From Sadeq Hedayat's enigmatic novel, The Blind Owl , to the novels, short stories, and plays of writers such as Ahmad Mahmud, Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi, and Moniru Ravanipur, whose works address the realities of Iranian society on more mundane levels, to the cinematic works of filmmakers such as Ebrahim Golestan and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, with their sometimes ironic and sometimes contemplative representations of the realities of their society and people, Iranian writers and filmmakers since the early decades of the twentieth century have been preoccupied with issues that pertain to a society in transition. This preoccupation reflects both individual and collective struggles for an understanding of, dealing with, sorting out, and selecting or discarding aspects of traditional or modern life, religious beliefs or political ideologies, and the historical past or promises of the present and future. The papers on these two panels combine a variety of theoretical and critical approaches to explicate the reflections on this transitional period in fiction, drama, and film. (Panel convenor M. R. Ghanoonparvar)
Chair
Institutional Affiliation :
The University of Texas at Austin
Academic Bio:
M. R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor of Persian and Comparative Literature and Persian Language at The University of Texas at Austin. Ghanoonparvar has also taught at the University of Isfahan, the University of Virginia, and the University of Arizona and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on Persian literature and culture in both English and Persian and is the author of Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (1984), In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (1993), Translating the Garden (2001), Reading Chubak (2005), and Persian Cuisine: Traditional, Regional and Modern Foods (2006). His translations include Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s By the Pen, Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient Stone, Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun, Ahmad Kasravi's On Islam and Shi'ism, Sadeq Hedayat’s The Myth of Creation. Davud Ghaffarzadegan's Fortune Told in Blood, and Mohammad Reza Bayrami's The Tales of Sabalan; his edited volumes include Iranian Drama: An Anthology, In Transition: Essays on Culture and Identity in Middle Eastern Societies, Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi’s Othello in Wonderland and Mirror-Polishing Storytellers, and Moniru Ravanipur’s Satan Stones and Kanizu. He was the recipient of the 2008 Lois Roth Prize for Literary Translation. His most recent book is The Neighbor Says: Letters of Nima Yushij and the Philosophy of Modern Persian Poetry (2009) and his forthcoming books include Iranian Films and Persian Fiction, Literary Diseases in Persian Literature, and a translation of Bahram Beyza'i's Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role.
Discussant
Institutional Affiliation :
University of California, Irvine
Academic Bio :
Nasrin Rahimieh is Maseeh Chair and Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at University of California, Irvine where she also holds an appointment as Professor of Comparative Literature.
She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University of Alberta in 1988. She served as Associate Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta (1999-2002) Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University (2003-2006), and President of the Association for Iranian Studies (2006-2008).
Her teaching and research are focused on modern Persian literature, Iranian diaspora literature, Iranian women’s writing, and contemporary Iranian cinema. Among her publications are Oriental Responses to the West (Brill 1990), Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (Syracuse 2001), a co-edited special issue of MELUS (The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (Summer 2008) on Iranian American literature, and the English translation of the late Taghi Modarressi’s Persian novel, The Virgin of Solitude (2008).
First Presenter
Institutional Affiliation :
The University of Texas at Austin
Academic Bio :
Ahmad Aminpour obtained his BA in English language and literature at the University of Tehran, Iran and is currently a graduate student in Persian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to teach Persian at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007-8 academic year. In addition to modern Persian literature, he also works on Kurdish poetry and fiction.
Concise Paper Title :
The Liminal World of The Blind Owl
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) :
Liminality as defined by anthropologists such as Victor Turner as a transitional state. Puberty, marriage, death, and so on are good examples of passing from one stage to another. Doors, bridges, noon, and midnight are also some examples of liminality in time and place. This presentation applies the theory of liminality as defined by Turner, and later on challenged and revised by other anthropologists, onto the fictional, delirious world created by Sadeq Hedayat in his most renowned book, The Blind Owl. The narrator in The Blind Owl is stuck in a liminal state and is unwilling to step out of it. The narrator lives in two worlds, that of both the glorious ancient and the degenerate modern city of Rey. The woman he deals with is both ethereal and a whore. In regard to his birth, it is not known which one of the identical twins is his real father. Young people go through a door and when they come out they are completely gray-haired. The narrator looks out a window and sees a young girl at the very moment she is offering a flower to an old man. And ultimately, even though he is young, he is transformed into an old man. The use of this concept helps explain what many critics, including Hasan Kamshad, have described as the enigmatic nature of the work.
Second Presenter
Institutional Affiliation :
The University of Texas at Austin
Academic Bio :
Nastaran Kherad is completing her Ph.D. in Persian literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of In the House of My Bibi : A Memoir of Growing up in Revolutionary Iran (2008) and is completing an English translation of Hamsayehha.
