Imagining Modernity
Local Games, Illicit Pastimes, and Treatment of Animals in Early Twentieth Century Persian Literature
From approximately 1800, the Middle East came under the influence of Western political philosophies. People’s hopes and their awareness of society and political systems started to change, leading eventually to deep changes in the structure of society. In Persia, these changes led to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911. The new thinking was introduced to Persia through translations of European intellectuals and through direct acquaintance of Persian students and diplomats with Europe. ‘Europe’ was both an inspiration and an ‘Other’ to be denigrated. As Persians, even illiterate Persians, used poetry to express and share their
responses to the current socio-political events, poetry became a primary vehicle to communicate political messages. The poetry of this period is topical, reflecting various cultural developments, dwelling on political and social themes relevant for the people. Poets became engaged in the socio-political developments, addressing a wide range of themes to improve the ‘backward’ position of Persia in comparison to the European progress.
Through the organization of this multidisciplinary meeting, Kamran Talattof and Asghar Seyed-Gohrab would like to examine how poetry was used as a means to introduce Western political thoughts to masses in Iran, and how everyday ordinary activities were viewed as a sign of ‘backwardness,’ an impediment for progress and imitation of Europe. The conference will be devoted to modern literary works produced between 1900 and 1940 dealing with the ordinary aspects of life such as traditional forms of entertainment, adult games, gambling, and other forms of pastime. How did authors view street gambling? How did they portray children's games? How did they confront pedophiles? What did they write about animals or animal crudity? Did they espouse a truly modern approach in the understanding and depicting these issues in an attempt to promote new literary values? Did Sadeq Hedayat, M.A. Jamalzadeh, Iraj Mirza and Aref Qazvini, and numerous other fiction writers and poets demonstrate a unified modern approach in dealing with the daily aspects of ordinary life or were they as the products of their time simply reporting without a true attempt to jettison the undesirable ideals of the past? How familiar were they with western modernity and western portrayal of similar traditional aspects of life, animals, or petty crimes? In dealing with these questions, the presentations draw upon the problematics of the conceptualization of modern literature and modernity in the context of the first four decades of the twentieth century. Such deliberations are particularly important with regard to the understanding the modern legacy that these pioneers have left and to the influence they exerted. In other words, we may ask whether those authors also addressed what should be considered far more pervasive aspects of modern life such as the idea of adventure, travel, sports competition, gambling, and outdoor activities, animal rights, and romance. Furthermore, how have the next generations built upon their representation of modern literary values.
Homa Katouzian
Liberty and Licence in Persian Literature, 1900-1925
With the onset of the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the 20th century, a parallel
revolution occurred in Persian literature, both poetry and prose. Its motives were new ideas and revolutionary fervor, and its vehicles were a growing number of newspapers devoted to the cause of law, liberty and modernization. An increasing number of young or younger poets and writers became the voice of the modern intellectuals who, contrary to age-old practice, wrote , not for the literary elite, but for he political public and common people. The literary idiom thus became simple, and common and folksy vocabulary entered formal literature. Dehkhoda, Ashrafeddin and Bahar were followed by Aref, Eshqi and Farrokhi who redeployed the classical literary lampoons and invectives in their otherwise new poetry to advance idealistic politics. Thus political romanticism and colloquial and folksy language combined with at times even obscene diction helped create a genre unique to the first quarter of the 20th century.
Homa Katouzian is a social scientist, historian and literary critic. He is the Iran Heritage Research Fellow, St. Antony's College and Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. He is also editor of Iranian Studies, Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies. He obtained all his university degrees in England and taught Economics at the Universities of Leeds and Kent at Canterbury (UK) until 1987 when he obtained voluntary retirement to pursue his interests in the field of Iranian studies. He was a fellow of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2001, Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, Spring 1990, Visiting Professor of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 1985, Economic Consultant, UNCTAD, UN, Geneva, 1982, etc. He has published widely in English and Persian. His most recent English publication is The Persians, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran (Yale University Press, 2010).
