic lyric poetry; politics and lust; spiritual devotion and carnal passion-together constitute a flexible, interdependent system that accommodates diverse approaches to desire. For instance, conventionally, the beloved in medieval poetry is a beautiful boy who captures the gaze of an older man; but Saʿdī's poems also describe encounters with a beloved who is conspicuously not younger ("a strong man who has long since crossed the threshold of manhood"; p. 199). Saʿdī's willingness to write against the grain of convention is especially evident in his obscene poems. Pornographic poetry in Saʿdī's era trades primarily in bawdy humor and lewd description; in contrast, Ingenito reveals how Saʿdī's pornographic poems can harbor indeterminate intimacies, as in the following line from an obscene poem, translated by Ingenito with lapidary restraint: "How could I be fulfilled by just looking at you? Other actions I have in mind, but none of them can I say to you" (pp. 163-72). Such amatory lyric delicacy here, in the middle of an obscene poem, is startling-and perhaps more shocking in its incongruity than any flagrant violation of decorum. Simultaneous exposure to such different sides of the lyric spectrum equips readers with habits of hermeneutic openness, allowing them to experience the spiritual and the erotic as events that cannot be decoupled.
University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 2, Spring, 2019
What is comparative poetics, and where is it to be found? The tradition of verses in Kashmiri asc... more What is comparative poetics, and where is it to be found? The tradition of verses in Kashmiri ascribed to the fourteenth-century female ascetic Lalla might seem a strange place to look for answers to these questions, given that the customary parameters of comparative poetics trace disciplinary origins to no earlier than the twentieth century (Earl Miner) and tend to favour a large sample size (the greater the variety of poetic traditions brought under analysis, the likelier the discovery of poetic "universals"). In this article, we offer an account of comparative poetics at work on a much smaller scale and within a distinctive matrix of pressures and principles. Building on the close analysis of Lalla's verses, we show how her corpus generates multiform "environments"-environments that afford the conceptual and aesthetic alignment of two pre-modern cosmopolitan literary and religious imaginaires, Sanskrit and Persian. In doing so, we call attention to what a comparative poetic endevour could look like in a pre-modern world by presenting Lalla's verses as an example of a literary corpus-importantly, not an extra-literary theoretical tradition-that is configured by immanent comparative poetics.
In "The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Li... more In "The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities", edited by Hani Khafipour