Parvin E'tesami's Feminism and Legacy in Persian Poetry

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2024

The volume provides readers with close reading—a dimension that has been notably neglected in most analyses of Iʿtiṣāmī’s poetry. The significance of Noorian's approach extends beyond such meticulous close readings; she equally emphasizes the contextualization of Iʿtiṣāmī's career within the broader framework of modern Iran. In this manner, the volume serves as a noteworthy contribution, fostering a more profound understanding of Iʿtiṣāmī as a Muslim woman who transcended the entrenched gender norms of her culture, thereby establishing herself as a prominent literary figure. Throughout the volume, Noorian consistently exhibits a commendable mastery of the existing literature on Iʿtiṣāmī. Her discerning selection of methodology emerges as a distinctive and noteworthy aspect of her scholarly contribution. In conclusion, this volume is a welcome contribution to the study of Persian literature and of the intersection of religion, modernity, gender, and literary modernism. This monograph is an essential resource for those seeking a deeper understanding of modern (Muslim) women writers in Iran and the broader Middle Eastern context.

Woman Poets Iranica , 2022

Available on Woman Poets Iranica Online (https://poets.iranicaonline.org/article/opening-the-drawn-curtain-decoding-the-gendered-personhood-of-the-woman-poet-in-persian-poetry/?fbclid=IwAR3Erk85CIPcDWGnzulGOkNA9GSP6SaR-9ci0rUP7psOJ05ghK4BbQJcY40)

This article shows how Iranian female poets in the post-revolutionary period, through their poetry, transgress several socio-cultural boundaries. The strategy of these women poets is the same: to become more visible, to raise their voice, to resist and to create a new identity not far off from their self. The article shows how the Iranian women poets in question attempt to promote ethical relations between human subjects through using their feminine writing. Their poems highly criticise an Iranian historical tradition that does not sufficiently recognise the presence of two different subjects—masculine and feminine— and which is not concerned enough with the ethics of relations between subjects. These poems can be analysed in terms of an Irigarayian framework that argues for a woman's ability to establish herself as an independent subject. The Iranian authors/poets started to reform and rethink gender, and their poetry opens doors to Bakhtinian dialogism and eventually Iranian feminism. The article argues, using Irigaray, that it is essential for Iranian women to create a " house of language " , a place in which they can practice living and articulating, so that they can achieve self-enunciation.

Social Science Review

Poetry has always been the noteworthy face of Iran's cultural identity. Persian poets and their poems have reconstructed and revolutionized both the Eastern and Western literary world. Sadly, in a male-dominated Iranian society, female literary talents had been sidelined throughout centuries. Still, there were some iconic female poets who have blended their poetical talents with very powerful mental strength to cut off all the societal limitations, taboos and prohibitions and had left their marks on Persian literature's history forever. But to attain that, they had to come across a long way. As the title indicates, the subject of this article is about the growth of some of those persistent women poets of Iran, with an emphasis on the hardships they have faced and how they overcame through those phases. In short, this article analyses the problems of women poets in the context of the socio-political environment of Iran and discuss the efforts the women poets have to made to b...

Undergraduate course syllabus, 2024

This course is intended to introduce you to classic texts in English translation from the millennium of pre-19th century literature in Persian. You will read Rūmī, Firdawsī, Hāfiz and other famous poets with attention to questions salient to them and to us: how did poetry perpetuate or undercut father-son relations? Why and how did Persian (and Arabic) literatures celebrate their own origins in and as translation? How did the courtly panegyric fuse Islamic and pre-Islamic values, put moral pressure on its addressee and displace the speaker's desire? How can proverbs and wise sayings obscure life decisions rather than clarifying them? Does Rūmī's poetry need its readers to be scholars? What kinds of reading competencies do texts like his assume? Why and how do ghazals eroticize a cruelly distant beloved? How did a ghazal or masnavī relate to prior, present and future ghazals or masnavīs? What kinds of social spaces-the court, the Sufi hospice, the coffee house, the madrasa, the home-did these texts circulate in, assume and help produce? What gender ideals did they assume and prescribe? What genre logics do they obey and disobey? How did Persian literary culture understand emotion and how does this understanding differ from our own?

This dissertation examines the ways in which three female Iranian writers have inverted the patriarchal dynamic of Iranian society by asserting their radically feminine voices through literature. However, it will be revealed how each of the texts in this study also articulate social anxieties about the fluctuating and uncertain roles of women in Iran in the last hundred years. Partly in response to the dogmatic political frameworks of the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic, Forugh Farrokhzad, Azar Nafisi and Marjane Satrapi have respectively articulated a distinctly feminine experience of growing up in Iran. Each text takes on a potent political charge due to its autobiographical overtones, for ‘writing the self’ is a powerful metaphorical act of unveiling in a traditionally veiled society. Herein, this paper joins the vibrant and topical conversation about the place of women in Iran, as well as challenging the patriarchal Western stereotypes that all too often dominate such discourses.

Women Poets Iranica. Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation

Abstract: This paper is an examination of the erotic desires that emerge in annual poetry readings by selected Iranian female poets in the presence of the country's Supreme Leader. Using desire as a conceptual tool I will argue that these poems, especially the highly eroticized ones, open up discursive pathways towards pleasure, creativity and agency in ways that counter the dominant narratives of the “emancipatory agency.” Feminist projects of emancipation generally focus on overt acts of resistance and defiance and overvalue spaces of exile. The annual events, however, are not transgressive, yet the unsatisfiable desire that is staged in these poetry reading sessions generates the impulse toward surpassing the regime’s designs for domination and strict control. By historicizing the complexities of the female poets’ engagement with the literary conventions of Persian poetry and the ideological norms of the Islamic Republic, I will demonstrate the instability of concepts such as “emancipation,” “resistance,” “agency” and “conformity.” The same complexities also warrant questioning the status of exilic space as the paramount locus of quintessentially feminist intervention or authentic literary production.

Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond, ed. Susan Scollay. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 2012

Susan Scollay is an independent scholar and curator specialising in the arts and culture of the Islamic world. Widely published, she is guest co-curator of the exhibition, Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond, a project that developed from her ongoing doctoral research

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International Journal of Persian Literature, 2023

Iraj Mirzā has a reputation for excessive sexual content in his poetic oeuvre. His “forbidden literature,” so to speak, and to quote Paul Sprachman, has suffered unjustly from charges of frivolity, and while vanity and profanity do indeed feature prominently, these allegations disregard the artistic high-mindedness that is ever-present in the prince’s extensive canon. Recent scholarship has attempted to rehabilitate his reputation by highlighting the formalistic aspects of his poetry as well as by emphasizing the striking intricacies of his particular poetic perspective. In this article, I will delineate Iraj’s line of poetic maturity—especially when interlaced with thoroughgoing thoughts of Constitutional Revolution—and will discuss how, juxtaposing the stylistic decorum of classical Persian poetry with interlocution and colloquialism, he could impact the upcoming movement of new poetry (she‘r-e no) in Iran. More emphatically, I will illuminate how Iraj Mirza’s attitude toward wom...