Classics of Persian Poetry at Texas

__________________________________ The Story behind a Classics of Persian Poetry Course Michael Craig Hillmann January 2014, revised September 2014 __________________________________ In late 2011, several UT Austin graduate students expert in Persian approached me with the request that I propose a course called Classics of Persian Poetry, which didn’t take place then because of insufficient student enrollment (such courses needed at least five students not to be cancelled). Then, in mid-2013, my Department of Middle Eastern Studies [= MES] invited me to design and offer such a course each spring in case a handful or more qualified students in various departments wanted or needed such a course. Earlier, in response to mandated, university-wide austerity measures, DMES had eliminated Arabic Studies, Persian Studies, and Turkish Studies groups and degrees and had announced that it would support fewer courses dealing with texts in those languages. In this context, both the graduate student request and the new plan for Classics of Persian Poetry, which I had offered occasionally in earlier decades, were welcome news, although in mid-2013 it was unclear that Classics of Persian Poetry could attract to it a handful or more of advanced students of Persian the following spring. In any case, here follows the proposed course description submitted for MES approval: Classics of Persian Poetry is a graduate survey course for advanced students of the Persian language in degree programs in Comparative Literature, Government, History, Linguistics, Middle Eastern Studies, and the like. The chief rationale for the course is the paramount significance of Persian poetry and classic Persian poems in Iranian identity, culture, and discourse. Because of that much documented significance, familiarity with classic texts of Persian poetry would appear a necessary skill for historians and political scientists, for example, as well as more obviously for students of Persian literature and Iranian culture. The course’s chief two-fold class activity is the close reading and group discussion of course texts with three aims: (1) familiarization with the chief forms, subjects, images, themes, and the like in classic Persian texts; (2) discerning arguably non-Western features in those texts that may play roles in the Iranian appreciation of them as classics; and (3) accounting for culture-specific features and content in the texts. As a prefatory backdrop to reading and discussion, the class first deals with Iranian and American definitions of “poetry” and “classics” and agrees upon a practical literary critical approach to reading poems that best suits the appreciation of classics of Persian poetry by American graduate students. After reading and discussing (in break-out sessions) specific texts, course participants demonstrate their: (1) skill (in plenary sessions) at identifying features of classic texts that contribute to poetic effects and appeal therein; (2) skill (in oral reports) at discerning culture specific features and content in classic poems; and (3) skill (on a comprehensive review test) at identifying works and their authors on the basis of signature subjects, imagery, diction, verse forms, and themes, and their familiarity with secondary (e.g., literary critical writing) and tertiary sources (e.g., Iranian commentaries and specialized Persian-Persian dictionaries). The single required course textbook is Classics of Persian Poetry: A Primer for Students (2015/6), which contains the Persian texts of 115+ poems and self-contained passages from poems. Besides Persian texts, each of the twenty-one chapters of Classics of Persian Poetry features notes on the poems therein and poetry, English translations of all texts, and introductory commentary on the chapter’s poem(s). That commentary is assigned reading prior to class sessions that call discussion of a chapter’s poems. Further required reading 1 appears on the course Blackboard/Canvas in files presenting copies of critical writing in Persian and English on Persian poetry and poems. Reading assignments derive further from the annotated Course Bibliography that also appears on the course Blackboard. Between late 2011, when I first submitted a course description and mid-2013, when I submitted the foregoing course description, DMES and I exchanged a series of e-messages on the subject of the course description. Here follows a list of the objections that DMES raised with respect to that description. MES: (1) Graduate courses should not have “lectures.” Graduate courses should, by definition, be discussion-based and seminar style. Graduate students are perfectly capable of reading any background information outside of class. MES: (2) I [= MES chair] see no reason why any class time should be spent reviewing a quiz. MES: (3) In a 14-week graduate course, I would like to see more than ‘a dozen or so’ works read. At the very least, students should be able to read modern Persian articles on these poets and their works in addition to the classical texts. MES: (4) I am surprised not to see Jami on the syllabus.” Here were my responses in reverse order. (4) MES: “I am surprised not to see Jami on the syllabus.” MCH: Because Jâmi’s works strike me as adding nothing aesthetically to the Khorâsâni and 'Erâqi styles or medieval Persian verse that achieves a sort of culminating synthesis in Hâfezian ghazals, I have not included him on the list. If, however, the course dealt with the so-called, post-medieval Indian Style, I'd start with Jâmi (1414-1492). (3) MES: “In a 14-week graduate course I would like to see more than ‘a dozen or so’ works read. At the very least, students should be able to read modern Persian articles on these poets and their works in addition to the classical [sic] texts.” MCH: Please let me know the names of other medieval Persian “classic” poems that should figure in such a course. Parenthetically, would that instructors of advanced Persian literature courses at American universities could at least handle the cited texts! Also, please read the statement on required course materials in the course description. As implied therein, students will be reading critical articles in Persian and English on all primary source materials. (2) MES: “I see no reason why any class time should be spent reviewing a quiz.” MCH: The review quizzes in part call for an explication de texte of several passages and poems that students have not read in class, which means that the review of the review quizzes serves to further the business of the course, i.e., the critical critical appreciation of classic poems. (1) MES: “[Graduate courses should not have ‘lectures.’ Graduate courses should, by definition, be discussion-based and seminar style. Graduate students are perfectly capable of reading any background information outside of class (rather than taking class time for lecture #2, for example).” MCH: Having taken nine or ten graduate English literature courses in the past fifteen or so years and having taken twenty or so graduate courses in Persian and Arabic literature at Tehran University and The University of Chicago and English literature courses there and at The Creighton University, my notion of graduate literature courses and literature seminars differs from yours. In addition, in my own graduate literature teaching, methods and styles in which have naturally continued to evolve over the past thirty-five years, lectures play a useful role, especially for students without a literature specialization and lacking familiarity with conversation in Persian about poetry. In many class sessions, a prelection then turns into a seminar conversation about the text in question. Perhaps an editorial change from the word “lecture” to “discussion” or “seminar” in the heading for the course calendar in the course description might assuage DMES concerns. DMES responded to my foregoing responses with the following further commentary. (1) MES: “I have checked [with graduate students who have taken MCH's Persian literature courses], and they do not find the lectures useful.” (2) MES: “Graduate seminars in literature are not in the business of teaching your critical appreciation of classical poems.” (3) MES: “The point of the class is to have students read the literature and discuss it themselves to develop their own appreciation for it. As for developing their reading skills, those are far better served by actually reading a new poem or two.” Here follow comments I submitted to DMES in response to the foregoing. (1) MES: “I have checked [with graduate students who have taken MCH's Persian literature courses], and they do not find the 2 lectures useful.” MCH: Not knowing to whom the pronoun “they” refers and absent any feedback on course instructor surveys from my Persian literature courses, I cannot comment on your assertion. Parenthetically, I also immediately wrote to or talked to all of the graduate students in question who assured me that MES had not asked them any questions about my courses. In other words, MES’s assertion was demonstrably untrue and consequently unacademic and anti-intellectual. (2) Except in a poetry theory course in which I teach a specific theory (not my own), in order to stimulate students to formulate their own views about the nature of lyric poetry (it's a Jesuit tradition in philosophy instruction that I've found effective), I don't teach my critical appreciation of classical poems. Instead, I present Iranian analyses and contrast them with a contemporary formalist approach, again encouraging students to develop their own views. Of course, in classes in which non-literature students participate who have not taken courses in literary criticism, the conversation does not stray far beyond explication de texte. (3) As