• Instructor: Rasoul Rahbari-Ghazani
• Duration: 8 Weeks (Online)
• Format: Live weekly seminars + guided readings + discussion + recordings + Telegram group
• Language: English (with Persian texts and translations provided)

Course Description. This eight-week online course offers an in-depth exploration of Persian poetry through the combined lenses of phenomenology and hermeneutics—two powerful philosophical approaches that investigate how texts are experienced, how they disclose worlds and transform understanding. Rather than treating poetry as a collection of historical artifacts, this course approaches Persian poetry as events of meaning, structures of experience, and invitations to interpretation. Drawing from thinkers such as Gadamer, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Ingarden, Iser, Levinas, Marion, and Merleau-Ponty, and engaging poets such as Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ, ʿAṭṭār, Fayḍ Kāshānī, and others, we will learn how to read Persian poetry not only analytically but experientially—as something that happens to us. Throughout the course, we examine how poetic language opens worlds, shapes ethical imagination, and engages the reader in a transformative interplay between text and self. Each week, pairs key philosophical readings with carefully selected Persian poems to practice phenomenological and hermeneutic interpretation in real-time.

8-Week Course Outline

• Week 1: What Does It Mean to “Experience” a Text? Reading as an event, not a decoding exercise.
  Play and presence; Rūmī’s ghazals as lived poetic moments.
• Week 2: The Literary Work as an Incomplete Object: Reader & Text. How the reader “completes” the poem; layers of the work; phenomenology of reading; ʿAṭṭār’s visionary journey in Conference of the Birds.
• Week 3: World-Disclosure and the Imaginal. World-opening; Rūmī’s Masnavī as a structure of truth; The imaginal realm as poetic ontology.
• Week 4: Voice, Address, and Dhikr: Repetition as Form. How apostrophe, vocatives, and refrain create a participatory mode of reading; Rūmī and Fayḍ Kāshānī as poets of invocation and remembrance.
• Week 5: Longing, Love, and Self-Transcendence. Phenomenology of eros and desire; comparing mystical love across Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ, and Fayḍ Kāshānī.
• Week 6: Symbol, Metaphor, and Unsaying. Poetic symbol and metaphor as disclosure and concealment; Ḥāfiẓ’s symbolic lexicon as hermeneutic field.
• Week 7: Attunement and Mood: How Poetry Shapes Our Being-in-the-World. How do poems attune us to a world—how do they shape our mood, our sense of presence, and our way of being-with-others?
• Week 8: Hermeneutic Circle, Ethical Imagination, and Transformation. Can poetry change how we see the world? The idea of literature as training in attention; concluding readings from Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ, or Fayḍ Kāshānī.

Course Format

• 8 weekly live seminars
• Guided reading packets (Persian + English translations)
• Access to recordings after each session
• Telegram group for questions and peer learning

Who Is This Course For? Ideal for:

• Students and scholars of philosophy, literature, Persian studies, or religious studies
• Readers of Persian poetry seeking deeper interpretive methods
• Anyone interested in phenomenology, hermeneutics, or the philosophy of art
• Those who want to experience poetry as a transformative practice

No technical background is required—translations and conceptual introductions are provided.

 All texts are provided as PDFs.