@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1669},
      author = {O'Malley, Austin M},
      title = {Poetry and Pedagogy: The Homiletic Verse of Farid al-Din  ʿAṭṭâr},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-03},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {331},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines ʿAṭṭâr’s didactic mas̱navis,  especially his Conference of the Birds (Manṭeq al-ṭayr) and  Book of Affliction (Moṣibat-nâma), from a rhetorical,  audience-centered perspective. The vast majority of  scholarship on ʿAṭṭâr has taken an exegetical approach to  his works, seeking to uncover their underlying theological  and ethical teachings. Although this brand of scholarship  has increased our knowledge of sufi beliefs, it tends to  abstract ʿAṭṭâr’s poems from the social situation of their  reception and thus ignores the self-consciously  perlocutionary and performative nature of his poetic  project. The present study, by contrast, approaches his  poems as socially situated sites of rhetorical interaction:  it focuses on how they  were consumed, the manner in which  they call out an audience and a public, and the modes of  relationality implicit in their forms of address. In so  doing, we show that ʿAṭṭâr’s poems did not merely transit  dogma to passive recipients, but spurred spiritual  development in actively engaged reader-listeners through a  “textualization” of contemporary preaching practices.  According to this model of poetics, the textual encounter  itself is to be approached as a performative act—a  spiritual exercise—capable of moving the reader-listener  further along the sufi path. Through these investigations,  we challenge the notion that Persian homiletic poetry  passively reflects religious thought, and instead show how  it was imbricated in the construction and performance of  mystically minded subjectivities.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1669},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1669},
}