I’m excited to be giving this upcoming talk!
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON IRANIAN STUDIES
Friday November 9, 2018
Faculty House, 5:00-8:00 pm
Salvation Through Sin: How a Queen Rewrote the Rules of Romance
Cameron Cross (University of Michigan)
Dr. Cameron Cross is an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East within the temporal parameter of Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period (ca. 500–1500 CE).
This talk offers a theoretical reappraisal of the New Persian romance, a genre that experienced a sudden and dynamic efflorescence in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century. In revisiting the question of genre (and “romance” as a viable term) in the Persian context, I hope to reorient our account of this moment in time, from a vertical axis of national literary history to a horizontal view situating these texts within a broad system of literary habits and practices that extended from Ghazni to Paris (and likely beyond). As an example of this approach, I offer the case of Vis & Râmin, a story that demonstrates a clear awareness of this intertextual tradition, which had been developed and circulated in languages like Greek, Latin, and Arabic (and thence into Persian, Georgian, and the European vernaculars) over the longue durée of the first millennium CE. One reason for the poem’s significance is not simply that it knows this tradition, but indeed takes the embedded metaphysics, politics, and ethics of the romance genre as its main object of study. By manipulating romantic conventions into the paradox that its heroine must choose adultery to prove her virtue, Vis & Râmin probes the coherence of its own world-view, opening vistas of individual choice and moral ambivalence hitherto unexplored in romance literature—Persian or otherwise.