Iranian-American Literary Studies

Email 7:

Ahh! I had just written a whole bunch of stuff and somehow it got deleted. I guess I'll start with my second paragraph.

The way that African-American women writers used Feminism to get their work noticed is being paralled today in Iranian-Americans studies, which has only existed since 2003. In that year, Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was published to wide acclaim. It made Laura Bush's must-read list and was a New York Times Reading Group Pick. Nafisi marketed the book as a women's rights book exposing the injustice of women in Iran, a hot topic in the post-Taliban world. Instead the book is more of a history of revolutionary Iran (honestly, the only one of its kind in its very honest portrayal of what went down) and the role of English literature in shaping the lives of non-English native speakers...with the obligatory discussion of women's rights. Americans loved it and a year later our own Dr. Hopkins, Chair of the SMU History Dept, was proud to tell me that he had added it to the history reading syllabus.

The book cracked open a previously unexplored topic, and suddenly books about Iranian women flooded the shelves. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (a graphic novel that is being taught in ENGL 2327 next term) and its 2 sequels, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (which describes the Iranian-Jewish experience), and Afschineh Latifi's Even After All this Time all described Iranian women who had lived in Iran during the revolution and had to leave to come to America and were all published within a year after Nafisi's book. The group that was still silent was Iranian-Americans, the children of the aforementioned generation, people like me. We got our turn with 2004's "Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America" by Firoozeh Dumas, which I first heard about on NPR the day it came out. It was the first good news I had heard about Iran on NPR. 2005's Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni was much more serious and is the most accurate reflection of the Iranian-American experience I've ever read, especially since I was in Iran the same year she went: 1997. I think in the coming years we will hear much more from this generation as they gain the courage these women have. And maybe the guys will learn from the girls and speak up. This will only happen once Iranian-American studies jumps out from under the umbrella of Feminism and stands on its own just like African-American studies did.

Marxista

Email 6:

One thing that bothers me about Marxism is the idea that consciousness comes from modes of production and that production is what distinguishes man from beast. I don't believe this to be true. There are plenty of animals that also build and produce things. Par example, bees make honey in a very systematic division of labor. There are the bees that hunt down the flowers, the ones that grab the nectar, the ones that collect it, etc. The actual honey-making process is still a bit of a mystery, but that just shows how complex their production is. Beavers build dams, sometimes highly convoluted dams. Some primates can make tools and silk worms and spiders spin fibers into fabric. So we're not that unique in our ability to make things.

We are unique in our ability to reflect on the world around us and categorize it. I completely agree with the idea of a false consciousness and seeing life solely through the lens of ideology. I don't believe that all people think this way, but there are plenty who do. The key to overcoming the effects of ideology, however, is through education, not a classless society. I cannot tell you how many misconceptions there are about Islam and the Middle East. When people find out where I'm from, they ask all sorts of questions like, "Is your dad oppressive? Why don't you wear a scarf on your head? Do you believe in the Bible? Do you support terrorism?" These are questions out of ignorance that come from an ideology that doesn't include people like me. It isn't that these people are bad or that they think they're better than me. If we lived in a society where we were the same class (whatever that means), I don't think that these questions would necessarily go away. I think through education and teaching each other in order to understand one another, we can see how great it is that we are all so unique. As a child, I escaped a country that tried to make all women the same in order to come to a country where I was free to be myself. Marxism, paradoxically, has an ideology of its own which excludes individuality. As Americans, we know that this is a very high price to pay in the name of classlessness. If our own immune system knows to recognize non-self antigens, our minds should be free for us to know and express ourselves.

Badass?

Rash --> Mono?

I broke out in a terrible rash yesterday! From 7 am to 2pm my entire body was covered with itchy red pox-like dots. It was awful. I figured that it was an allergic reaction to the Amoxicillin. So I called my cousin and she told me to come over and check it out. When I did, she looked at my arms and was like, yup that's a drug rash. She called some other doctors to check if she should send me to the emergency room in case of anaphylaxis. Thankfully, they said it wasn't necessary since I've been taking the Amoxicillin for 8 days and the rash only started that day. So she gave me a cortisone shot and a script for Prednisone and told me to take Benadryl and Zantac 75. So I have been medicating and itching.

Today I came to work and told one of the doctors about this. He said that this was a classic sign that I had mono. He pulled mono up on the computer and, sure enough, a symptom of mono is that when the patient takes antibiotics, she breaks out in a rash. This is not an allergic response because later in life the patient is not allergic to the same antibiotic. The mono would explain why I've been so tired, but I thought that I was tired from the drugs I've been taking.