for the statement that: “The point of the class is to have students...discuss it [literature] themselves,” that might serve as “the point” in an advanced Persian language class using medieval Persian poems, but not in my Persian literature survey courses. As an illustration of the difference, I often read some Frost and Hafez in the evening and have never thought of my appreciation of their poems as something I needed or need to develop through discussion, even with Sorayya. As stated above, the Spring 2012 Classics of Persian Poetry course proposed by graduate students never took place. As for the 2014 course that MES proposed that I design, MES [= MES Chair = MES below] returned the keyboarded course description proposal sheet with 15 or 20 cross-outs and 10 or 15 marginal notes, including phrases such as “Absolutely Not,” “reductive,” “passé,” and “outmoded.” The phrase “Absolutely Not,” which I had not heard addressed to me, even in my own house growing up (and Dad was Jesuit-trained in high school and college and saw to it that I had the same training), got my attention. What could a Persianist possibly propose in a graduate poetry course that would lead a department chair in another language and another discipline and without Persian expertise to write “Absolutely Not?” Here follow numbered statements in the course description (e.g., §1.1), MES’s comments (e.g., §1.2), and my responses (e.g., §1.3). §1.1. Course description: The chief rationale for the course is the paramount significance of Persian poetry and classic Persian poems in Iranian identity, culture, and discourse. §1.2. MES: “The chief rationale for the course is the paramount significance of classic Persian poetry in Iranian culture and discourse.” §1.3. MCH: First, the phrases “Persian poetry” and “classic Persian poems” define two subjects in a way that the phrase “classic Persian poetry” does not. By “Persian poetry” I mean poetry in Persian of any period, poetry itself having a demonstrably special significance in Iranian identity, culture, and discourses. By “classic Persian poems,” I mean specific and identifiable poems of any period that Iranians see as “classics” in the sense that T.S. Eliot defines and develops the term in “What Is a Classic?” I might also use the phrase “classical Persian poetry” or “medieval poetry” to describe poetry in Persian from slightly before Rudaki (d. 940/1) to Jami (d. 1492). But “classic Persian poetry” does not satisfactorily communicate the two notions described above. Second, because many Persian Iranians define themselves in part in terms of their Persian poetry, I use the term “identity” as an arena in which those Persian Iranians attach special significance to Persian poetry. §2.1. Course description: “[One]...course...aim…: discerning arguably non-Western features in those texts that may play roles in the Iranian appreciation of them as classics.” §2.2. MES: “[One]...course...aim…: discerning arguably non-Western features in those texts that may play roles in the Iranian reader’s appreciation of them as classics.” MES marginal notes: “Reductive and outmoded.” §2.3. MCH: The course does not divide culture into Western and non-Western, but rather examines Iranian appreciation of classic Persian poems to discern features in them that may not figure in European and American appreciation of classic poems, the views of poetry on the part of class members serving to 3 represent the latter. The course focuses almost exclusive attention to Iranian writing on classics of Persian poetry, and pays little or no attention to European and American writing on classics of Persian poetry. Julie Scott Meisami’s excellent Medieval Persian Court Poetry, the most favorably received book on the subject in English, has a bibliography of 190+ items in which, if memory serves me correctly, three are written by Iranians! This course introduces students to the world of Iranian literary criticism of Persian literary works and is much less interested in “the reader’s appreciation of them” than in the “Iranian appreciation of them as classics,” two different propositions. From its inception in the 1974-1975 academic year, OALL/MELC/DMES’s Persian literature courses, as stated through the years in descriptions of them, have deliberately privileged Iranian writing on Persian poetry both to provide a balance to orientalist, structuralist, and later Euro-American views and to use Persian primary and secondary sources as self-view windows into Iranian literary culture. §3.1. Course description: The course first deals with Iranian and American definitions of “poetry” and “classics” and agrees upon a practical literary critical approach to reading poems that best suits the appreciation of classics of Persian poetry by American graduate students. §3.2. MES: “The course first deals with Iranian and American definitions of “poetry” and “classics” and agrees upon a