Parvin Loloi
Nasim-e Shomal: The People’s Newspaper
Nasim-e Shomal (the breeze of the north) was published intermittently, first in Rasht in the province of Gilan in the North, then in Tehran, from September 1907 to November 1940. It was founded by the poet and journalist Sayyed Ashraf-al-Din Hosayni Qazvini, also known as Ashraf Gilani (1870-1934). The first two weekly issues were rather blunt accounts of the events of the day, but under the influence of Ali-Akbar-e Saber’s newspaper Molla Nasreddin, published in Turkish in Tiblisi, Ashraf started to compose very sensational and satirical poems directed at the injustices of the time and also commenting on political and social events. His language was simple and sometimes colloquial which contributed to the newspaper becoming very popular quite quickly. It was distributed solely by newspaper boys whose shouts declared its availability in the streets and in the bazaars. It was read aloud by the educated to those who could not read, in many public places, including commercial centres like caravanserais and bazaars, as well as on street corners and in the fields. Women read it eagerly in their gatherings. The poems were often learnt by heart and sung and recited in many places.
The popularity of the paper was so great that the author became known as Nasim-e Shomal, and eventually adopted the name as his nom-de-plume. This paper will discuss some of the reasons behind the popularity of a small and private paper in the early twentieth century and will try to conceptualise the life of those who read and enjoyed Ashraf Gilani’s poems in early twentieth century Iran.
Parvin Loloi was educated at Melli University (Tehran) and at the University of Wales (Swansea), where she wrote her PhD thesis on the English translations of Hafiz and their
influence on English poetry. She is a freelance scholar and writer. Her research interests include various aspects of translation studies, and the way in which Persian literature and culture have influenced (and are reflected in) English literature. She has regularly contributed papers to the conferences organised every year by the University of Salzburg, the results of which have been published in the series 'Studies in English and Comparative Literature'. Her publications include a critical and annotated edition (in two volumes) of two 17th century plays Sir John Denham, The Sophy (Vol. 1, 1998), Robert Baron, Mirza. A Tragedy (Vol. 2, 1998), Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry; A critical Bibliography; English Translations since the Eighteenth Century (2004), 'Byron In Persian Costume' in The Swansea Review (1988), 'An Essay on The Thousand and One Nights' in Encyclopedia of the Novel (1990), 'A Dramatic Version from the Apocrypha: Kyng Daryus and the Book of Esdras', in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation: Studies in English and Comparative Literature (1999),'Tennyson, Fitzgerald and Cowell: A Private Relation with Public Consequences' in Private and Public Voices in Victorian Poetry: Studies in English and
Comparative Literature (2000). Kamran Talattof
Modern Representation of Animals: Literary Encounters across Time
In recent years, Mohammad Reza Sarshar (b. 1953), a productive, creative, and committed Muslim writer, has launched an extensive attack against Sadeq Hedayat (1903-51), one of Iran’s most revered literary icons, in terms of literary, personal, political, and ideological issues. Why, one may ask, is an ostensibly pious writer so eager to challenge and defame a dead colleague? Would denying Hedayat's merit and historical significance be consequential?
In answering these questions and through the translation and analyses of a story about animals by each author, this project will show the incredible ideological abyss that separates the two authors , the contexts of their literary activities, the meaning of their works, and the
discontinuity with which modern Persian literary representation might be characterized. The two animals in their stories symbolize broader ideological paradigms that have clashed since before the times of the two authors, a problem that is more than a mere literary encounter; it is about the challenges that the dominant ideology faces in the wake of a resurgence of some sort of nationalism among the literary and intellectual communities. It is about the challenges that literary modernity has been facing since it first was introduced to Iranian society.
The paper provides a comparative look at the movie Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009) which is based on a true Japanese story of the same era when Hadayat was writing his tale. Finally, pointing out works of Jack London about animals further sheds light on the problematics of the
conceptualization of what we refer to as modern Persian literature.