This is so crazy. I have no idea what's wrong with me. Everyday there's a new problem and I'm just so frustrated with all of this. I can barely study with all the pain and discomfort these diseases have been giving me. The doctor today told me to rest and relax, but how can I? I have to work 3 times a week and go to school everyday. There's no way around it. So tired now...must sleep...

Which Degrassi Guy Should You Date?

Yay, I got Craig! He's dreamy...

You Should Date: Craig

				Craig is troubled. And high maintenance. And tends to be clueless about other people's feelings. Oh, and he has a little problem with monogamy. But hey: he plays the guitar and looks good in a leather jacket. These are the trade-offs we make in life. Have fun! Click here to check out Craig's video timeline 20% of the people who tooks this quiz got the same evaluation.

Strep

So from last Wednesday (like in October) I had this sore throat. Two days later I asked one of docs at work to take a look at it cuz I noticed that my throat was white. He said it was mucus and no big deal. So I toughed it out through the weekend. By Monday, it had gotten really bad and I felt like I couldn't eat anything from the pain and my voice was starting to go. I told that same doc that I hadn't gotten better, and he said that I should take a decongestant cuz it sounded like I had a cold. By Wednesday I had dealt with too many sleepless nights and too much pain, so I asked a different doc at work to look at it. She said I had a huge infection with a risk of abscess and that she would talk to our head doc about getting me a sample of antibiotic. When he looked at it, he said that I did need the antibiotic, but that it was his policy to not treat his employees. So I had to go to someone else. Then I remembered that my cousin's office (she's an MD) was in the same hospital, so I called the hospital directory and got her number. She said I could come right over and when I did she said that my infection was pretty nasty and wrote me a script for Amoxicillin. She said that if I didn't feel better w/i 48 hours I should call her. Well, I'm happy to report that it has been over 48 hrs, and I feel a lot better. I have some fatigue from the antibiotic, but other than that I am healing.

Jane Eyre

Email 5:

I've always preferred Jane Austen's realism to the supernatural darkness of Bronte novels (both sisters). I just don't get why the ending could be considered a happy one. Jane, who has reached the sole possibility of female empowerment through her inheritance, throws away all of the possibilities that that inheritance presents to marry herself to a freak with a castrated arm. I mean seriously! This sooo would not happen. Part of why Jane is happy to be with Rochester is because she's so plain and has nothing to offer and is totally flattered that this rich, charming guy is noticing her. She hasn't been involved with any man before, so this is quite thrilling for her. The second guy she's with seems okay to marry, except he's weird, and she would have married him if she didn't know that she could have done better (cuz she was able to catch Rochester).

But a woman with money is in a unique position to actually have a choice as to who to marry, and Jane has the opportunity to see the world and find the right man for her. This man cannot be the maimed Rochester. There's just no way. Not the guy to made his first wife crazy and then stuck her in an attic. Not the guy who dresses up like a gypsy. Not the guy who has no problem being a bigamist. There has got to be a better man in England! And now she has a chance to find that man because she has that money. It's just like Jude the Obscure and how he can't find the right woman, he just meets the two and thinks he has to choose. At least in Jane Austen the right guy is there somewhere, you just have to figure out which one he is. I'd take a Darcy over a Rochester any old day.

Lacan's "The Mirror Stage"

Email 6:

Lacon begins his essay with a definition of the “mirror stage”. This is the stage of childhood development when the child is first able to recognize his own image in the mirror, even though the child’s brain is no more developed than a chimp’s brain. The chimp, however, quickly tires of his reflection, while the human child sees the mirror as a continuous interacting stimulus. It is through this special stimulus that the child begins identification and the development of the self. The reflection of the child in the mirror serves as an example of Gestalt, the concept that objects embody certain qualities of the viewer.

Lacon claims that the function of the mirror-stage is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality – the same function that all images serve. The mirror is the reflection of the self just as much as art is a reflection of the artist and his world. During the mirror stage, the child begins to see himself as a subject and object simultaneously, a concept similar to the “reflexive” part of speech. Thus the child sees not only himself in the mirror, but also the way that others see him. The mirror begins his initiation into the social world, with all of the self-consciousness and insecurities that come with it. His word, méconnaissance, cleverly expresses self-knowledge as it literally translates as “knowing me.” While the mirror stage may seem idealistically revelatory in this regard, it may also be the beginning of psychopathology. No matter how much this child will want to know himself, he cannot completely do that. And suppose, years later, the child sees something about himself that he does not like. This leads to self-loathing and a desire to change himself into something he can never be in order to satisfy others or himself.