practical literary critical approach to reading poems that best suits the appreciation of classics of Persian poetry by American graduate students.” MES marginal notes: “reductive and outmoded.” §3.3. MCH: In my years of teaching Persian poetry to Americans–and anecdotal experience strikes me as useful only if and when no other more broadly based data and conclusions are available–Any readers out there who have taught an American university course on Hafez’s poetry a dozen or more times, please share you experiences with me–, American students have come to poetry courses unclear about what poetry does and without much experience in reading poetry and almost no experience in reading poems for fun. For that matter, from DMES faculty colleagues I’ve heard the following in the past year or so: (1) “I don’t get poetry, and I don’t much like it”; (2) “Poetry isn’t important in area studies or history”; and (3) “After all, readers can interpret a poem almost any way they want.” (1.1) If someone doesn’t like or get poetry or like or get opera or like or get jazz or baseball or steak and potatoes, that’s fine with me (I don’t much like three items on the list myself). But if that person signs up for a course of mine on English or Persian poetry, he/she and I have to have a semester-long conversation about “getting it” and agreeing that were poetry his/her cup of tea, Yeats’s “The Second Coming” does a good job of appealing to the imagination and communicating experience. (2.1) If one thinks that poetry isn’t important in area studies or history and that person is talking about America, I’d agree (Walt Whitman notwithstanding). But Persian poetry plays a different role in Iranian history and society, according to Iranians, which is why the first paragraph of the course description for Classics of Persian Poetry reads as it does. (3.1) Yes, readers can interpret poems any way they want if they’re not reading poetically. But, if readers are reading poetically, what’s the second way they can read John Donne’s “The Canonization,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” or even T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets?” §4.1. Course description: After reading and discussing...specific texts, course participants demonstrate their: (1) skill (in plenary sessions) at identifying features of classic texts that contribute to poetic effects and appeal therein; (2) skill (in oral reports) at discerning culturespecific features and content in classic poems; and (3) skill...at identifying works and their authors on the basis of signature subjects, imagery, diction, verse forms, and themes, and their familiarity with secondary (e.g., literary critical writing) and tertiary sources (e.g., Iranian commentaries and specialized Persian-Persian dictionaries). §4.2. MES: “Why do you expect grad students not to pay attention or be engaged?” §4.3. MCH: The course description neither states nor implies the expectation that students will not pay attention or be engaged.” Of course, parenthetically, if they’re not, that’s mostly their own responsibility as graduate students. As for the rationale behind the explicit citation of the demonstration of specific 4 skills by students, most graduate students of Persian participating in their first course on Persian poetry in America have never used a general Persian-Persian dictionary, do not know the name of the standard contemporary unabridged Persian dictionary, are unfamiliar with literary critical terminology in Persian and likely not in English, and are unaware that a published Persian commentary exists for almost every famous (in the Persian Iranian world) pre-modern Persian poem. §5.1. Course description: The single required course textbook…, Classics of Persian Poetry: A Primer for Students (2014/5), ...contains the Persian texts of 114 poems and self-contained passages from poems. Besides Persian texts, each of the twenty-one chapters of Classics of Persian Poetry features notes on the poems therein and poetry, English translations of all texts, and introductory commentary on the chapter’s poem(s). §5.2. MES: “The single required course textbook..., Classics of Persian Poetry: A Primer for Students (2015/6),...contains the Persian texts of 115+ poems and self-contained passages from poems. Besides Persian texts, each of the twenty-onr chapters in Classics of Persian Poetry features notes on the poems therein and poetry, English translations of all texts, and introductory commentary on the chapter’s poem(s).” MES marginal notes: “[English translations of all texts] Absolutely Not. This is contrary to DMES teaching philosophy.” §5.3. MCH: In the study of authentic Persian texts at the advanced level, the case for the utility of English translations in self-study review is easily made, both with respect to everyday, unmemorable texts the study of which leads students to develop the skills to read similar