Zukunftsphilologie
2010/ 2011

Rebecca Gould

Translation, Annotation, and Critical Introduction to Rashid al-Din Watwat’s Magic Gardens: On the Nuances of Poetry (Watwat 1984)

Rebecca Gould holds degrees in Slavic and Comparative Literatures from the University of California (B.A.) and in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University (PhD), with a concentration in Comparative Literature from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation, “The Political Aesthetic of the Medieval Persian Prison Poem, 1100-1250”, traces the genesis and dissemination of Persian prison poem from Lahore to Shirwan, and focuses particularly on the prison poems of Khaqani of Shirwan (d. 1199). She has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and her translation of Alexander Qazbegi’s “Memoirs of a Shepherd” will be published in 2011 by Syracuse University Press.

Translation, Annotation, and Critical Introduction to Rashid al-Din Watwat’s Magic Gardens: On the Nuances of Poetry (Watwat 1984)

In Berlin, Gould will continue her work on classical Persian and Arabic rhetorical and literary-theoretical traditions. Her current project involves translating and introducing to a comparative literary readership medieval Persian treatises on Islamic rhetoric (‘ilm al-balagha). Additionally, Gould will document how literary theorists from the medieval Persianate world revised Arabic textual traditions to suit the new exigencies of Persianate literary culture. Though primarily concerned with Persian and medieval Islamic literary cultures, Gould also translates from Georgian and Russian literature, and is interested in the comparative study of literary knowledge in European intellectual history, with a particular emphasis on Giambattista Vico’s project to create a new form of disciplinary knowledge by combining philosophy and philology. This second project is provisionally entitled “The Consequences of Contingency in Philology’s Intellectual History”.

Publications