Lacon’s final statement is a quite poignant comment on the limits of psychoanalysis, as well as all other clinical practices. As clinicians, we can help our patient know himself and his disease, but we cannot go back in time to correct it. We can only perform an intervention at the primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. Just as scar tissue remains in the body after medical procedures, the mind also remains scarred after intervention. The best that we can hope to do as clinical psychologists/psychiatrists is to expose the disorder to the patient so that he may come to understand it and cope with it. The disorder will not go away; it is naïve to think that it will. Psych disorders are preventable precisely because their origins can be traced. But this can only be done through the benefit of hindsight, and there is no guarantee that if a different path had been taken the disorder would not have occurred anyway or that a different psychopathology would have emerged altogether.

Deconstructionism

Email 4:

To me, deconstruction really drives to the meat of literary criticism: the identification of critical problems and the resolution of them. Without binaries, we would not see the aspects of a literary work that do not fit into them. And aren't those anomalies what we as literary critics are most interested in? It's so interesting how the structuralist notion of binaries is portrayed as an inherent part of Western culture, while the deconstructionist idea of anomalies is painted as something often only an intellectual can see. Deconstructionism encourages the mind to push the envelope and keep looking at the text. When the lay-reader reads a text, he is only understanding it at plot level. But when we as trained literary critics read it, we find that certain aspects of the text nag at us, and that is the time when deconstruction can provide us with guidance as to how to treat textual anomalies.

Who Are You From Instant Star?

Tommy

				Lord knows you'll pay if you call him Little Tommy Q to his face, because with his boy band past firmly behind him, Tommy demands respect from everyone around him -- without throwing tantrums about it. While he's a little more jaded than Jude (as in realistic about just how much crap one has to put up with to keep moving forward in the music industry), he's still confident (uh, VERY confident) in his own decisions, directions, and tastes. 29% of the people who tooks this quiz got the same evaluation.

How I Used Biochemistry to Interpret Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

This is an email I privately sent another English prof, that he promptly forwarded to the rest of the class.

I had an epiphany of what rhymes with dulcimer...multimer! OK, so the rhyming dictionary says that there are no perfect rhymes for the word, but multimer sounds close, as do its derivatives: homomultimer and heteromultimer. So what is a multimer, you ask? It is a protein with more than one peptide chain. A homomultimer has multiples of the same kind of chain, while a heteromultimer has different kind of chains - Hemoglobin is made of 2 alpha helices and 2 beta sheets, thus it is a heteromultimer. My fall break Tuesday was spent making up a biochemistry exam over this material because I missed it due to my interview, which went extremely well, and I thank you for your constant support in my medical school journey.

Could Coleridge have used the word multimer to rhyme with dulcimer? The answer is a resounding no. Alpha helices and beta sheets were not discovered until the 1950s by the great Linus Pauling, therefore combinations of them to create secondary protein structures would not have been known nor named in 1798. But the description of the intricacies of Kubla Khan's infrastructure does sound awfully close to the intricacies of protein structure, however unintentional that may be. The Alph river sounds like an alpha helix to me, and alpha helices often shoot up in the middle of a large protein for the purpose of protein signalling. Maybe C.P. Snow would appreciate my analysis, but perhaps I should not mix disciplines so. Just thought I would share my thoughts.

I Even Worked a Med School Rant in Literary Theory!

Email Five

I'm with William on this one. In class we talked about how Heidegger's stages of human being parallel the struggle of students. I can totally relate. In high school, I worked really hard to make perfect scores on my AP exams. Then in college I worked really hard to make A's and do well on the MCAT so that I could go to medical school. This summer I worked really hard on my med school applications, and all the money I made working really hard at the hospital went to my applications (around $3000). Now I have my first med school interview this Friday at UT Houston, and I have tons of pressure to perform well there as well. Then once I get into med school there will be boards (a series of three licensing examinations) and the science classes of the first two years, and then after med school there's residency with 48 hour shifts and call nights. It seems like it will be forever until I'm an actual doctor who can just chill.

