This year, UBC Persian Literature Reading Club at UBC’s Iranian and Persianate Literature, Language and Culture Program at UBC is hosting a series of panel discussions about “Otherness” in modern Persian Literature. The question is what it means to be an “Other” as a writer creating and promoting new genres other than the main body of Persian Literature or to be “Other” in depicting the experience of the minorities in the Persianate world. During the Fall, Winter, and Spring of the calendar year, we will attend to both trends in modern Persian Literature.
The sessions are hosted by Iranian writer and critic Amir Hosseing Yazdan Bod and Dr. Hessam Dehghani from the Iranian and Persianate Literature, Language, and Culture Program at UBC. For each session, they invite a writer in that specific genre, introduce and analyze genres as varied as science-fiction, crime novels, detective stories, literature of religious, racial and ethnic minorities, and the like.
This is the 5th and final session in our current series “Otherness” in Literature and the “other” of literature: The Rise of the Crime Fiction”. In this panel discussion session with literary critics, writers and academics from North America and Iran, we will discuss the essence and power of crime fiction as the “other” of the mainstream genres of Persian Literature, its significance with respect to Iran’s socio-political issues and the understanding of human issues in general.
جلسه پنجم و آخر از مجموعه جلسات «ادبیات دیگری و دیگری ادبیات» به ژانر کمتر دیده و خوانده شده‌ی دیگر یعنی «ادبیاتِ جُرم» اختصاص دارد. بحث میزگرد به پرسش‌های زیر می‌پردازد:
۱. رمان جرم چیست و در برابر ژانرهای غالب ادب فارسی معاصر چه اهمیت و کاربردهایی دارد؟
۲. نسبت این ژانر با ژانرهای مشابه مثل ژانر پلیسی چیست؟
۳. موضوع رمان جرم کدام زیست جهان و تجربه‌ی کدام گروه و افراد است؟
۴. وضعیت این نوعِ ادبی در ایران امروز چکونه است و چالش‌های روبروی آن کدامند؟
میزبان جلسه: گروه ایران‌شناسی و زبان و فرهنگ فارسی دانشگاه بریتیش کلمبیا با مشارکت کتابخانه‌ی نورث ونکوور
Date & Time:
Saturday, June 3, 2023
10:30am (PDT) / 9:00pm (Tehran Time)
Location: Third-floor program room, North Vancouver City Library, 120 14th St W, North Vancouver, BC V7M 1N9
There is also an option to attend virtually via Zoom Meeting.
Presented in Persian
Free & open to the public
Guest Speaker
Amirhossein Yazdanbod was born in 1977 in Tehran. He studied philosophy and physics, but later changed his area to computer engineering. He started writing fiction in 2004 and his short story “For Marcia, the Dear Scoundrel” won Ghalam-e Zarrin-e Zamaneh short fiction prize in 2007. Amir’s first collection of stories, The Portrait of the Incomplete Man (Cheshmeh, 2009) won two national book prizes including “Golshiri”. His latest work Stutter (Ofoq, 2013), is a political novel that occurs in Iran, Afghanistan, and Azerbaijan. He is also a member of the PEN Canada Writers in Exile group and published essays and short stories in Canada.
امیرحسین یزدان‌بد متولد ۱۳۵۶ در تهران است. او تحصیلاتش را در فیزیک کاربردی با گرایش حالت جامد وفلسفهٔ غرب نیمه تمام رها کرد. تحصیلات اصلی او در زمینهٔ کامپیوتر و امنیت شبکه متمرکز شد. از سال ۱۳۸۴ نوشتن داستان را جدی گرفت اگرچه پیش از آن هم چند یادداشت و تک داستان از او در نشریات چاپ شده بود. مجموعه داستان «پرتره‌ی مرد ناتمام» او با اقبال بسیاری روبه‌رو شد و جوایز بنیاد هوشنگ گلشیری وگام اول را نصیب او کرد. هم‌چنین او با همین اثر فینالیست جایزه منتقدان و نویسندگان مطبوعات شد و نامزد دریافت جایزه روزی روزگاری هم بود. یزدان‌بد به خاطر داستان کوتاه «برای مارسیای رذل عزیز» برندهٔ قلم زرین شد. چهارسال بعد او نخستین رمانش «لکنت» را از نشر افق منتشر کرد که با توجه بسیاری از جانب نشریات و روزنامه‌ها و منتقدان مواجه شده است. وی هم‌اکنون ساکن کانادا و عضو انجمن پن و حلقه‌ی نویسندگان در تبعید است و آثاری در نشریات معتبر از جمله فصلنامه‌ی تخصصی اتحادیه‌ی نویسندگان کانادا از وی منتشر شده است.
