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The Iranian Studies Initiative at UCSB and Farhang Foundation invite you to

Newspaper Poetry and Representative Politics in the Revolutions of 1905-1911

a free live lecture event by Dr. Sam Hodgkin - Yale University

This event is a part of a lecture series on
Iranian Art and Literary Exchange Between Iran, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia in the 20th Century.
This series is co-organized by the Graduate Center for Literary Research, University of California, Santa Barbara and with the support of the Gramian-Emrani Foundation and Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Funds. 

The poetry of the Constitutional period marks ground zero for the modern transformation of Persian poetic production. Mohammad Reza Shafi'i Kadkani has convincingly shown a shift in poets’ conception of artistic representation in his adaptation of M.H. Abrams’ work. Abrams, and to a greater degree, subsequent scholars of Romanticism, have connected transformations in lyric representation with the changing civic experience of voice and political representation in the wake of the French Revolution.

This paper draws on the theorist Frank Ankersmit’s work on the relationship between artistic and political regimes of representation to show how Constitutional Iranian newspaper verse developed new repertories of poetic voice on new claims about the poet’s legitimacy in speaking for broader publics. Further, it contextualizes that transformation in the Iranian poetics of political representation within the broader Turco-Persianate publishing zone which experienced the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions of 1905-1910. Across that zone, the claim of new parliamentary institutions (Duma/Majlis) was contested by revolutionary committees (sovet, cemiyet, anjuman) in public performances and press manifestos, often framed by occasional verse.

About Dr. Sam Hodgkin

Sam Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He has published on the modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His research engages with theories of representation, translation, and world poetics, and with the history of literary institutions. His current book project, entitled “The Nightingales’ Congress: Poetics of the Persianate International,” shows how the Soviet internationalist project of world literature emerged from sustained engagement between leftist writers of West and South Asia and state-sponsored writers of the multinational Soviet East. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, and his articles will appear in upcoming issues of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature Studies.

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