The reason I am going through all of these obstacles is so that I can find something like what Heidegger calls "forfeiture," what we Persians call "aramesh." I want that moment when I can rest on my laurels and bask in the glory of success and achievement instead of this constant state of anxiety about my future and if I'm really ever going to make it. Yes, Herr Heidegger, I do agree that creating meaning out of my life before I am dead is a fantastic motivating factor, but so is the chance to relax and not have to work so hard. I don't want to work myself into the grave! But that seems to be exactly what Heidegger says I am doing. Maybe he's right, but that's certainly not my intention.

UT Houston Interview

My interview was great yesterday! I got to see the whole campus, and meet med students and professors. The professors and administration really seem to care about their students, and the environment is not competitive, which is such a relief. It's nice to be around people who aren't trying to stab you in the back. My interviewers were both women and very nice. They never mentioned my taking courses at other schools or anything. My second interviewer never mentioned grades at all. It was a very exciting day in a fun city. I like this school a lot, and I hope that I'll hear some good news February 1, just in time for my birthday.

Hafez Poem

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly
Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet"

Email 4:

"The Figure in the Carpet" traces a literary critic’s journey to discover the ultimate truth of author Hugh Vereker’s work. The story portrays the author as the ultimate source of authority, without whom all truth is lost. The protagonist is a fan of Vereker and enjoys his work very much. Notably, that enjoyment ends once the author reveals that all of his works have a hidden unifying message. Regarding reading for the purpose of literary criticism, the protagonist says, "My new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking...I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed...Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less...I had no knowledge - nobody had any." Sadly, the protagonist’s plight reveals reading for literary criticism can take the fun out of reading.

If this is so, then why do George Corvick and Gwendolen Erme find so much enjoyment in Vereker’s works once they start reading them critically? The key is in the different ways Corvick and the protagonist pursue Vereker’s truth. The protagonist is not willing to work for the truth; instead he leeches off of the ideas of others. Like the student who solely reads Cliffs Notes, he just wants someone to tell him what it all means. Corvick, however, works diligently with Gwendolen to find the truth behind the texts. While his initial pursuit of the truth is communal, it is not until he is alone in India that he undergoes the Wordsworthian enlightenment and sees the truth before him. Much like the author’s inspiration, truth strikes the critic when he least suspects it.

"The Figure in the Carpet" presents an interesting contrast to Barthes’s "Death of the Author." While Vereker is alive, the protagonist has some hope of finding the truth. But with the death of this author and all those who verified their critiques with him, all hope for finding the truth is lost. It appears that Miss Poyle spoke the truest words of all: "Nobody sees anything!" Nobody, that is, except for the author. The now-deceased author "was still there to be honoured by what might be done - he was no longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the authority?" The story does not allow for the possibility that literary truth can be found without the author’s verification. If this is true, then the practice of modern literary criticism is invalid. The story instead seems to point toward the futility of relying on authorial intent to reveal the truth. The text and its truth will remain long after the author is gone. Why should they die with him?

Remains of Dante's last inferno

Ashes from the corpse of Italy's greatest poet, Dante Alighieri, were found lying in a bag on a Florence library shelf yesterday

By Reuters, Florence
Tuesday July 20, 1999
The Guardian

Ashes from the corpse of Italy's greatest poet, Dante Alighieri, were found lying in a bag on a Florence library shelf yesterday.

Two employees at the national central library in Florence stumbled across the remains by chance while searching in the rare manuscripts department.

'They came across an envelope on one of the shelves on the second floor,' the library's director, Antonia Ida Fontana, said. 'They opened it and found a bag of ashes along with documents which identify them as those of Dante.'

Dante, whose Paradise, Purgatory and Hell were among the most influential texts of medieval Europe, was born in Florence in 1265 and banished for his political views in 1302. He died in bitter exile in Ravenna in 1321.

On the 600th anniversary of his birth in 1865 scientists opened his tomb and donated a few of his ashes to the Florence library, then based in the Uffizi gallery.

The relics were displayed in Florence in 1929 but went missing, possibly when the library moved in 1935.

'We have been without these ashes for 70 years,' Ms Fontana said. 'It's a very emotional find for us. It's the only relic of Dante we have in Florence, which was always such a bitter-sweet city for him.'

