Re-Introducing the Classics: Teaching Classical Persian through the Works of Sa’di

About the Talk: For centuries, the Bustan and Golestan of Sa’di Shirāzi provided new learners of Persian with a foundation in grammar and vocabulary, as well as a model of literary elegance and good style for them to emulate. In this paper, we discuss a new project aimed at retrieving the pedagogical dimension of Sa’di’s work for contemporary students of Persian. It is usually the case that students embarking on the study of classical Persian have a good base of modern vocabulary and a solid grounding in modern standards of grammar: the challenges they are most likely to encounter, then, are (a) jumping into a very different lexicon, replete with new vocabulary and even familiar words with unfamiliar meanings, and (b) uses of grammar and syntax that are not common in modern Persian, or even contradict the rules they were taught. Guided by the principle of scaffolded practice, this project proposes to utilize modern stylometric and quantitative methods to create a guided introduction to classical Persian through the works of Sa’di. Starting with short sentences and verses that illustrate the most common grammatical features of pre-modern style, arranged in an order that reiterates the most commonly used words in the corpus, the program aims to equip students with the fundamentals they need not only to read through longer sections of Sa’di with much more confidence, but to jump into any pre-modern work. If successful, this method could be utilized to build similar primers into the distinctive idioms of other major writers and periods, such as the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi, the Khamsa of Nezāmi, the Masnavi of Rumi, or the Bahāristān of Jāmi.

About the Speakers: Cameron Cross is Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include the comparative study of medieval narrative and fictionality, practices of adaptation and performance, and the theoretical prisms of gender, animal, and monster studies.

Matthew Thomas Miller is Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and affiliate faculty of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature programs. His research focuses on Persian literature, Sufism, the history of affect/emotion in the Islamicate world, digital humanities, and literary cultures of Middle Eastern revolutionary movements.