texts on their own later and with respect to classics of Persian poetry the study of which leads students to permanent mastery of the texts in question, which texts figure in everyday Persian Iranian discourse in Iran, Europe, and America. Because Classics of Persian Poetry aims to help develop the latter skills, the following comments relate exclusively to the utility of translations in the study of those classic Persian poems. First, if a Classics of Persian Poetry course has as one aim the development in students of the ability to read poetically, in A.C. Bradley’s century-old words in “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” the process is not a language learning process but a poetry experiencing process. In that process, the use of Persian paraphrases or an English translation of a Persian poem and the demonstration that the paraphrase or translation is not poetic– didn’t Robert Frost say that poetry is what gets lost in translation?–encourages students to focus on features of a Persian poem that relate to an appeal to the imagination and the communication of experience, to use terms to which Laurence Perrine drew attention half-a-century ago in his American high school/college textbook called Sound and Sense. If I were teaching a Latin course on Virgil’s Aeneid, I might even have students read Robert Fitzgerald’s translation along with it, regardless of the penalty that violating an administrator’s “Absolutely Not” might lead to! Do some administrators not understand the ruleless, eclectic magic that can happen once a seminar door closes with all the seminarians inside? Back to the use of translation in post-reading, out-side-of-class self-study, the statement “Absolutely Not. This is contrary to DMES teaching philosophy,” suggests that DMES has a single teaching philosophy, as if a single methodology would apply to my Persian Art Past and Present, Persian Reading for Heritage Students, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Epic Impulse, and The Middle East in World Poetry courses. If I as an individual instructor use a different, so-called “teaching philosophy” in courses of different sorts, it stands to reason that various instructors in various disciplines treating disparate subject matters would not have a single “teaching philosophy” even if they served in the same academic unit. For that matter, recognizing that sensitivity to the use of translations comes with the territory, so to speak, in the field of foreign language education, I note that even in that field experts write about the utility of translations and expert language program directors call for translations to accompany texts in the target language for self-study review. Moreover, one could further note that skill at translation figures prominently in the academic and professional world of Persian expertise, which accounts for the presence in advanced Persian textbooks and readers of exercises calling for English paraphrases and summary translation of authentic texts that the reader/writer then 5 compares with translations in the textbook/reader of the text in question. Further e-mail exchanges took place in July 2013 as MES further pondered the approvability of Classics of Persian Poetry (which earlier departmental course committees had approved and of which a DMES Persianist colleague, who took the course some years back, speaks highly). For example, MES wrote: “What is ‘recitation’ and what is it for? Students will stand up and recite poems? Seems like a waste of time.” My MCH response: “In Iranian terms, Persian poetry isn't poetry unless heard. Consequently, students of Persian poetry cannot become expert in or expertly appreciative of that poetry unless they can recite classic poems. Moreover, assessment as to whether or not a student of Persian has mastered the language of a Persian poem can come easily only from his or her reading the poem out loud, instructor comments and group conversation ensuing when issues arise. The long and short of it is that Persian means the adjective in the phrase “lyric verse.” Moreover, unless students listen to readings outside of class and participate in in-class jam sessions, they likely won't learn to appreciate what's transpiring in a poem unless they see a text. In addition, the odds are that in whatever part of their everyday lives that takes place in Persian in the future, they'll be hearing poems in interactions with Persian speakers more than reading them. And that’ll happen at almost every Iranian(-American) social gathering which they attend. At another point in the exchanges, I asked this question: For example, if I teach a Hâfez class, do I teach ten ghazals so that students can read other Hafezian ghazals on their own in the future or so that those ten ghazals remain in their minds and imaginations? MES responded: “The former is graduate teaching, the latter is undergraduate teaching.” MCH: