Date:
Friday, October 13, 2017, 5:00pm
Location:
Room 201, Warren House, 11 Prescott St, Cambridge, MA 02138
"When Meaning Reaches the Tongue": Bedil's (1644–1720) Poetics of the Inexpressible
Abstract: Meditations on the nature of speech have been a conventional part of the Persian masnavīs. In Bedil’s oeuvre, however, the notion of speech as a human ability is inextricably tied with cosmological-ontological speculations. The present paper discusses Bedil’s approaches to the problem of speech versus silence as expressed in his first masnavī, Muḥīṭ-i A`ẓam.
Dr. Hajnalka Kovacs, the new Preceptor in Hindi and Urdu at Harvard. She specializes in the Persian and Urdu literature of early modern South Asia. She received her Ph.D. in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her research focuses on the poetry and mystical thought of the celebrated Indo-Persian poet Mirza `Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1644–1720).
