PERSIAN POETICS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Through a transcontinental network of poets and poetics from Iran and Russia to Germany and the United States, in this course we will: 1) learn about classical Persian poetry that was translated widely and contributed to the development of World Literature (the cornerstone of which was Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s weltliteratur) and to study different translations and adaptations of this poetry; 2) study world poetry that Iranian poets had translated into Persian and analyze how these translations may have affected modern Persian poetics; 3) read in comparison modern Persian poetry and African diasporic poetry, discuss the intersections of the power structures of gender, class, race and ethnicity, and analyze how these power structures manifested themselves in pre-revolutionary Iran (and ultimately, what can be learned from including this historical context in contemporary Caribbean and African American studies).

On a broader scale, this course aims to place Persian poetry and poetics within a world literature discourse, both in terms of its historical contributions to this discourse as well as the discourse’s contributions to Persian poetics. It is meant to encourage you to investigate the role that translation plays in world literary studies; at the same time, it acknowledges the limits of global markets of literature and their politics of translation. Weeks eight through thirteen of the course in which Iranian poetry is put into conversation with African diasporic poetry, therefore, demonstrate the possibilities that open up in world literary studies when scholars expand their focus beyond proven literary connections and underscore cultural provenance as a basis for comparison.