In light of MES’s comment, I have decided to ask my question of students during the first course session and treat poems thereafter according to whichever aims the group prefers. As for the obvious untenability of MES’s categorical reaction to my question, a reaction that only an academic not in literature might have, I have this question: What about the graduate course in which students read all of Milton’s Paradise Lost or the graduate course in which they read all of Shakespeare’s plays or the graduate course in which they read James Joyce’s Ulysses? I’ve taken these graduate courses, and I’ve taught a course called Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Society of World Literature and have directed a faculty seminar on the same subject. All of these courses aim to help students get better and better at reading the specific text in question and not necessarily at reading other texts. Also in the July 2013 e-mail exchanges, MES wrote the the following in support of its objections to the Classics of Persian Poetry: A Primer for Students syllabus: “When I studied classical Persian poetry with Professor Thackston we used his book, just texts, with a very useful glossary.” MCH: My first response to MES’s statement was to suggest a debate on the relative merits of Wheeler Thackston’s A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry (1994, 114 pages of texts and notes and a 50-page glossary) in terms of background and contextual information and commentary and notes on texts vis-à-vis Classics of Persian Poetry: A Primer for Students (2015/6, 380 pages of texts and notes with text translations paralleling texts without using extra lines of space. A chief difference between the two textbooks lies in text selection. Thackston’s one thousand years of Persian poetry related exclusively to traditional(ist) poems while Classics of Persian Poetry also includes modern(ist) poems. More significant differences between the two books lie in their very different treatments of individual poets and poems, e.g., Thackston’s units on Khâqâni and his “Ode to Ctesiphon (Millennium, pp. 29-31) and on Hâfez and his ghazals (Millennium, pp. 64-68) vis-à-vis parallel units in Classics of Persian Poetry (online at Academia.edu/MichaelHillmann. Such a comparison should convince most readers that my part in the suggested need consist only of handing out copies the cited units and resting my case, so to speak. Finally, in another e-message MES wrote that written analyses of poems constituted undergraduate work and not a proper subject for graduate student papers. My MCH response: “An analysis of a poem that puzzles even Iranian experts can become a graduate-level enterprise as any number of doctoral dissertations on Persian poetry in Iran and abroad show, not to speak of hundreds of dissertations on English poetry–a new analysis of The Waste Land or Emily Dickinson's poems still gets a diploma for 6 good reasons–because it obliges students to read Persian commentaries, investigate issues of intertextuality, and pin down denotations, connotations, and associations of images, not to speak of contending with different published analyses and mulling over texts in literary critical terms.. Rather than a comparison of critical approaches, most graduate students who have not read much poetry or taken undergraduate courses in Persian poetry taught by a poetry expert will find it challenging enough to evaluate a single critical approach in terms of its effectiveness in shedding light on a text. For example, most Orientalist and Medievalist writing in English on medieval classics of Persian poetry do not exhibit identifiable literary critical approaches or even refer to literary critical writing on the nature of poetry or the reading of poetry qua poetry. In any case, long answer short to MES’s dismissive view of analyses of poems as “undergraduate” work takes only five words from more than half a century ago: Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn! A new DMES chair took office in January 2014 and by October 2014 all DMES policies regarding Persian literature enunciated in the 2010-2013 years had apparently fallen by the wayside. That is good news for the study of Persian literature, but DMES’s development of a vision of how Persian literature fits into a department that arguably still lacks an overall philosophy remains a desideratum. In any case, as of the 2015-2016 academic year, DMES will offer one of two Classics of Persian Poetry courses each fall with syllabi and schedules as follows. • Classics of Persian Poetry from Rudaki d. 940/1) to Jâmi (d. 1492) Course Schedule • class sessions 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Discussion of course activities and goals. Definitions of “poem” and “classics.” Discussion of approaches to the appreciation of poetry. Quatrains from the 9th through the 15th centuries. Classics of