The Persianate Studies Workshop at the University of Michigan is pleased to host a virtual writing workshop with Dr. Jane Mikkelson, who will be presenting a paper titled: “Mapping the Grounds of Verse: A Geopolitical Turn in Early Modern Persian Literary Criticism”. The event will take place on Zoom from 5:00-7 pm (EST) on Monday, February 22, 2021.
This paper is an article in progress in which Mikkelson considers Persian lyric style and its criticism in the tazkere tradition. Recent scholarship on style and periodization in early modern Persian literature focuses in particular on the validity of designations such as “Indian style” (sabk-e hendī) and “Speaking Anew” (tāze-gūyī); geographically inflected ways of talking about literary style are often characterized as unhelpfully modern, anachronistic, even deleterious to our understanding of the premodern Persian canon. This essay undertakes to reorient some of the problems and virtues associated with modern approaches to Persian lyric style by turning to premodern literary-critical thought. Analysis of four early modern tazkeres (biographical compendia) composed both by Indian authors (Āzād Belgrāmī and Sher ʿAlī Khān Lodī) and by Iranians (Ṭāher Naṣrābādī and ʿAbd al-Nabī Fakhr al-Zamānī Qazvīnī) sheds new light on how early modern critics and poets themselves handle issues of style, geography, canonicity, terminology, and periodization. Remarkably, these tazkeres bear witness to a “geopolitical turn” in the literary critical tradition, a shift that is explicitly acknowledged by early modern critics themselves.
Dr. Mikkelson received a joint PhD in 2019 from the University of Chicago in South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and her current book project, Steadfast Imagining, examines practices of lyric meditation in the early modern Persianate world, contextualizing these practices alongside premodern theories of literature and of the imagination. Her publications and ongoing research focus on comparative literature, Persian literature and Islamic thought, translation, theories of literature, and projects that bridge the studies of early modern Islamic, South Asian, and European literary and religious cultures.
Please RSVP to Shahla Farghadani at (sfarghad@umich.edu) for a Zoom link and a copy of Mikkelson’s paper.