The Persianate Studies Workshop at the University of Michigan is pleased to host a virtual writing workshop with Alexandra Hoffmann, who will be presenting a paper titled: “Love, Madness, and Masculinities in Neẓāmi’s Layli o Majnun“. The event will take place on Monday, March 22, 5:00 – 7:00 pm(EST).
This paper is an excerpt of a chapter from Hoffmann’s dissertation “Strong Warriors, Liminal Lovers, and Beardless Men: Male bodies and Masculinities in Pre-modern Persian Literature.” The chapter presents Neẓāmi’s Layli o Majnun as deeply informed by discourses on love and lovesickness, in part inherited from its ʿAbbāsid sources. She aims to re-evaluate readings of Neẓāmi’s Majnun that have either considered him a courtly failure or a mystical hero, and argues that the poem’s inherent polyphony creates a complex system of masculinities. The identities, values, and gender performances of other men situate Majnun in an uneasy place within a framework of masculinities that are more normative – at least at first sight. Neẓāmi thus presents Majnun as part of a polyphonic whole, inherent with tensions that the reader must bear to leave unresolved.
Alexandra Hoffmann is a PhD candidate in Persian Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include masculinities, corporeality, history of emotions, mirrors for princes, and traveling tales in pre-modern Persian literature. She has published on the twelfth century Sindbād-nāmeh and its Medieval European adaptations as The Seven Wise Masters (of Rome).
Please RSVP to Shahla Farghadani at (sfarghad@umich.edu) for a Zoom link and a copy of Hoffman’s paper.