Persian Poetry [= CPP] 1. Discussion of influences of Arabic and Arabic prosody on Persian poetry. Two lyric poems by Rudaki (d. 940/1). CPP 2. Discussion of royal court traditions on the Iranian plateau. Lyric poems by Shahid Balkhi (d. 936), Khosravâni, Farrohi (d. 1038/9), Qatrân (d. 1072), and Sanâ’i (d. 1131 or 1140). CPP 2. A panegyric qasideh poem by Farrokhi (d. 1037). CPP 4. Discussion of traditional Persian poetry of praise. A panegyric qasideh poem by Manuchehri d. 1040). CPP 4. The opening pages in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh 1 CPP 3. Discussion the epic tradition and Iranian cultural identity. “The Story of Sohrâb” in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh 2. CPP 3. “The Story of Sohrâb” in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh 3. CPP 3. The last pages in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh 4. CPP 3. Discussion of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh as Iranian history and a nationalist story. Omar Khayyâm (1048-1131) and Khayyamic quatrains 1. CPP 5. Khayyâmic quatrains 2. CPP 5. “Ode to Ctesiphon” by Khâqâni (c.1121–1190) 1. CPP 7. “Ode to Ctesiphon” by Khâqâni 2. CPP 7. Passages from Seven Portraits by Nezâmi (1141–1209) CPP 7. from The Conference of the Birds by ‘Attar (d. 1221). CPP 9. Discussion of the Persian Sufi tradition. 7 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Poems by Rumi (1207–1273) 1. CPP 10. Poems by Rumi 2. CPP 10. Poems by Rumi 3. CPP 10. Poems by Rumi 4. CPP 10. Poetry in (The) Rose Garden (1258) by Sa’di (c.1215–c.1290) 1. CPP 11. Poetry in (The) Rose Garden by Sa’di 2. CPP 11. Online. Two ghazals by Sa’di. CPP 11. Discussion of the nature of Persian lyric verse. Ghazals by Hâfez (c.1320–c.1390) 1. CPP 12. Discussion of ambivalence in the Hâfezian ghazal. Ghazals by Hâfez 2. CPP 12. Ghazals by Hâfez 3. CPP 12. Ghazals by Hâfez 4. CPP 12. Discussion of Hâfez as an Iranian national hero. Review Test. Discussion of Review Test. Discussion of Critical Papers. Conclusions. • Classics of Persian Poetry from Sâ’eb (d. 1676) to Behbahâni (d. 2014) Course Schedule • class session 1 Discussion of course activities and goals. Definitions of “poem” and “classics.” Discussion of approaches to the appreciation of poetry. 2 Characterization of “classical” or “medieval” Persian poetry from Rudaki (d. 940/1) to Jâmi (d. 1492) through sample shorter Persian poems. Classics of Persian Poetry [= CPP] 1–12. Discussion of influences of Arabic and Arabic prosody on Persian poetry. 3 An Ode for Kabul by Sâ’eb (d. 1676). CPP 13. Discussion of royal court traditions on the Iranian plateau. 4 A Strophe Ode on Sufi Love by Hâtef (d. 1783). CPP 13. Discussion of the Sufi tradition in Persian poetry. 5 A poem by Qâ’âni (d. 1854). CPP 13. “Mother” by Iraj Mirzâ (d. 1924). Discussion of didacticism in traditional(ist) Persian poetry. 6 “Ro’asâ va Mellat” by ‘Ali Akbar Dehkhodâ (d. 1956). CPP 13. “Payâm-e Âzâdi” by ‘Âref Qazvini (d. 1934). CPP 13. “Happy were the days…” by Farrokhi Yazdi (d. 1939). CPP 13. Discussion of mellat as a new subject of address (joining mamduh, ma’shuq, and ma’bud. 7 “Julâ-ye Khodâ’ by Parvin E’tesâmi (d. 1941) CPP 13. “Zan dar Irân” by Parvin E’tesâmi. CPP 13. Discussion of women in Persian poetry from the 900s to the 1950s. 8 “‘Oqâb” (1945) by Parviz Nâtel Khânlari (d. 1990). CPP 13. 9 Modernist Poems by Nimâ Yushij (d. 1960) 1. CPP 14. Discussion of Modernism. 10 Modernist Poems by Nimâ Yushij 2. CPP 14. Discussion of Nimâic modernism. 11 “Kuché” by Feraydun Moshiri (d. 2000). CPP 15. 8 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 “Kârun” by Feraydun Tavallali (d. 1985). CPP 15. Discussion of moderate modernist poetry (e.g., modernist sensibilities and traditional(ist) forms. “Ârash-e Kamângir” by Siyâvash Kasrâ’i (d. 1996). CPP 15. Modernist Poems by Sohâb Sepehri (d. 1980) 1. CPP 16. Modernist Poems by Sohâb Sepehri 2. CPP 16. Discussion of gnosticism in contemporary Persian poetry. Modernist Poems by Sohâb Sepehri 3. CPP 16. Modernist Poems by Mehdi Akhavân-e Sâles (d. 1990) 1. CPP 17. Modernist Poems by Mehdi Akhavân-e Sâles 2. CPP 17. Discussion of the Iranian past in contemporary Persian poetry. Modernist Poems by Mehdi Akhavân-e Sâles 3. CPP 17. “Pariyâ” by Ahmad Shâmlu (d. 2000) 1. CPP 18. Poems by Ahmad Shâmlu 2. CPP 18. Poems by Ahmad Shâmlu 3. CPP 18. Discussion of contemporary Persian “political” poetry. Poems (1950s–1970s) by Nâder Nâderpur (d. 2000) 1. CPP 19. Poems (1980s–1990s by Nâder Nâderpur 2. CPP 19. Poems by Forugh Farrokhzâd (d. 1967) 1. CPP 20. Poems by Forugh Farrokhzâd 2. CPP 20. Poems by Forugh Farrokhzâd 3. CPP 20. Discussion of the feminine voice in Persian poetry from the 1950s to 2015. Post-Revolution poems by Simin Behbahâni (1927-2014) 1. CPP 21. Post-Revolution poems by Simin Behbahâni) 2. CPP 21. Review Test. Discussion of Review Test. Discussion of Critical Papers. 9