Concise Paper Title :
Ahmad Mahmud and Socialist Realism
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) :
This presentation examines the traditional approach to committed writing as opposed to the style of aesthetic writing, that is, writing for an intended purpose rather than for the sake of art itself. The focus is mainly on the long-established style of ideologically-driven writing employed by Ahmad Mahmud, whose works are representative of those of generations of writers such as Mirza Fathali Akhundzadeh, Zeynolabedin Maragheh’i, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, Bozorg Alavi, Sadeq Chubak, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Mahmud Dowlatabadi, and Simin Daneshvar. Although these writers' stories deal with local issues, they reflect a yet larger transnational conflict between the intelligentsia and the advocates of the status quo. Like most of the Iranian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries whose works were influenced by socialism, Mahmud also could not escape this style of committed writing. One example is his use of global ideology in his works, which generally deal with local issues and introduce southern Iran against the backdrop of the political turmoil of the 1950s as a focal point.
Thid Presenter
Institutional Affiliation :
The University of Texas at Austin
Academic Bio :
This summer Hanan Hammad is defending her Dissertation entitled “Industrialization and Social Transformation in Modern Egypt: al-Mahalla al-Kubra 1910-1958” in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Then, she will move this fall to Texas Christian University at Fort Worth-Dallas as an assistant professor of the history of the Middle East. She has finished the translation of Moniru Ravanipur's novel “Ahl-e Gharq” from Persian into Arabic. Her article “the Iranian Revolution in the Egyptian Press” is to be published in the forthcoming Radical History Review. She has worked as a professional journalist for several Arabic publications including the Egyptian weekly al-Ahali and the Kuwaiti daily al-Rai al-‘Amm.
Concise Paper Title :
Mourning Locality: Community versus Globalization and Nationalism in The Drowned and Cities of Salt
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) :
Depending on their stand on the political spectrum, their position towards the state, and their socio-literary commitments, many modern Arab and Iranian authors have focused on the coercive and/or the modernizing nature of their nation states. Global intervention in their own countries enjoyed more agreement among authors and has been seen as a direct threat to the “nation.” The Iranian novel Ahl-e Gharq [The Drowned] by Moniru Ravanipur and the Arabic saga Mudun al-Malh [Cities of Salt] by the Saudi Abdul Rahman Manif are similarly unique in their treatment of both the nation state and global intervention as “destructive” forces for the local community and its authentic culture and institutions. There is abundant literature in which the nation, explicitly or metaphorically, takes central stage and the author juxtaposes nation state against its citizens or globalization verses the nation. In both Ravanipur's and Manif’s works an isolated local community becomes the focus. Both authors lament the rich, though simple, authentic cultures under the pressure of a nation state seeking hegemonic power and gigantic global companies that care only for oil. This paper compares how both authors treat local community and culture versus the state and globalization in the phase of nation building. It pays close attention to how a local community is imagined in juxtaposition to the imagined nation.
Fourth Presenter
Name:
Sahar Allamezade, University of Maryland
Academic Bio :
I received a Bachelors degree in English Translation Training from the Azad University of Shiraz in 2000. I then moved to the United Kingdom to study literature at Buckingham University, where I received a Masters degree in Victorian Literature in 2002. In 2003, I was admitted to the Department of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to pursue a PhD degree in literature, which was interrupted. In August 2006, I began a PhD program in Comparative Literature focusing on 19th century Persian literature at the University of Maryland.
Concise Paper Title :
Iraj Mirza’s Sexual Poetics: Writing Like a Man, Reading Like a Man
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) :
In his poetry, Iraj Mirza (1874-1926), a modernist Iranian poet and satirist, openly and explicitly criticizes the veiling of Iran’s women as a sign of the country’s backwardness. In order to discredit the long held values of the hijab (veil), Iraj unveils the female body in his poetry. Such unveiling is best depicted in two of his long poems: Arefnameh and Zohreh and Manuchehr. In a crucial part of the Arefnameh, he depicts a speaker who lampoons a veiled woman with whom he eventually has intercourse, while she holds her face-veil tight. Readers are given a detailed account of the entire episode, specifically of the actual intercourse and penetration. In Zohreh and Manuchehr, presumably written later in his life, the poet paints a more circumscribed picture of the naked female body, presumably that of a goddess turned human. On contrast to the woman in Arefnameh, here Zohreh undresses herself tastefully to entice her virgin beloved, Manuchehr.
Critics like Paul Sprachman have interpreted the unveiling in Arefnameh as a metonym and a cause for the poet to express his abomination for “predatory homosexuality.” This view, I suggest is still situated on the male’s eye’s view of this gender dynamic. In this paper, I hope to show that in both poems the unveiling/undressing of the female body is depicted from a patriarchal perspective and calls for male-centered readings. Whereas Arefnameh ends with a prediction of a similar fate—almost a rape-like destiny— awaiting all other veiled women, thus “teaching them a lesson,” Zohreh and Manuchehr seems to satisfy the female desire by having Manuchehr sleep with a nymphomaniac Zohreh. As the latter leaves the scene to ascend back to the sky, the former is left to ponder his conquest and the plight that turns a youthful infatuation for a beautiful body into the calamity that is love.
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