Reading World Literature (201-0-20)
Topic
Indo-Persian Literature as Global Literature: Love
Instructors
Rajeev Kinra
847/467-1241
Harris Hall - Room 307
Meeting Info
Harris Hall L28: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
Indo-Persian poetry was present at the very birth of the concept of "world literature": indeed, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (d. 1832) coined the term Weltliteratur in part thanks to his admiration for the Persian poet Hafez Shirazi (d. 1390). Of course today the Persian language — or "Farsi," as it is also known — is most commonly associated with the nation-state of Iran. But the historical association with world literature reveals a forgotten cosmopolitanism. Before the nineteenth century, Persian served for nearly a millennium as the literary and political lingua francaacross virtually the entire eastern Islamic world, including vast stretches of South, Central, and West Asia. This course will introduce students to some of the most common genres of Indo-Persian literature, such as the romantic epic (masnavi), the courtly panegyric (qasida), the quatrain (ruba‘i) and especially the lyric (ghazal), as well as to some of the canonical poets of the era and the historical context in which they lived and wrote. Expressions of love, longing, devotion, and dissent against religious orthodoxy were among the most common themes of this literature, giving rise to its many modern afterlives — for example, in Urdu and Turkish literature, but also in European Romantic poetry, American Transcendentalist philosophy, and the music of Bollywood cinema, to name just a few.
All readings will be in English or in English translation, so no prior knowledge of Persian is required for this course; but students who do have some familiarity with Persian, or with related languages like Urdu, Turkish, or Arabic, are of course most welcome to read texts in the original languages if they so desire. Class time will be a mix of lectures that situate our literary readings in their global historical context, with time also set aside for discussing the literature itself, issues of translation, and scholarly debates about "world literature" itself as an analytical category.
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area