Dr. Hessam Dehghani earned his first PhD in Linguistics from Allameh Tabātabāi University working on the “Structural analysis and Phenomenological study of Persian Literature” in 2012. He then earned another PhD in Philosophy from Boston College in 2019. Between August 2019 and December 2020, he was a post-doctoral fellow and associate researcher at Harvard Divinity School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies where he focused his research on the formation of the Persianate identity in Persian Mystic Literature. He has presented on different aspects of Persian mystic literature regularly at Harvard University and Boston College. His latest presentation on Persian Literature at Alireza Ahmadian Lecture Series can be found here. He is also the director and founder of Persian Literature Reading Club at UBC, a public humanities initiative where the most prominent Persian writers, academics, students and the Persianate community at large come together to read about and discuss some of the most pressing human issues raised in the works of Modern Persian Literature.
Besides his research interest, he has been teaching English as a foreign language in Iran since 2000, and Persian and Arabic in North America for the past 8 years. Since 2012, he has taught Persian and Arabic and directed Persian program single-handedly at Boston College for which he received both teaching and leadership award from that institution. In 2021, Dr. Dehghani started his tenure-track position as an assistant professor of teaching Persian language and Culture at the University of British Columbia. In pedagogy, his interests lie in Content-based Instruction and Critical Heritage Language Education for which he has passed multiple CAL, ACFTL and STARTALK workshops and received several certifications from 2013 up to present. He is passionate about implementing technology in teaching Persian and creating open access interactive online textbooks. Implementing the latest findings in Critical Heritage Education and Second Language Acquisition, he and his wife, Mahtab Sirdani, devised a new method of teaching literacy to the heritage learners of Persian, they call Collaborative Storytelling (CT).
Dr. Farzan Sojoodi is a retired full professor of semiotics and linguistics at the Tehran University of Arts. He obtained his B.A in English Literature, M.A, and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Allameh Tabataba’i University.
His primary interests are critical semiotics, discourse theory, cultural semiotics, and intercultural studies. He has published some books in Persian, the most important of which are Applied Semiotics, Semiotics: Theory and Practice, and Semiotics and Literature. He has published nearly 100 articles on theoretical issues in cultural semiotics, intercultural studies, literature and media, Persian language, and literature.
He was one of the founders of the Tehran Society of Semiotics and Forum for Indo-Iranian Studies [FIIRST], and he is a member of the Linguistics Society of Iran.
As an invited professor, he has taught some courses in post-graduate programs at the University of Tehran, Tarbiat Modares University, the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, and Elm International Academy.
فرزان سجودی، استاد پیشین نشانه‌شناسی و زبان‌شناسی دانشگاه هنر تهران است. او لیسانس ادبیات انگلیسی و فوق‌لیسانس و دکتری زبان‌شناسی را از دانشگاه علامه طباطبایی گرفته است.
حوزه‌های اصلی مطالعاتی او عبارتند از نشانه‌شناسی نظری، نشانه‌شناسی انتقادی، نظریه گفتمان و مطالعات فرهنگی. از او چندین کتاب و ده‌ها مقاله تالیفی و ترجمه در زمینه مطالعات نظری و روش‌شناختی در علوم انسانی و مطالعات انتقادی ادبیات و هنر منتشر شده است. نشانه‌شناسی کاربردی، نشانه‌شناسی: نظریه و عمل و نشانه‌شناسی ادبیات از تالیفات او هستند. از ترجمه‌های او می‌توان به تفسیر و بیش‌تفسیر (امبرتو اکو)، ابرساختگرایی: فلسفه ساختگرایی و پساساختگرایی (ریچارد هارلند)، ساختگرایی، پساساختگرایی و مطالعات ادبی (مجموعه مقالات به انتخاب فرزان سجودی)، ویتگنشتاین: نظریه و هنر (ریچارد آلن و ملکوم تروی) رمان فریاد خاموش (کنزابور اوئه) و مقدمات نظریه ادبی (برتنز) اشاره کرد.
سجودی از بنیان‌گزاران حلقه نشانه شناسی تهران است.
Maham Meyghani is an Iranian novelist who also works as radio and stage playwright and university lecturer at the Tehran Fine Arts University and Damghan University. Her works include Heat stroked (2012), Transplanting the Index (2013), A composition in Scarlet (2014), No one gets killed in “Seyed khandan” (2018), Sun rises from “Amir A’alam” (2019) and The serial killings of “Abbas Abad” (2021).