COMP_LIT 390 Birth and Rebirth: Persian Poetry and Iran’s Poetesses
This course will examine the work of Iranian women poets in the context of Persian literature. We will investigate how these writers employed poetic discourses and the Persian language to reflect upon the world they lived in. We will pay special attention to the themes of gender and femininity in literature in relation to women’s lives as writers, the obstacles they faced, and the solutions they sought to those obstacles. We will pursue this objective simultaneously via close readings of poems and theoretical readings about gender and sexuality in Iran and the Middle East. The course will start with an introduction to the history of Persian poetry, its traditional forms and content, and will continue with an introduction to the lives and works of five eminent female poets: Mahsati, Tahirah, Parvin I‘tisami, Forough Farrokhzad, and Simin Behbahani.
Godard says of the cinema that it was essentially “a nineteenth-century matter that was resolved in the twentieth century”. For the cinema, the emblematic medium of the twentieth century, turned the powers specific to it (e.g., montage, projection photography) to articulating or developing aesthetic, philosophical and political problems posed by literature, philosophy and painting in the previous century. This invites us to think the relationship between centuries in two ways. First, problems posed in the 19th-century continue to shape (and limit the possibilities of) the forms in which twentieth-century art mobilizes its powers. For, having outlived the situation in which they were initially formulated, these problems continue (in Marx's phrase) to "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living". Second, it becomes necessary for those who find themselves within this history to conduct an archaeology of nineteenth-century art and thought as a prehistory of twentieth-century culture. This course will explore these questions by reading canonical literary texts of the 19th century (by authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Zola) alongside cinematic works (such as those of Buñuel, Renoir, Marker, Walsh and Godard), as well as critical texts (such as Benjamin, Jameson, Kracauer, Deleuze and Rancière).
