عنوان

Speaking Laterally: Transnational Poetics and the Rise of Modern Arabic and Persian Poetry in Iraq and Iran

Number

TL49415

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Speaking Laterally: Transnational Poetics and the Rise of Modern Arabic and Persian Poetry in Iraq and Iran

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Thomas Levi Thompson

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Gana, Nouri

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of California, Los Angeles

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

289

Text of Note

Committee members: Cooperson, Michael D.; Ingenito, Domenico A.; Rahimieh, Nasrin

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-82691-3

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Discipline of degree

Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Body granting the degree

University of California, Los Angeles

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This dissertation critically investigates the transnational movements that shaped the making of modernist poetry in Iraq and Iran. Following a brief introduction to the project's historical and critical framework, the first chapter provides the dissertation's theoretical foundation. It thus engages conversations about literary commitment, the transnational dimension of literary development, and world literature to situate these two poetries as integral to the broader modernist movement. Chapter Two examines the poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj, the founder of Persian modernist poetry, and the foundational position of premodern Arabic prosody for Persian poetic form. It highlights how Nīmā's innovations on Arabic prosody presage the birth of the Iraqi free verse movement. Chapter Three moves on to discuss the work of Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, addressing how his pioneering project of poetic modernism changed in light of his political alignments. It demonstrates how his experience of the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh in Iran forced him to reconsider his Communist affiliations and discerns the effects his changing political outlook had on how he presented his poetry for posterity. Ahmad Shāmlū and Furūgh Farrukhzād, two poets who took up Nīmā's modernist vision in Iran, are the subjects of Chapter Four, which tackles their continued development of Arabic prosody in Persian and ultimate break with the formal constraints Nīmā had continued to adhere to. It also considers Shāmlū's and Farrukhzād's contrasting poetics of death in terms of their transnational poetic engagements. The final chapter turns to examine the Iraqi poet 'Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī's poetics of revolution-which combines existentialism, Sufism, and political commitment-to show how al-Bayātī's use of the poetic masks of 'Umar al-Khayyām and the martyred Sufi Mansūr al-Hallāj works in transnational dialog with the Persian poetic and mystical traditions. By taking the Arabic modernist tradition as its focal point and putting Arabic poetry in conversation with modernist poetry in Persian, this study sheds light on how modernism functions as a planetary movement and calls for a reconsideration of current models for transnational literary analysis, reorienting modernist studies away from vertical approaches to lateral ones that consider minor modernist traditions on their own terms.

Comparative literature; Prosody; Persian language; Poetry; Arabic language; Literary criticism; Vision; Politics; Poetics; Near Eastern studies; Literature; Conversation

Subject Term

Language, literature and linguistics;Social sciences;Arabic;Modernism;Near east;Persian;Poetry;Transnationalism

Mayer, Linda Diekman

Gana, Nouri

Subdivision

Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

University of California, Los Angeles

Call Number

1914918730; 10286571

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y