Forugh Farrokhzad, Modernity and Madness

Dr. Leila Rahimi Bahmany is a research fellow and lecturer of the Persian language at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Iranian women’s literature and feminist literary theories are her main fields of research. She has authored several book chapters and encyclopedia articles on Persian literature. Her book, Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation: Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath was the Latifeh Yarshater Award recipient in 2016. She is currently working on her second monograph dealing with the life and literary works of an Iranian writer Simin Daneshvar.

This presentation will focus on Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetics of modernity. It will delineate the characteristic features of literary modernity which place Farrokhzad among the modernist poets of the 20th century. Among these modernist features is the topic of female madness.