Sassan Tabatabai publishes collection of poetry, “Uzunburun”
Sassan Tabatabai publishes a collection of poetry entitled “Uzunburun.” Rosanna Warren writes, “Sassan Tabatabai has composed a book of delicate mourning, exile, and love. Ancient Persia and modern Iran harmonize in his vision, as do the ancient poems of Rudaki and Rumi and the contemporary poems of Kadkani in Tabatabai’s translations. Sensuous, rueful and clear, these […]
Sassan Tabatabai’s poem “Qazal” featured in Clarion 15
Sassan Tabatabai’s poem “Qazal” — from his forthcoming poetry collection “Uzunburun” — will be featured in the Fall 2011 issue of Clarion literary magazine. Read “Qazal” here.
Professor Margaret Litvin publishes book, “Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost”
For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: their times “out of joint,” their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet’s Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare’s play developed into a musical with a happy ending in […]
Professor Keith Vincent’s translation of Shiro Hamao’s “The Devil’s Disciple” published
While Shimaura Eizo sits in jail awaiting trial for the murder of a beautiful young woman, his erstwhile lover and initiator into a sinister, restless existence has risen in the ranks of the legal profession and is now the prosecutor on the case. Spinning a complex web of events and influences in this chilling murder […]
Professor Wiebke Denecke’s book “The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi” published
The importance of the rich corpus of “Masters Literature” that developed in China since the fifth century B.C.E. has long been recognized. But just what are these texts? Scholars have often approached them as philosophy, but these writings have also been studied as literature, history, and anthropological, religious, and paleographic records. How should we translate […]
Professor Peter Schwartz’s book “After Jena” published
After Jena is the first scholarly work in English to set Goethe’s influential and controversial novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) squarely within the turbulent time in which it was written. Peter J. Schwartz explores the era of rapid modernization following Prussia’s defeat at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt (1806) — a battle that permitted Napoleon to […]
Professor Keith Vincent publishes co-edited volume
How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki’s canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan’s infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we […]
Professor Abigail Gillman publishes “Viennese Jewish Modernism”
In Viennese Jewish Modernism, Abigail Gillman challenges the conventional understanding of modernism as simply a break from tradition. Until recently, the study of Jewish modernism has centered on questions of Jewish and non-Jewish identity, generally ignoring the role Judaism played in the formulation of European modernism as a whole. By focusing on the works of […]
Abigail Gillman. Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann
From Penn State University Press, forthcoming 2009. Viennese Jewish Modernism brings together three cultural phenomena usually described separately: the breakdown of traditional modes of transmitting the past to the present; the development of European modernism; and the remarkable Jewish contribution to Viennese culture in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The crucible within which […]
Peter J. Schwartz. After Jena: Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and the End of the Old Regime
After Jena is the first scholarly work in English to set Goethe’s influential and controversial novel Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) squarely within the turbulent time in which it was written. Adducing evidence from many spheres and applying the tools of several disciplines, Peter J. Schwartz shows how Elective Affinities reflects changes in marriage, property […]