Kamran Talattof received his Ph. D. from The University of Michigan in 1996, and he has been teaching at the University of Arizona since 1999 after teaching at Princeton University for three years. He is currently a full professor for the Department of Near Eastern Studies while holding affiliation with the Department of Gender & Women's Studies and the Graduate Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching. His authored, co-edited, and co-translated books, focus on issues of gender, sexuality, ideology, culture, and Persian language pedagogy and include Sexuality, Modernity, and Popular Women Artists in 1970s Iran; The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature; Modern Persian: Spoken and Written with D. Stilo and J. Clinton; Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry with A. Karimi-Hakkak; The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric with J. Clinton; and Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought with M. Moaddel. He is the co-translator of Women Without Men by Shahrnoosh Parsipur, with J. Sharlet and Touba: The Meaning of the Night by Shahrnoosh Parsipur, with H. Houshmand. His current projects include the production of the intermediate and advanced levels Persian books: Modern Persian: Written Spoken, Volumes 3-6. Many of his articles also focus on gender, ideology, culture, and language published in variety of journals in English and Persian. He has served on a number of ISIS and MESA committees, as the editor of SIS Newsletter, and as the book review editor of the Journal of Iranian Studies. In terms of the broader academic experiences, he has served on a number of national and international committees within academic associations and on the editorial committees of academic journals, as well as on several ad-hoc international committees. Kamran Talattof has received a few awards for his teaching and services to the field of Persian and Iranian Studies.
Nader Mottalebi Kashani (Editor, Nameh-ye Baharestan, International Journal of Manuscript Studies, Library of Parliament)
ﻪﻧﺎﺧرﺎﻤِﻗ محمدامين قاجار (رسالهای درباره یﺯﺎﺑرﺎﻤِﻗها نوشته محمد امين قاجار در سال 1292 قمری /1875 ميلادی ) This lecture will be in Persian
Asghar Seyed-Ghorab
One of the characteristics of the literary movement of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) is the introduction of colloquial and folk elements to literature. As poets used the vehicle of poetry to communicate their ideas to masses, they used familiar poetic forms to express new political ideas. One of the forms that became popular during this period was the use of lullabies, which appeared in a wide range of forms with different political messages. In this paper I would like to analyse several lullabies composed during the 'constitutional movement'
in literature.
Ali-Asghar Seyed-Ghorab is Associate Professor and currently chairman of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden Institute for Area Studies (Leiden University). With his team of researchers, he studies the use of classical Persian poetry as a political instrument in modern Iranian politics, analysing the role of poetry in justification of violence, the combatant cult of martyrdom as an icon of national identity, and the reception of Ayatollah Khomeini’s mysticism and poetry among Diaspora and clergy in Iran. He has published extensively on various aspects of Persian culture, including Metaphors and Imagery: Studies in Persian Poetry, (edited, Leiden, Brill, 2012); Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry, 2010; One Word: Yak Kaleme: 19th-Century Persian Treatise Introducing Western Codified Law, 2010 (together with S. McGlinn); Safina Revealed: the Great Il-Khanid Compendium, 2011 (together with S. McGlinn); Embodiments of Evil: Gog and Magog: Interdisciplinary Studies of the ‘Other’ in Literature & Internet Texts, 2011 (together with F. Doufikar-Aerts & S. McGlinn); Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami's Epic Romance, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003; The Mirror of Meanings (Mir'at al-Ma'ani), translated with an introduction and glossary, Mazda, Costa Mesa, California 2002, (critical Persian text prepared by N. Pourjavady); “Majnun’s Image as a Serpent” in The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric, eds. J.W. Clinton & K. Talattof, New York: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 83-95. He has also published several volumes of Dutch translations from modern Persian prose and poetry (two volumes on Sohrab Sepehri and Forugh Farrokhzad, and individual volumes on Mohammad Reza Shafii Kadkani, Ahmad Shamlu (with J.T.P. de Bruijn), Nader Naderpur (with J.T.P. de Bruijn), Shahrnush Parsipur (with G.R. van den Berg) and Hushang Golshiri (with J.T.P. de Bruijn, G.R. van den Berg, and J.G.J. ter Haar). In 2007 he was elected a member of The Young Academy of The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
