A Formal Foundation for Comparative Study of the Late Persianate
In: Philological EncountersSearch for other papers by Levi Thompson in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
ʿAbṭa, Maḥmūd al-. “Al-Band fī al-adab al-ʿirāqī.” Al-Risāla 933 (21 May 1951): 575–577.
-
Adūnīs (ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd Isbir). “Fī qaṣīdat al-nathr.” Shiʿr 14 (1960): 75–83.
-
Ahmed, Amr Taher. La « Révolution littéraire »: Étude de l’influence de la poésie française sur la modernisation des formes poétiques persanes au début de XXe siècle. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2012.
-
Ahmed, Amr Taher. “A Theory of Reduplication: Eightfold Meters in Classical Persian Poetry.” Iranian Studies 50, no. 3 (2017): 391–414.
-
Ahmed, Hussam R. The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt. Stanford [CA]: Stanford University Press, 2021.
-
Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
-
Allen, Roger. The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction. Second edition. Syracuse [NY]: Syracuse University Press, 1995 [1983].
-
Allen, Roger and D.S. Richards, eds. Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [2006].
-
Bashir, Shahzad. The Market in Poetry in the Persian World. Edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes. Elements in the Global Middle Ages Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. DOI: 10.1017/9781108953016.
-
Boyce, Mary. “The Parthian ‘Gōsān’ and Iranian Minstrel Tradition.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1/2 (April 1957): 10–45.
-
Creswell, Robyn. City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
-
Dabashi, Hamid. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2012.
-
Dujaylī, ʿAbd al-Karīm, al-. Al-Band fī al-adab al-ʿarabī: tārīkhuh wa-nuṣūṣuh. Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1378/1959.
-
Elwell-Sutton, L. P. “ʿArūż.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica, II/6–7, 670–679. Available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aruz-the-metrical-system. Accessed April 2, 2023.
-
Elwell-Sutton, L.P. The Persian Metres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
-
Fakhreddine, Huda J. The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
-
Fani, Aria. “A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli.” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 523–552.
-
Fani, Aria and Kevin L. Schwartz. “Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century.” Iranian Studies 55, no. 3 (2022): 605–609.
-
Feuillebois, Ève. “Ghazal in Persian.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrün Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27440. Accessed April 2, 2023.
-
Fragner, Bert G. Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte Asiens. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999.
-
Golston, Chris and Tomas Riad. “The Phonology of Classical Arabic Meter.” Linguistics 35 (1997): 111–132.
-
Green, Nile, ed. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland [CA]: University of California Press, 2019.
-
Ḥājj, Unsī al-. Lan. Second edition. Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-Jāmiʿiyya li-l-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1962 [1960].
-
Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
-
Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā. Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1926.
-
Ibn Jaʿfar al-Kātib al-Baghdādī, Qudāma. Kitāb naqd al-shiʿr. Edited by Seeger Adrianus Bonebakker. Trustees of the de Goeje Fund 17. Leiden: Brill, 1956.
-
Jabbari, Alexander. “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–434.
-
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry. Studies in Arabic Literature: Supplements to the Journal of Arabic Literature. Vol. 6, 24 vols. Edited by M.M. Badawi, P. Cachia, M.C. Lyons, J.N. Mattock, and J.T. Monroe. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.
-
Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad and Kamran Talattof, eds. Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004.
-
Kia, Mana. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
-
Krenkow, F., G. Lecomte, C.-H. de Fouchécour, Abdülkadir Karahan, and R. Russell. “Ḳaṣīda.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0461. Accessed April 2, 2023.
-
Malāʾika, Nāzik al-. Qaḍāyā al-shiʿr al-muʿāṣir. Baghdad: Manshūrāt Maktabat al-Nahḍa, 1967 [1962].
-
Malāʾika, Nāzik al-. Revolt Against the Sun: The Selected Poetry of Nāzik al-Malāʾikah. A Bilingual Reader. Edited and translated by Emily Drumsta. London: Saqi Books, 2020.
-
Moody, Alys and Stephen J. Ross, eds. Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
-
Philsooph, Hushang. “Book Review: Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry.” Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 1 (April 2009): 100–105.
-
Pue, A. Sean. I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry. Oakland [CA]: University of California Press, 2014.
-
Sayyāb, Badr Shākir al-. Al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya al-kāmila. Fourth edition. Baghdad: Dār al-Ḥurriyya li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2008.
-
Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Muḥammad Riżā. Musīqī-yi shiʿr. Second edition. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Āgāh, 1368 [1989].
-
Spooner, Brian and William L. Hanaway, eds. Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012.
-
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamed. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001.
-
Thiesen, Finn. A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody: with Chapters on Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982.
-
Thompson, Levi. “Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping East-East Exchanges between Arabic and Persian Poetry.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Mapping New Directions in the Humanities, 40 (2020): 115–138.
-
Wright, W. A Grammar of the Arabic Language. Revised by W. Robertson Smith and M.J. de Goeje. 2 vols. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, Pvt. Ltd, 2004 [1862].
-
Yaḥyāwī, Rāwiyya. Shiʿr Adūnīs: al-binya wa-l-dalāla. Damascus: Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 2008.
-
Yūshīj, Nīmā. Majmūʿah-i kāmil-i ashʿār-i Nīmā Yūshīj: Fārsī va Ṭabarī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1370 [1991].
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 28 | 28 | 0 |
| Full Text Views | 396 | 396 | 127 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 279 | 279 | 24 |
A Formal Foundation for Comparative Study of the Late Persianate
In: Philological EncountersSearch for other papers by Levi Thompson in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 28 | 28 | 0 |
| Full Text Views | 396 | 396 | 127 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 279 | 279 | 24 |