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This presentation is divided into two interconnected sections. The first part argues that confining literature into rigid either/or categories—subjective or objective, heroes or villains, reader or writer, Eastern or Western—leads to its simplification, even collapse of its multi-layered meanings and implications. It presents thresholds as a third, an in-between space of co-creativity, communion, and collaboration.
The second part discusses the work of Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, which can be characterized by its great literary merit, intellectual honesty, scholarly integrity, and aversion to a binary mode of thinking and writing. Nakhjavani’s novels—Saddlebag, Paper, The Woman Who Read Too Much, Us &Them—are poetic in their language, philosophical in their outlook, scholarly in their respect for facts, and freed from binary chains. Standing at the threshold of the local and the global, addressing an integrated readership, Nakhjavani produces a cooperative space between writer and reader—a hospitable space between telling and listening that facilitates connection. She builds bridges and a reciprocal space between self and other, here and there, now and then. Hers is a dialogical mode of writing and a rejection of separatism and segregation.Farzaneh Milani completed her graduate studies in Comparative Literature in 1979 at the University of California in Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective” was a critical study of the poetry of a pioneering Iranian poet. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women Studies in America, Milani was the recipient of All University Teaching Award in 1998 and nominated for Virginia Faculty of the Year in 1999. Zintl Leadership Award (2015), and Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Award and Professorship in 2020.
Milani has published over 100 articles, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords in Persian and in English. She has served as the guest editor for two special issues of Nimeye-Digar, Persian Language Feminist Journal (on Simin Daneshvar and Simin Behbahani), IranNameh (on Simin Behbahani), and Iranian Studies: Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies (on Simin Behbahani). She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Readers Digest, USA Today, Daily Progress, and N.P.R.’s All Things Considered. She has presented more than 250 lectures nationally and internationally. A former director of Studies in Women and Gender and Chair of the department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Persian Literature and Women Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She was a Carnegie Fellow (2006-2007).
The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy invited Milani to join it as a member of its Board of External Experts for Literature in 2021. Milani will serve in that capacity for three years.