Email Three

I find it ironic that in order for us to understand Barthes's "The Death of the Author," Dr. Schwartz had to "resurrect" the author and talk about 1968 and the Paris protests. She did this so that we could get a feel for the environment that produced such rebellious language. Obviously, 35 years after Barthes's publication, we still have not had the heart to murder our authors. We have to know the circumstances of works in order to analyze them. It can be something as simple as a general time (Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan England) or as specific as motivations (The Communist Manifesto was a pamphlet specifically written for and given to workers). There needs to be some kind of context. I agree that often we look at authors as a categorization. Dr. Schwartz described Barthes as one of many 1968 Parisian writers who wrote with similar inflammatory language. If she hadn't said that, Barthes would have looked like someone making a mountain out of a molehill, but in the context of intellectual uprising, his language makes sense. She didn't need to tell us his biography or what he had for breakfast the day that he wrote "The Death of the Author." We only need a general context, and that's fine by me.

Regarding Rotman, I found the book to be very interesting, although I questioned some of his statements. He calls the new number system "Hindu" numerals. This is an inaccurate label because Hindu is the adjective form of Hinduism. There is nothing religious about these numbers, as the name implies. If he meant that they were Indian, he could have said "Hindi," although even that label is a little off. Zero was not invented in India; it was invented in Sumer. But if we want to play the "Columbus discovered America" game, then, all right, it was invented in India. Mathematicians and scientists (and almost anyone else I can think of) calls these numbers "Arabic numerals" because the Europeans learned about them from Arab traders. There is a running joke among Arabs that goes, "Everyone uses Arabic numerals...except Arabs." This is true: Arabs, Persians, and Indians all use different numerals albeit the same method of notation. Visit this website to see how I learned to write numbers: http://students.washington.edu/irina/persianword/numbers.htm. I think we could do a whole class on the semiotics of numbers, but then again, I hate math. Here's another flaw I find with Rotman: the origin of the word "cypher." OK, so the Rot man says that "zero" came from "cypher" without explaining how such a big leap took place; fine, I'll live with that. But then he says, "the etymology of the word zero, via 'cypher' from the Hindu sunya (= void)." OK, Mr. Rotman, I have to stop you there. Again, you used "Hindu," a word that refers to religion. Are you trying to make "void" sound mystical? Sunya comes from Sanskrit, the origin of all Indo-European languages, including Persian and English (not Arabic or Hebrew, which are both Semitic languages). The word "cypher" actually comes from the Persian word "sefr," which means zero and cypher (sound it out, gang, and you'll see how it makes perfect sense). How does this connect to Indians? Persian was the court language of India, the unifying language like Hindi is today. Persian was the trade language that was used with the Arabs (remember your geography, the Arab traders had to cross Persia via the Silk Road to get to India). The word "sefr" is today used by both Persians and Arabs to refer to zero, in fact it's the only name for a number that we have in common. It's okay with me that the Webster dictionary calls it an Arabic word; that's who the Europeans learned it from. I have this feeling that Rotman is British...I won't get into why, but it would help if this author hadn't killed himself by not supplying an "About the Author" page. He must have read Barthes.

Structuralism

Email 2:

While I believe that Angela articulated her argument well, I have to disagree with her on Structuralism's validity. I think that Structuralism gives voice to a phenomenon that I have encountered many times when reading a text: I read something, and it reminds me of something else you've read. This becomes Structuralism when the text is meant to point to that "something else."

For example, last semester I took Later Victorian Lit and studied the poems of Dante Rossetti. Rossetti's poems often have a common theme of the continuum of time and refers forwards and backwards to different poems in the time frame of a particular poetic situation. While my professor taught this theme, he drew a diagram on the board of an X with two lines pointing horizontally out of either side. At the time, I was also taking Early Italian Humanism taught in the Italian department and had just studied how Italians view Rome as the Eternal City because the Empire to them has never fallen; it has just been moved. Empires, that is, are always the same just moving from different locations: Persian to Egyptian to Greek to Roman to Byzantine to Holy Roman, ie Christendom. Therefore, Italians view history as being on a continuum where the past points to the future and the future points to the past per the theological study of typology.

Obviously, this view of history is very much engrained in Italians and Italian Humanist scholarship. Rossetti's father was a Dante Alighieri scholar (he loved Dante so much that he named his son after him) who moved from Italy to England. Rossetti's father was an Italian and a scholar and would have raised his son in a similar fashion with a similar literary background. In fact, the diagram of the X with two arrows that my English prof drew was the exact same diagram that my Italian prof had drawn! Thus, Rossetti's poem and it's theme were playing on an Italian literary and historical tradition of viewing time/history as a continuum where previous events are prefigurations of future events. I found further evidence of Rossetti's Italian Humanist scholarship by reading his sonnet sequence, which takes almost verbatim elements of Petrarch's Canzoniere, as does his sister Christina Rossetti's sonnet sequence. Hers is more interesting because it is a sequence told from the perspective of Laura and Beatrice, the object of Petrarch and Dante's sonnets, respectively.

