The Ghazal: The Origins, Evolution, and Migration of a World Poetic Genre

This course will explore the origins, evolution, and migration of one of the world's great poetic genres, the ghazal (short lyric poem, usually on love). Starting with a discussion of the origins of the genre in the late pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods in Arabic and Persian, the course will then move to an examination of the evolution of the genre in the early medieval Islamic period in those languages, and the subsequent emergence of the ghazal in the related literatures of Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. We will then consider European translations of selected Persian ghazals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the effect of these translations on contemporary European poetry, and the migration of the genre into English in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The course will end with close reading of ghazals written in English by diasporic poets of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent writing in the US and the UK.