INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND TEXTUAL PRACTICES (PERSIAN)

The teaching of the intellectual history of the Persianate world is a pivotal element of the LICAAM Master's project: an occasion for reflecting on the centrality of the reproduction of "classical" textual and epistemic models in the formation of modern Iran and the other national realities of the Persianate dymension. Directly connected to the course in Narrations and cultural dynamics (year 1), our teaching is to be considered as the final laboratory on texts in literary Persian: a seminar aimed at interpreting the complex cultural dynamics which have brought the Persianate world to the transition towards global modernity. For the master students already well-acquainted with Persian studies, the course aims at representing, in other words, a conceptual pillar around which organising the other teachings of the Middle Eastern Master's programme: a creative seminar to be declined according the students' interests and prerogatives, but always integrated with the LICAAM formative project.

At the end of the course the students should be able to autonomously deal with a rigorous analysis of the literary text, with a special stress on the historical and political semiosis involved. In a simmetrical perspective, they will also have to acquire a clear conscience of the indeterminacy of the ermeneutical spectre, i.e. to recognize the historicity of any textual phenomenon: to read, in other words, literary culture as a producer of intellectual-historical meaning, and recognize its rhyzomatic ties, more or less visible, with the global social and economic dynamics involved in the formation of what we call modernity.

An adequate knowledge of literary Persian is required, as well as a working knowledge of Iranian and West Asian history

The 2019/20 course focuses on the forms of biographical writing: we deal especially on the tazkira (collection of biographies with anthology) of poets, and on its various historiographic and autobiographic declinations, from 1500 to 1900

The following texts do not represent a complete bibliography: we will suggest more readings during the course, which will naturally include several first-hand materials in Persian

- Stefano Pellò, Tutiyan-i hind. Specchi cosmopoliti e proiezioni identitarie indo-persiane, Firenze: Società editrice fiorentina, 2012.
- Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashoning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography, Oxford, 2001.
- Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- Stewart-Robinson, J. “The Teẕkere Genre in Islam.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (Gennaio 1964): 57–65.
- H. A. R. Gibb, “Islamic Biographical Literature”, in B. Lewis, P.M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1968.
- M.K. Hermansen, “Biography and Hagiography”, in J.L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 218-221.

Letture:

- Mufti, AR. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 458–93.
- Ahmadi, Wali. “The Institution of Persian Literature and the Genealogy of Bahar’s‘ Stylistics.’” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 2 (2004): 141–52.
- Chittick, W.C. “The Perfect Man as the Prototype of the Self in the Sufism of Jami.” Studia Islamica 49, no. 49 (1979): 135–57.
- Marcia K. Hermansen, “Religious Literature and the Inscription of Identity: the Sufi Tazkira Tradition in Muslim South Asia”, The Muslim World 87/3-4 (1997): 315-329.
- Paul Losensky, “The Creative Compiler: The Art of Rewriting in ‘Attar’s Tazkirat al-Awliya’”, in F. Lewis, S. Sharma (eds), The Necklace of the Pleiades, Amsterdam: Rozenberg; West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2007, pp. 107-120.
- M.K. Hermansen, B.B. Lawrence, “Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communication”, in D. Gilmartin, B.B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu. Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida, 2000, pp. 149-175.
- Paul Losensky, “Linguistic and Rhetorical Aspects of the Signature Verse (takhallus) in the Persian ghazal”, Edebiyat, 8 (1997): 239-271.
- Meisami, JS. “The Past in Service of the Present: Two Views of History in Medieval Persia.” Poetics Today 14, no. 2 (1993): 247–75.
- Mitchell, Colin Paul. “To Preserve and Protect: Husayn Va’iz-I Kashifi and Perso-Islamic Chancellery Culture.” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 485–508.
- C. Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in pre-Colonial India”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37/4 (1995): 692-722.

The exam will consist in a discussion with the instructor, focused on the reading and analysis of the text dealt with during the classes

The teaching methods will follow the traditional discursive model, with the occasional integration of powerpoints and multimedia

English

oral