OK, so what does this have to do with Structuralism? My professor had little to no awareness of the Italian literary tradition. When I explained the tradition to him, he was very happy to learn about it because it provided a label for the unity and common themes of Rossetti's poetry that he had not been quite able to put his finger on. Without this knowledge of other works, he lacked a basic understanding of Rossetti's purpose in writing the poems and the deliciousness of his application of Italian ideals to English poetry. Rossetti was Italian-English, and he was able to express his own duality by combining the two sides of himself intellectually and aesthetically in his painting and poetry. If we are not aware of the tradition behind his works, we cannot fully appreciate Rossetti's poetry. We are missing a vital piece of information that Structuralism encourages us to pursue. Instead of staying closed-minded and focusing solely on the one poem, we can look at it as a part of an entire literary tradition that goes back centuries. This is crucial to fully appreciating a work from every angle. This form of literary criticism is not a "dissection" that kills the work. It is instead a vivisection that allows us to see the poem's beating heart and read it's genetic code to see where it came from and where it is going. We do not "murder to dissect" the poem; we instead use Structuralism to "see into the life of things."

Literary Canon

I'm required to send weekly emails to my literary theory class, so I thought that I would post them here as well so that y'all could get a feel for what I do as an English major.

Email 1:

I remember the first time I asked the question, "What is Literature?" I was sitting in Dr. Bozorth's British Authors I class after we had just read Addison and Steele's essays and before we could even begin the class discussion, I said, "Dr. Bozorth, these essays do not seem like literature to me. These are just magazine articles. Shouldn't we be spending more of our time reading great poetry instead of the equivalent of our Vanity Fair magazine?" He then said, "Class, this is a great opportunity to discuss 'What is Literature?' The answer is that if it is in the Norton Anthology it is Literature, otherwise it is not. Maryam, the essays are in the Norton Anthology, so they are Literature." He was (sort of) joking of course, but I think what he said had great merit. A literary work is only called Literature if it has been labeled as such. Holy Semiotics, Batman!

This brings us to the subject of the "Literary Canon" and the exclusion of works deemed not worthy. For example, the obsession with "Orientalism," a term which actually referred to Persian, not East Asian, poetry, was prevalent in Victorian-Era Europe, particularly in England and Germany. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward Fitzgerald was the reason that T.S. Eliot became a poet (it's true; Google it!) and outsold many the works in the traditional canon. Lord Tennyson began his literary career translating Persian poetry at Oxford and produced great poems inspired by Persian poetry, such as "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and his "In Memoriam" owes much to Rumi's poetry about Shams. Matthew Arnold’s "Sohrab and Rustum" published in 1853 further demonstrates the influence of Persian poetry. The list goes on and on. However, "Orientalist" poetry and traditional Persian poetry are not considered part of the literary canon. There is no mention of them in the Norton Anthology even though this was a major phase of British and World literature and is studied very deeply in England (my mother earned her A levels in Persian literature after studying with an Oxford professor). It seems that politics, or as Eagleton says, "ideology" has pushed crucial and valid influences like Persian poetry by the wayside in order to make room for whatever "Literature" fits the mold of the Powers That Be. In fact, Cecil Lang's second edition of his anthology The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle replaces Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Swinburne's "The Leper" and "Anactoria" to "show a new aspect of Swinburne not discussed previously." Mr. Lang has little regard for showing English students an aspect of British literature not discussed previously.

We have no Persian lit courses at SMU, which is sad considering how large the Persian studies department is at the University of Texas and Ivy League colleges. I encourage you all, as students and scholars of Literature, to indulge yourself with the riches to be found in Persian poetry, even if it's not part of the canon:

from Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights"

Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressèd with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone.

(lines 133-40)

Tennyson's "Recollections of the Arabian Nights"

Then stole I up, and trancedly
Gazed on the Persian girl alone,
Serene with argent-lidded eyes
Amorous, and lashes like to rays
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl
Tressèd with redolent ebony,
In many a dark delicious curl,
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone.

(lines 133-40)